Far Rockaway, Queens--REPRESENT! Resident Joy Devor won the Simply Manishchewitz Cook-Off last night with her recipe for "Fantastic Flounder Rolls" beating out close to 3,000 other entrants in this nationwide competition. Somehow Ms. Devor managed to score some elusive Tam Tams, which might have been the key to setting her recipe above the rest. (The recipe also used Manischewitz Extra Virgin Olive Oil.) Her next cooking challenge, according to NY1, is "preparing food for her......

This recipe comes from Joanne Chen, author of The Taste of Sweet: Our Complicated Love Affair with Our Favorite Treats. In her new book, she goes on an exploration of sweets, bringing in historical anecdotes, scientific data, and refreshing honesty about her own sweet tooth along the way. For example, when given chocolate yogurt to eat in the dark and told that it was strawberry, 19 out of 32 subjects reported that it had......

Here is one last winter recipe before all the glorious spring and summer produce sweeps in. Chickpea-Stuffed Delicata Squash for the chickpeas 1 C (200 g) dried chickpeas 4 C water (or, better yet, mushroom broth) 1/2 C dried cranberries 1/2 C tawny port 2 large (4" diameter) delicata squash Salt, sugar, olive oil, and macademia nuts to taste Preheat your oven to 475 F. Mix the dried cranberries and port together in a bowl.......

This recipe is adapted from A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews by David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, a cookbook full of recipes for foods cooked and eaten by Jews and conversos in the Iberian Peninsula during the time of the Inquisition. The recipes were mostly gleaned from testimony denouncing the Jews during the inquisition. Jews were often identified by cultural signs, such as their culinary customs, and......

These grits are spicy, boldly flavored, creamy, meaty from the pork stock, and just an all-around success. The idea of making it with kimchi broth was inspired by Aki and Alex of Ideas in Food, who cooked barley in kimchi broth for another tasty-looking dish. The kimchi grits pair well with stir-fried shredded brussel sprouts, which are crispy and meaty from bacon grease. And just to balance out that meaty pickle fun, the shrimp......

Go make kumquat marmalade while you still can -- their season runs through mid-winter and with spring right around the corner, time's a-wasting. Get 1.5 lbs kumquats and slice them up thinly, reserving the seeds. Tie the seeds in a cheesecloth bag. Put the kumquat slices and the bag of seeds together in a non-reactive pot with 4 cups water and cover it and let it sit for 24 hours. The next day, put the......

One thing that should be in your container of kitchen utensils is a set of tongs. They are extraordinarily handy and can used as an extension of your hands. Keep them near your stove top and use them for many of your cooking needs: Distribute a sauce on pasta before plating, give vegetables a stir while they're roasting, flip a pork chop under the broiler, hold up a thick steak to brown the sides, toss......

It seems like every other weekend, Brooklyn is home to some kind of homestyle cooking competition, with a constant rotation of cupcake-offs, chili massacres, a big jerk-off, and probably some vegan tofu spread-a-thons somewhere. Prizes at these things are typically anything from homely trophies to a few cans of PBR, but the just-announced, upcoming inaugural Risotto Challenge is something special indeed: The prizes are going to be very nice. More on that below. On April......

When you order chocolate mousse in a restaurant, the result can sometimes be heavy and bland. This mousse recipe is light and buoyant because it is made without any dairy, but luscious because it emphasizes high quality chocolate. Dairy products tend to blunt the flavor of chocolate, so if you want to highlight an exceptionally fine chocolate, it is best to substitute water for cream when making your emulsion. Anyone who has worked with chocolate......

Today the Times’s Keith Dixon, a self-described “clumsy, overambitious cook,” offers tips for cooking dinner in a crowded city apartment made even more cramped by a newborn baby. Dixon has adapted his cooking technique to accommodate a light-sleeping baby who, awakened by a clattering spatula, derails dinner plans as he and his wife “labor to get her back to sleep.” So he’s evolved into a “Silent Chef” with “ninja stealth” and suggests, among other things,......

It's a no-brainer: Most recipes need exact measurements. But do you have what it takes to tackle that cookie recipe? Maybe, maybe not. With NYC apartments being so tiny and kitchen cupboard space being non-existent, some of you might be relying on your liquid measuring cup to appraise how much sugar or flour you need, which would make Alton Brown cringe! The difference isn't so much about the volume - pour flour into a liquid......

Now that the cold weather is likely here to stay, at least until the next freak 60 degree day, you might want to hunker down with a cozy-sounding book. Steven Gdula's The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home ($29.95, Bloomsbury.), will warm you right up. This whirlwind tour of the past hundred years or so sheds light on how the kitchen was often a reflection......

Forget going out to a restaurant -- the way to woo your sweetheart (or potential sweetheart) is by cooking. Before the fear courses through your veins, don't think that "cooking a romantic meal" needs to be overwhelming or complicated. The simple act of cooking a meal for someone, no matter what the menu, is romantic and special in and of itself. Perhaps the most romantic meal possible is breakfast in bed, and it doesn't have......

Here is an absolutely luscious, rich winter dish. We started off working with an Alice Waters recipe, but then we were inspired by Michael Ruhlman's love of veal stock to meat things up a bit to great effect. We think he is wrong in declaring veal stock to be "a selfless stock" - it does have a flavor of its own, and only seems neutral if it's part of the baseline flavor profile of your......

A veteran of Nobu and Ruby Foo’s, Chris Cheung was hired 5 months ago to replace Patricia Yeo at Monkey Bar, the red satin and black lacquer midtown institution known primarily for its, well, monkey theme. In an effort to reemphasize the food quotient of the restaurant, the 38 year-old chef maintains an inventory of global tastes and reassembles them using the template of traditional Chinese food: The curly fries, for example, that come with......

