Mouthing Off

Cherry preserves with habanero chile create a fabulously sticky, sweet
and spicy glaze for these grilled chicken wings. © Lucy Schaeffer

Food & Wine's senior recipe developer, Grace Parisi, is a Test Kitchen superstar. In this series, she shares some of her favorite recipes to make right now.

Crispy glazed wings, hot off the grill are unsurpassed in their deliciousness. My favorites are ones that combine opposing flavors and textures: sweet/spicy and crispy/sticky.

The trick to getting there is to grill (or fry or roast) your wings naked—with nothing more than salt and pepper and maybe a touch of oil on them until they’re supercrispy, then quickly coating them with a sugary glaze that gets caramelized at the last minute. That’s for texture. For flavor, I like to combine something sweet like jam (sour cherry preserves) with fresh aromatics—habanero and sautéed onion, in this case. The habanero makes them a little dangerous and the sweet cherry tames the heat. Like an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, you need both to enjoy it all. SEE RECIPE »

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Horchata Milk Shake © Con Poulos

Horchata, the delicious Mexican drink of cinnamon-flecked rice milk is getting an adult makeover from bartenders across the country, making it the ideal cocktail for this Cinco de Mayo. MORE >

Chef Fredrik Berselius outside Aska, located inside Williamsburg's Kinfolk Studios. © Jasmin Sun

As one of the hallmarks of New Nordic cuisine, foraged ingredients are now trending in restaurants across America. But Swedish native Fredrik Berselius, chef at Aska in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has been eating wild produce since he was a kid growing up in Stockholm. This afternoon, as part of Brooklyn’s Food Book Fair (which runs through the weekend), Berselius will take part in the show-and-tell Food + Foraging panel. “There have been a couple of scares, where I’ve been like, ‘Uh-oh, was that not so good to eat?’ But usually I’m more concerned with running into mountain lions.” »

Courtesy of Blue Diamond Almonds

F&W food editors apply their incredible cooking knowledge to explaining what to do with a variety of interesting ingredients.

A big part of the pleasure of eating pistachios is getting them out of the shell. It slows you down, of course, and spares you from mindlessly grabbing a handful, which is good. Plus, every pistachio presents its own little challenge of how to get the nut out in one piece without hurting your fingers or your teeth, or cracking a nail. Now the folks at Blue Diamond have jumped into the game with dry-roasted thin-shell almonds, which come salted and unsalted. I can’t tell you how they make the shells thinner, because they weren’t willing to share their secret. But the almonds we tried were superfresh and crisp, with great almond flavor, and they definitely made mindful snacking on almonds a lot more fun.

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Photo © Stephanie Meyer.

OK, so I was with Hot and Hot Fish Club’s amazing chef Chris Hastings, standing in his Birmingham, Alabama, restaurant kitchen and eating my way through his mise en place about an hour before service. He hated me. But before I left, he fed me some shrimp and grits, and the shrimp were some of the most miraculous I have ever had. So I started quizzing him. He freely told me that while fresh Gulf shrimp, just hours out of water, help immensely, it’s the cooking technique that results in their perfect flavor and sinful texture. I can’t even begin to tell you how good these are. Anyway, I adapted his trick and, inspired by some local cress I had eaten in a salad dish earlier that day with him, I created this riff on his dish. That man is a genius, truly. SEE RECIPE »

See More of Andrew Zimmern’s Kitchen Adventures

These grown-up lemon bars are made with paper-thin slices of lemon, giving
the sweet filling a pleasant bitterness. © Christina Holmes

Food & Wine's senior recipe developer, Grace Parisi, is a Test Kitchen superstar. In this series, she shares some of her favorite recipes to make right now.

At a recent trip to a great new restaurant in my neighborhood, 606 R&D, I had a most intriguing dessert called Shaker Lemon Pie—a double-crusted pie with a flaky crust and almost lemon-marmalade–like filling. It was quite good, but not flawless—the crust was a bit soggy and the filling was dry, but the flavor was intoxicating. I knew if I did a bit of work it could be even better. I asked my husband, Chris, from Shaker Heights, Ohio, the resident expert (at least in our house) on Shaker culture, but he’d never heard of it.

