For my first meal in my new kitchen, I wanted to cook chili, a dish easily prepared in the space of a Lazy Sunday afternoon. Shopping at Fairway, a labyrinthine and beautiful grocery store at 132nd Street, I spied ground lamb. Although Serious Eats offers an excessively complex—almost self-parodically so—beef chili recipe, I prefer a simpler scoop of beans and meat. My dorm kitchen, shared with six suite mates, is a claustrophobe’s nightmare. There’s no room for voluminous ingredient lists, let alone a host of tabletop appliances set aside for processing coffee beans and esoteric spices. Fortunately, great tasting chili is, for me, a matter of imprecision, intuition, improvisation, and an ex-mad scientist’s soul, one turned away from Enlightenment rationalism and embracing of melodramatics. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Simplicity
College Dorm-Proof Lamb Chili
Filed under College Life, Columbia University, Recipes, Theory and Criticism
The Proof Is Not in the Pudding: Husk-On Corn with Basil Honey Butter
Overambitious plans make for half-baked dinners. As a kid in the kitchen, I plotted baroque feasts that required hours of labor. Nearly 20 now, I finally understand economy of effort. Last Thursday, I avoided culinary disaster by accepting simplicity as the solution to an unapproachable recipe.
