Author Archives: Remy Charest

Eating local: What’s in your basket?

By Remy Charest | Published: August 26, 2010
It was Ruhlman that started it. Mark Ruhlman is one of my favorite chefs. The book on Charcuterie he wrote with Brian Polcyn is what helped me start making dry-cured ham and other things like bacon and chorizo. I follow his tweets, and this morning, he started a very civilized game of I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours by asking people to send [...]
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Caramelized peach sorbet – no ice cream machine required

By Remy Charest | Published: August 15, 2010
I’d been thinking of this recipe for three years at least. At a restaurant I particularly loved, L’Utopie, which unfortunately closed last year, desserts often featured all sorts of interesting ice creams (including “nature” – i.e., no flavor added, which made you realize that vanilla really is a flavor, not the “default”, neutral variety of [...]
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Cooking Live: Penne with asparagus, parmesan and lemon

By Remy Charest | Published: June 9, 2010
I discovered this simple recipe last year at Tastecamp, when David Page, of Shinn Vineyards, in Long Island, made it for a group of bloggers attending this blogger meeting. Simple, delicious. I must have gone back for three servings. It was just a great balance of flavors – and it went pretty well with the [...]
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The taste of oil

By Remy Charest | Published: April 2, 2010
If cooking was a Hollywood movie, oil would be relegated to a very small supporting role. A couple of lines, nothing memorable, nothing to build a career on. Frankly, with the way most generic vegetable oils taste, that’s a proper casting. Your average corn, canola or sunflower oil doesn’t have have much personality: it may be [...]
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Cooking Live: parmesan-encrusted chicken breasts with a stovetop paella (of sorts)

By Remy Charest | Published: February 14, 2010
In mid-January, the New York Times published an article by Melissa Clark entitled Recapturing the Glory of Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts. The premice to the article was that this piece of chicken, lauded for dietary reason, was also a rather boring, as far as flavor and texture were concerned. With the help of some fine [...]
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L’Oignonnée: simple braising for your roasted leg of lamb

By Remy Charest | Published: January 31, 2010
This is kind of a double-layered post. It’s about braising, but only after roasting. It starts with a roasted leg of lamb, cooked rare, as it should, with a nice coating of herbs, spices and olive oil, with a crispy outside and moist inside. It continues with the leftover meat, which is
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Sprucing up leftovers: beef-mushroom stew on Twitter Cooking Live

By Remy Charest | Published: January 9, 2010
Some leftovers are particularly tough to deal with. For years I’ve dreaded the extra meat left after a Chinese fondue. That thinly sliced meat is not an easy thing to cook. Boiling it is kind of boring, stewing it leads to a rather mushy result, and frying it is also not as simple as it [...]
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A New Year’s resolution for home cooks: stop measuring so much

By Remy Charest | Published: January 5, 2010
OK, I’ve got a resolution that should be easier to keep than, say, quitting smoking or losing ten pounds. Next time you cook, whether following a recipe or improvising, let go of the measuring implements, and follow your instincts and your senses. I’m not proposing that we go back to pre-Fannie Farmer, Boston Cookbook days, when [...]
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Year-old ham, dried bacon and Christmas marvels

By Remy Charest | Published: December 25, 2009
All sorts of wonderful treats are on the table at Christmas time. And I’m especially proud of some that we served last night for pre-dinner drinks. A dry-cured ham that had been hanging in my cellar for a little over a year and some delightful air-dried bacon from this fall’s Operation Half-Pig accompanied the just-finished [...]
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Mixing it up in the wok: Italian flavors in a Chinese cooking vessel

By Remy Charest | Published: December 18, 2009
In the days when I dabbled in creative management consulting, over ten years ago, one case study that came up was how Canon had redefined its business, at one point. I’m telling this from memory, so details may be off somewhat, but bear with me. Instead of considering itself as a manufacturer of particular goods [...]
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