I was obsessed and had to know more, so I read a number of recipes online and found a few books about Shaker/Mennonite cooking. Obviously, lemons don’t grow in the Midwest, so it’s a relatively modern recipe (last century). Whole lemons are shaved superthin with skin (pick out the seeds) and macerated with sugar for a day or longer, then mixed with eggs, flour and butter and layered between two crusts. The rind softens and cooks like marmalade but with all of the other ingredients, it has more of a cakey/lemon curd/marmalade texture. I opted for something a little different. I made a shortbread-type bottom crust, which I topped with the lemon filling and a lattice of more shortbread. The result is a delicate, yet pick-up-able lemon bar that is tangy, sweet and buttery. It’s totally perfect to take to a Shaker church social or in my case, my back deck with a hot cup of milky, sweet coffee. SEE RECIPE »

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Heart of Gold © Robert Gunn

Indian spices like saffron and cardamom are now pantry staples for many cooks, but bartenders are also finding uses for the aromatic seasonings in deliciously complex cocktails. MORE >

© Atsushi Tomioka

F&W food editors apply their incredible cooking knowledge to explaining what to do with a variety of interesting ingredients.

I’ve never been a fan of the crisp freeze-dried fruits that line the snack racks at natural food markets and airport convenience shops. I sort of understood them in breakfast cereals when they were first introduced—usually strawberry and raspberry—and they made sense as an alternative when fresh berries were hard to come by. However, there’s a new fruit in the game, recently introduced by Crispy Green, that’s made me a convert: tangerines!

They certainly wouldn’t win any beauty contests—it fact they don’t look very appetizing at all, but don’t let that put you off. They’re loaded with great citrus flavor, with a perfect balance of sweet and tang. They’re light and crunchy and delicious right out of the bag, but I especially like them crumbled into salads (good with smoked duck!), or over ice cream, yogurt or anything else you might want to gussy up with a hit of tangerine flavor as the citrus season fades.

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Tuna Salad with Chickpea Puree; © Johnny Miller

In F&W's April Handbook feature, I tackle one of the healthiest and most common ingredients around—canned fish. For the magazine, I mixed canned tuna with hummus to create a light yet satisfying salad that couldn’t be any simpler to put together. To further transform canned tuna, it can be whipped into a fantastic tonnato sauce.

Combine the tuna and the oil it’s packed in (if it’s in water, drain first), lemon juice, capers, anchovy fillets, olive oil and a touch of mayo (or plain yogurt) in a blender and puree until smooth. Traditionally served on cold sliced veal (vitello tonnato), the sauce is great as a crudité dip, salad dressing on escarole or arugula, or drizzled on grilled chicken breast. Use it as a sandwich spread for turkey sandwiches or as the base for potato salad.

Sardines are particularly rich in omega-3s and minerals like calcium and potassium. Roasted or broiled with lemon and fresh herbs, they’re delicious to top rice or grains. I like stuffing them straight from the container into sandwiches with Dijon mustard, sliced radishes and watercress. Side note: I’ve been known to travel with these fish when camping…nothing beats an open tin of sardines bubbling over a fire.

As grilling season approaches, canned octopus becomes an unexpected pantry essential. Charred, the tentacles take on a fantastic texture and slightly smokey flavor. Toss pieces of the grilled octopus in a simple shallot vinaigrette with some chopped parsley for a fun starter, or use it as a crostini topper. For a full-on seafood salad, add some canned smoked oysters and mussels. And since the grill is already on, make some salmon burgers: simply drain the canned salmon and mix it with eggs, chopped scallions and breadcrumbs to bind the mixture together.

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Alex Guarnaschelli of Butter restaurant in New York and Food Network fame recently stopped by F&W HQ to discuss her new (and first) cookbook Old-School Comfort Food: The Way I Learned to Cook. One of the 100 recipes in the book is a simple method for making butter. While training at high-end French restaurants like Guy Savoy's La Butte Chaillot and New York’s Daniel, Guranaschelli used to put the delicious fat, and lots of it, in almost everything. But now she has a new philosophy for butter use—watch the clip to learn more.

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