Last Chance Foods from WNYC

Christmas is over and the presents are put away, but for many of us, the holiday season isn’t quite finished yet. There’s still New Year’s and a spate of winter parties to attend. If you happen to be hosting a celebration, we’ve got a time-tested, easy mid-winter fix for your bar: Hot, mulled, alcoholic drinks. 

At Last Chance Foods, our cup runneth over with cookbooks. It’s a large cup, admittedly. And with Christmas less than a week away, these beautiful tomes come in handy as last minute gifts. Here are our picks for some of our favorite cookbooks of the year. We even snagged a few recipes from them for your cooking pleasure.

In the past few years, ramen shops seem to be popping up everywhere from Harlem to Flushing. Chef Ivan Orkin, who just opened Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop at Gotham West Market and published the memoir/cookbook Ivan Ramen, says that the reason ramen has gotten so popular is because it’s the ultimate comfort food.

Gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, nut-free, vegan and vegetarian — has your Thanksgiving menu being undermined by food allergies and ethical objections? Tell us about what you don’t eat in the comments below. Or share the extraordinary lengths you’ve gone to in catering to the dietary restrictions of your friends and family. Here’s what three chefs and one caterer had to say about the subject.

Master pastry chef Jacques Torres has a word of advice for anyone making pies for Thanksgiving. He says to keep it simple. “When you start to put too many [flavors together], you don’t know what you eat anymore,” he said. Instead, pick one main flavor and then use another ingredient or two to complement it.

Mid-November may feel too early to be bopping along to Christmas tunes, but there’s one Christmas tradition that requires a long head start. English Christmas cake, according to Out magazine editor Aaron Hicklin, needs at least five weeks to mature, a process that calls for the cake being regularly soaked in booze. (If only human maturity was developed the same way.)

If you’re out wandering the woods this weekend, you might want to keep an eye out for a ruffled mass of mushrooms stuck to the bottom of a hardwood tree. It could well be a maitake, or hen of the wood, mushroom. The fungi is delicious and has a meatier, more assertive flavor than average button mushrooms.

For the past few weeks here at WNYC, The Leonard Lopate Show and Last Chance Foods have combined to bring you the latest breaking news in the worlds of seasonal vegetables, new cookbooks, and pickling. Today, Leonard Lopate launched the 3-ingredient challenge with the help of chef Rozanne Gold. In recognition of that contest and to present a united Food Fridays front, Last Chance Foods host Amy Eddings put a series of questions to Lopate for a change.

Step into any of the city’s nouveau Southern restaurants, and you’ll likely see a menu full of regional staples like biscuits, fried green tomatoes, and cheesy grits. While foods like boiled peanuts grow increasingly popular, a few Southern staples still remain a bit of a mystery. Take chow-chow, for instance. Even the name sounds fictitious.

The sizzle of onions, the clicking of toasted rice, the whoosh of wine added to a hot pan, and the viscous burble rice cooking in stock — these are the sounds of making risotto. Cookbook author Lidia Bastianich listens for these audial cues when making the creamy rice dish, and lets her five senses guide her through each step.

For the rest of the year, we’ll be revisiting previous episodes of Last Chance Foods.  When Great Performances CEO Liz Neumark started a farm seven years ago, she asked her farmer not to grow kale. Even back then, she’d grown tired of the all-reigning queen of superfoods. While farmer Bob Walker ignored her request and planted kale anyway, Neumark notes that there are plenty of other greens in the fields that are both fascinating and worthy of the spotlight — tatsoi and mizuna are two prime examples. 

Look, let’s be honest: Some of us are not ready to get into canning. We might live in Brooklyn, obsess about pickles, and splurge on artisanal cheese, but the prospect of mason jars and hot water baths is just too much, okay? Great. Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about a method of preserving that’s easier than canning.

For those of us unaccustomed to cooking with tomatillos, they can be a bit of a mystery. The obvious facts are these: They kind of look like tomatoes, but are not, and they’re a key ingredient in salsa verde.

There are a few straightforward rules to follow when hanging out with celebrity chefs, according to the fictional character Ruth Bourdain. For instance, “Do: Rub Tom Colicchio’s head with the finest extra virgin olive oil. Don’t: Put barrettes in his soul patch.”

The next time you see a leaf of shiso sitting under your sashimi, wrap it around the fish, and put it in your mouth. It’s not there just for aesthetics. “Shiso has an antiseptic property so it is safe to eat with raw fish,” said Hiroko Shimbo, the author of Hiroko’s American Kitchen and a well-known expert on Japanese cuisine.