It's the middle of winter and I don't feel like cooking—not even a warming soup or stew. My savior is the freezer. When I decided to make potpie last November with leftover Thanksgiving turkey, I doubled the recipe and prepared a second pie to store in the coffin freezer in my basement. Back in the fall, my husband also made half a dozen batches of pesto (just the basil, garlic and olive oil—no cheese or nuts, which we add when we're ready to use it) to freeze in little plastic containers like the ones pictured above. So this weekend, out came the pie for one dinner and a container of pesto—to toss with pasta, cubes of mozzarella and halved grape tomatoes—for another.

Here are some recipes that are made for freezing. And if you don't feel like making them just now, I don't blame you.

Chicken Potpies (You can make a big pie instead of individual ramekins and top with any pie crust recipe, like this one.)
Basil Pesto
Chicken Chilaquiles

As Julia Moskin reports in this week’s New York Times Dining section, many yoga traditionalists are not pleased with all the eating and drinking now happening at yoga studios around the country. While austerity is at the core of many traditional yoga practices, personally I’m hungry after a 90-minute Bikram yoga session in a 110 degree room (even if it smells like stinky, sweaty feet).

Here, some fantastic recipes from my favorite chef-yogi (and an F&W Best New Chef 2009), Jeremy Fox from Napa Valley’s Ubuntu restaurant and yoga studio:

Carrot Macaroni and Cheese (pictured)
Lemony Quinoa Salad with Shaved Vegetables
Broccoli à la Catalan

When he isn't fist pumping, tanning or scavenging for women, Mike "The Situation" from MTV's Jersey Shore (2.5 million viewers' guilty pleasure—and mine, too) is cooking.

In the controversial reality show's latest episode, The Situation and his male roommates decide to make an "unbelievable dinner" and stay at home with Nicole "Snooki," who is recovering from being punched (by a man!). "There's going to be a feast on the dinner table, but 'The Situation' has got it under control," he says.

When The Situation refuses to help clean up after the "feast" of lobster, steak, asparagus, grilled corn and salad, his short-lived flame Sammi "Sweetheart" picks a fight with him. (In a previous episode, the two flirted while preparing sausage and peppers together.)

His retaliation: "From now on you are excluded from dinner then. You are excluded from surf and turf night. You are excluded from ravioli night. You are excluded from chicken cutlet night."

 

Oh no! Anything but chicken cutlet night!

Here are some recipes for Sammi and anyone else who might get banished from one of The Situation's "crazy meals" in a future episode:

Surf and Turf Night
Eric Ripert's Surf and Turf

Ravioli Night
Shrimp-and-Lobster Ravioli
Pecorino Ravioli with Walnuts and Marjoram (pictured)
Sweet-Potato Ravioli with Brown Butter

Chicken Cutlet Night
Chicken Stuffed with Spinach
Chicken with Cherry Tomato Pesto Sauce
Anne Byrn's Chicken Piccata with Artichokes and Olives

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had an extra bunch of greens in my fridge leftover from a party. They were mildly mustardy and more tender than kale. I wanted a dish that would be meatless, but not too light, and I remembered the Swiss chard torta from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. In the recipe, she combines cooked chard with eggs, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, raisins and pine nuts and bakes them in a springform pan to make a sort of crustless quiche. I looked through my fridge and found two-day-old yellow rice from Malecon, the rotisserie chicken joint around the corner, and there was also a hunk of seriously intense aged gouda cheese that I thought would be delicious with the mustard-green flavor. After sautéing the greens, I tossed them with the rice, cheese and an egg and spread the mixture in a small springform pan. I baked my version of Marcella’s torta until the egg was set and the edges were crusty. It was a perfect satisfying, (mostly) healthy dinner for two.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m cooking my first Thanksgiving dinner from start to finish on Thursday. What I’m thankful for this year: my guests won’t have to eat in front of the TV. After months of searching, I finally found the perfect dining table that fits my budget. I wanted it to be modern but made of rustic wood. Ideally, the legs would come off for easy transport. Like the answers to many New Yorkers’ prayers, I found the table on Craigslist. Or more appropriately, I found the carpenter there. Jed from Silo Tables built the table from reclaimed pine wood that’s loaded with character, with all kinds of quirky knots and even a few visible nails. The simple legs are made from reclaimed carbon steel and they screw in easily to the mounting plates under the table. Bonus: Jed delivers for no extra fee.

Included on my Thanksgiving menu: 

• Roast Guinea Hens with Cumin-Date Sauce: With only four meat-eaters at dinner, I’m opting for smaller birds—I’m going to make F&W Marcia Kiesel’s clever, delicious Guinea Hen recipe using Cornish hens.
• Root Vegetable Gratin: With barely any cream, this gratin is all about the sweetness of the root veggies. Plus, it’s an elegant dish for vegetarians.
•  Bay-Steamed Broccoli: I love the peppery, herbal flavor of bay leaves with juicy steamed broccoli, and this dish takes no time to make.     
• Spiced Upside-Down Apple Bundt Cake: Because it’s just fabulous.