New Yorkers may be outraged about the city's attempted regulation of trans fats and mandated calorie posting, but at least our local government isn't going as far as their counterparts in Mississippi. Local legislators are trying to make it illegal for restaurants to serve food to obese patrons to combat the state's high obesity rate; approximately two-thirds of the state's residents are obese according to federal health statistics. Alan Richman, food critic at Bloomberg, has......

Okay, we realize that this isn't quite as crucial to the basics of a kitchen as either a sharp knife or a cast iron pan, but in our minds, it still ranks as a kitchen essential. Why? Because not only do we use our Microplane grater quite frequently, but it does what it is designed to do absolutely flawlessly. The Microplane was originally a woodworking tool, but made the crossover into the kitchen. According to......

We recently received a press release in the Gothamist feedbag announcing the arrival of “Top Chef: The Cookbook.” Being a major Top Chef junkie, we were pretty excited about this one. The official scoop is that the book, the "official companion cookbook" the #1 food show on cable will arrive in March and have: More than 100 Quick Fire Challenge and Elimination Round recipes from the first three seasons of the series; "In-depth discussions" with......

Crunchy, salty, spicy, and satisfying, these quick pickled cucumbers add a nice kick to most any meal. We reduced the oil content from Kuo's original recipe to make it a bit lighter and healthier, and rinsed off the excess salt after maceration in order to obtain a more balanced flavor, at least to our palate. Quick-Pickled Cucumbers with Chili Bean Sauce (adapted from The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo) For the quick-pickling: 2......

We've gotten a lot of hand me downs from the family basement over the years -- furniture, lamps, art, an espresso maker -- but our hands down favorite is the cast iron pan. It's likely that there's one lying around in your family's basement or just waiting to be picked up at a stoop sale or online. For a very low price, you'll have a pan that's strong, durable, has excellent heat retention, and with......

Many people we know have made new year's resolutions that sound vaguely like the ones they made last year, and many have to do with food and/or losing weight. Our food resolutions this year may ultimately result in losing a few pounds, but they're really just about being more conscious about what we eat. Here they are: 1) Eat local foods as much as possible. For us this means making the greenmarket our first stop......

You will never find Chef Bobby Flay too far away from an ancho chili pepper. Back in 1991, he opened Mesa Grill in New York, his shrine to the Southwestern flavors for which he is now famous around the world. In 1992, Mesa Grill won New York Magazine's Best New Restaurant, and the following year, Flay was given the James Beard Rising Star Chef award. Since then, he has created a mini-empire of six restaurants,......

The last recipe in Niloufer Ichaporia King's new Parsi cookbook, My Bombay Kitchen, is a light dessert drink hat's supposed to be served on March 21st, the Parsi New Year. It is certainly delicious enough to have year round, though, or perhaps on our own New Year's Eve in a few weeks. It's a cinch to throw together. Soak some basil seeds in water (just a teaspoon or so will be enough for several......

We love Momofuku, especially now that the Noodle Bar has moved to a larger location where we can actually bring our friends and chat with them at a table over dinner instead of just hoping to find one or two spaces at the bar. The food is amazing, and being the devoted carnivores that we are, we enjoy chef David Chang's devotion to adding meat to every dish on the menu (with one exception).......

Food bloggers from around the world are offering delicious prizes as part of Menu for Hope 4. Menu for Hope is an annual fundraising event hosted by Chez Pim. Last year, Menu for Hope raised an incredible $62,925 to help the UN World Food Programme feed the hungry. Want more details? Well, here’s the FAQ. From December 10-21, you can buy raffle tickets to bid on any on the food-related prizes being offered. Tickets cost......

The tcherek (sometimes spelled cherek) is a traditional, crescent shaped Algerian cookie stuffed with almonds that have been pulverized into a paste bound with orange blossom water and sugar. After the cookie is baked it is briefly steeped in more orange blossom water, then rolled in toasted almonds. Nomad’s tcherek recipe substitutes confectioner’s sugar for a less nutty exterior, and on the dessert plate ($6) of 4 house-made cookies at the East Village restaurant, what......

Here is a meat pie to warm and satisfy you, now that winter has come and even snow flurries are upon us. Loosely inspired by Moroccan basteeya, this pot pie marries a rich and savory meaty filling with traditionally sweet spices, and you can sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on top if you like to heighten the effect. The crust is made with lard and butter, (yes, lard AND butter) resulting in an extravagantly light and......

Alice Waters is considered by many to be a revolutionary. She opened Chez Panisse in 1971 and began awakening America to the benefits of local, sustainable agriculture by changing her menu according to what was available seasonally. She has taken this charge beyond her restaurant through her books as well as through her Edible Schoolyard program, which enables public school children to explore the connection between what they eat and where it comes from through......

This puree was inspired by a dish we had at Alinea, during the most impressive meal we have ever been served. The dish that inspired us was lobster (butter-poached, we believe), served with lobster mousse, sunchoke puree, and sweet orange, all surrounded by the hyacinth aroma released by boiling water being poured over hyacinths in the larger bowl holding the smaller bowl of edible food. It was one of the most luxurious experiences we have......

Time to dress up and play "I have my own food television show!" If you've ever thought you had it in you, now's the time. Epicurious.com is hosting a contest for the best video on holiday food and entertaining. Submit your entry by January 2, 2008 and have a chance to win prizes including Michael Chiarello cookware and Epicurious.com editors' favorite cookbooks. And if you're quick about it, the first 25 people to submit videos......