Posted on February 3rd, 2012 by Sara Moulton | Filed under Entrees « Featured Home « Featured Recipe « First Courses « Recipes | Submit Comment
I was born and bred in New York, but my roots are in New England, so you might say that chowder is in my blood. While this recipe is for New England fans, both my red and white chowder recipes are so easy you might want to serve a pot of each on Sunday and let your family and guests choose or sample both. My family has always made New England-style chowder by starting with whole cod or haddock on… 
With the Super Bowl coming up on February 5th, I have been getting requests for half time menus. Well it seems to me that this is going to be a Battle of the Chowders, and what better half time menu than steaming mugs of chowder with a selection of appetizers. My variation of a Manhattan chowder follows. Keep an eye on this site for my New England style Oven-baked Chowder in time for the game. For the appetizers, go to… 
This hot and hearty chowder is a great dish for a winter weeknight. Made with milk, not cream, it’s healthier and lighter than a classic chowder but seems plenty substantial as you are enjoying it. (The downside is that it is a bit more likely to look a little curdled when the lemon juice is added than it would have if made with cream.) The crackers provide the chowder with a tangy counter-point. I had never made crackers before, but they… 
Once upon a time Gourmet magazine ran a recipe for an appetizer of black-eyed pea cakes with jerk pork. I loved it as it was, but it occurred to me that we could conjure up a great vegetarian entrée by losing the pork, making the cakes bigger, and then topping the cakes with a tasty sauce. The use of canned black-eyed peas (they mash up better than the dried and cooked kind) and prepared mayonnaise makes the preparation of this… 
When I was six or seven months pregnant with Sam, my boss at Gourmet volunteered me to cook a dish at a fund-raising event for 300 to 400 people. I was not thrilled. Even when I’m at the top of my game, that kind of large scale cooking is not my forte. But being pregnant really increased my dread. To top it off, the organizers of this gala charged me with making dessert. Of course! Of the dozen chefs working… 
My grandmother Ruth Moulton was a fabulous old New England cook. She attended the Garland School of Home Economics in Boston, a competitor of the original Fanny Farmer’s cooking school. Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding, fish chowder, Johnny cakes, and other regional fare–these were her signature dishes. When I was about five years old, it was Granny who gave me my first cookbook–Mud Pies and Other Recipes. Even though it was a pretend cookbook, it somehow persuaded me that real… 
One evening I was making individual free-form meat loaves on Cooking Live when a viewer called in and said she used a similar recipe but always mixed up a double batch and then froze half in muffin tins. On evenings when there was nothing else in the fridge, she‘d just pop some of those muffin meat loaves into the oven and—voilà—there was dinner. Admittedly, meat loaf is not the most complicated dish on this earth, but it is more work… 
Being the ignorant Northerner that I am, I always thought that green tomatoes were transformed at the beginning of the season into fried green tomatoes because nobody could wait for those first tomatoes to ripen. I have been enlightened by my Southern friends and now understand that these tomatoes are actually harvested at the end of the season out of fear of the upcoming frost. I am happy to eat them at either end of the season, particularly gilded with… 
For a lot of folks, the first recipe they ever prepared was printed on the back of a box, a package, or a can. Nestlé Semi-sweet Chocolate Morsels gave us Chocolate Chip Cookies. Lipton Onion Soup Mix turned into Lipton Onion Dip. Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup became Classic Green Bean Casserole. After all, why not depend on the makers of a favorite product to have some good ideas about how to use that product?
It was that kind of thinking… 
Some time ago Good Morning America ran a low-fat, low-calorie Healthy Eating contest that asked viewers to submit original recipes for Best Entrée and Best Dessert. We received hundreds and hundreds of entries, narrowed them down, then flew the winner in each category to New York to make their dish on the show.
Dana Richardson from Durham, North Carolina, submitted a recipe for Sweet Potato Burritos, and although it did not win, I personally liked it a lot, enough to… 
This is one of the four quick meat sautés that I included in Sara Moulton Cooks at Home. You start by pounding the meat nice and thin which allows it to cook quickly. Then you coat it in seasoned flour which keeps it from drying out when it is cooked, sauté it on both sides and set it aside while you make the sauce. Quickly reheat the meat in the sauce and serve.
1 pound pork scaloppini cut from the… 
It was always a pretty scary proposition when my kids came onto the show to cook with me when they were young. Unlike almost all of my other guests, they were not chefs, or grown-ups, or practiced television performers. They were sweet and funny, of course, but they were children, and unpredictable, which is to say unscriptable, and that can be nerve racking.
We developed this recipe in anticipation of one of those shows. I tried to think of all… 
This is a simplified version of a Chinese dish. An uncomplicated and delicious combo of ground pork and noodles, it is called Ants in a Tree because that is supposedly what it looks like. The first time I ate it was when Kempy Minifie the senior food editor at Gourmet, tested Nina Simond’s version of it for the magazine. Nina has written many great Asian cookbooks, I recommend them all. I love this recipe, but it used to be… 
I love duck, cook it frequently, and have included it in all my books. Recently Ariane Daguin, founder of D’Artagnan, invited me to cook with her in an Episode of her video series, Back of the House. Please take a look. Ariane really knows duck; she was raised in Auch, Gascony where her father was chef-owner of the Hotel de France. She came to the U.S. for college but recognized a market for some of the amazing foods she was… 
Although none of us wants to devote more than 45 minutes to getting dinner on the table during the workweek, we still want to eat well. Now that children are back to school, time is even more critical. In Sara Moulton Cooks at Home, I included four quick family-friendly chicken recipes that you can have on the table in a hurry. In each, thin pieces of chicken breast are seasoned and floured, fried quickly, and set aside while a sauce… 