 

Late that night after dinner at Vetri, we hit the road towards New York City. I hated to skip over my native New Jersey without even a single stop, but six days was a long time to be away from my wife and newborn son, and I missed them both. It was time to go home.

By way of summing up the experience, it's hard to pick favorites. I learned more than I thought I would on this trip, and was glad I had members of my team with me to share in the experience. We all found fresh inspiration in the people we met along the way, all of them committed in one way or another to good food: whether growing it, catching it, distributing it, or cooking it. I enjoyed the chance to form deeper relationships with Anson Mills and Rappahannock River Oysters, and feel that in Cane Creek Farm, Culton Organics, and Samuels & Son I've discovered new suppliers whose products I'm excited to use in my restaurants.

And so, at the end of this six day journey, there's only one question that remains in the back of my mind. Where should I go next?

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Although I've been friends with Marc for years, this was my first time eating at his acclaimed restaurant Vetri. It was well worth the wait, and I came away thinking that his impossibly thin, buttery pastas and tender baby goat could hold their own against any I've had.

As has been the trend during this trip, our menu featured several of the items we saw earlier in the day at Culton Organics and Samuels & Son. Line caught fluke became an amuse of fluke crudo with Culton Organics' Spitzenberg apples and lemon. Swordfish was mixed in with paccheri pasta and tomatoes, basil leaves, and fries cut from Culton Organics eggplant.

Tom Culton's cauliflower was transformed into a flan, served with house cured guanciale and quail egg. His squash became the filling for agnolotti with amaretto cookies and sage. A side of his Brussels sprouts, charred and served with shaved truffled pecorino cheese, accompanied our baby goat course. Tom's cardoons made it into a deconstructed Bagna Cauda, served in a warm bath of anchovy sauce with baby vegetables and salt cured egg yolk.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Anyone who has ever spent time in a fish market can attest to them typically being pretty smelly, messy, old-fashioned places. So, I was more than a little bit surprised when we pulled up to Samuels & Son's headquarters. Samuels just moved out of Philadelphia's historic fish market and into a brand new $20 million facility that was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

The new facility was clean, spacious, and brightly lit, with fish of every variety you can think of stacked neatly in boxes row by row. Everything from the cutting rooms to the loading bays was temperature controlled at a constant 34 degrees. With the help of refrigerated trucks, that meant that a fish can be kept super cold (but never frozen) from the moment it gets plucked out of the ocean to the moment it arrives at a restaurant, an innovation which makes a big difference in freshness terms.

Even more state of the art was the facility's ozonated water system. Ozonated water has antibacterial properties, allowing the fish cutters to constantly sanitize both their work surfaces and the fish itself without introducing any chemicals.

The facility is a big step forward in the way that seafood is processed, and I was impressed by how much Samuels & Son was willing to invest in providing their customers with a better product.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

When it came time to decide where we should stop north of DC, my first call was to my friend and fellow chef Marc Vetri. Marc has two highly regarded restaurants in Philadelphia, Osteria and Vetri, and I knew that he'd have great suggestions for food producers to visit in the area. Number one on his list was Culton Organics, a family farm in the heart of Lancaster County which supplies fruit and vegetables to his restaurants. Marc loved the place so much that offered to join us if we visited.

So, on the morning of day six we were Pennsylvania-bound. I invited the chefs of my three New York restaurants, James Tracey, Shane McBride, and Lauren Hirschberg, thinking this would be a good opportunity to spend a day together outside the kitchen.

Culton Organics is run by a guy named Tom Culton. Tom took over his family's 55 acre farm when he was 20 and has been working it for the past nine years, only growing as much as he, his grandfather, and his girlfriend can handle. Currently that means just half of his acreage is in fruit and vegetable cultivation, but Tom is not interested in growing his business, insisting that bringing on extra help takes the joy out of farming for him.

We took a walk through Tom's fields, which were amazingly lush considering that he doesn't use pesticides, weed killer, or man-made fertilizer. He doesn't even irrigate. Tom keeps the land fertile using crop rotation, growing a wide variety of produce (from cardoons to artichokes to fraise de bois) on land that has been farmed by his family organically for the past 100 years (yes, you read that correctly, and it is a very rare achievement). Tom also takes frequent research trips to Europe, studying a new crop or farming method in Italy or France in order to apply it to his own farming.

The icing on the cake of our visit to Culton Organics was when Tom invited us back to his 19th century farmhouse for a hearty lunch: pig's stomach stuffed with pork sausage, new potatoes, and celery, accompanied by homemade apple sauce. It was one of the best home-cooked meals I've had in recent memory.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Since we were planning to stay in DC for the night, Jose Andres encouraged us to have dinner at one of his restaurants. Although minibar at Café Atlantico is the talk of the town in Washington right now, I was in the mood for paella so we opted for Jose's bar and tapas joint, Jaleo.

Jaleo has been open for years and yet it's always festive and buzzing. Two highlights of our meal were a delicious arroz negro paella and lomo iberico, a salt-roasted pork tenderloin. Jose joined us for the second half of the meal, and it was great to have a chance to catch up with a good friend I don't see often enough.