Reasons Why You Might Want to Make Tomato Sauce This Week: It’s delicious, and pasta is a pretty efficient comfort food. It’s also versatile and good for more than pasta (read: pizza, stirred into broth to make a soup, smeared on bread, etc.) It’s easy. It’s endlessly customizable, meaning you […]
Home School: Blanching Vegetables
Our new feature, Home School, will highlight the methods and techniques that we use in the kitchen everyday. Whether you’re new to daily cooking or just need to freshen up on some of your skills, we’ll focus on the basics to help you deal with limited ingredients and limited time! […]
Resourceful Cooking
Things are feeling awfully uncertain. And while we can’t do too much to help you navigate this surreal experience, we can at least try and help you figure out some of the basics. After all, cooking is our calm place. First, here are our best reminders for stocking your pantry […]
FAQ: Corned Beef and Cabbage
Classic Corned Beef and Cabbage is one of our favorite food rituals, but it’s a home-cooked dish that folks seem to struggle with! So, we’re offering up some answers to the questions we get most often regarding this St. Patrick’s Day staple! Question: Um, what is corned beef? Answer: Fair […]
Snack Sushi
Sushi is generally an outside food, meaning we eat it outside of the house when someone else makes it for us. And for a lot of reasons, this is generally a fine practice. Good sushi fish can be hard to find and hard to store. Plus, who even knows how […]
All About Roux
If you’re feeling the spirit of Mardi Gras, you may be inspired to try your hand at a Cajun or Creole recipe, like gumbo or shrimp etouffee. The key to many of these flavorful, complex dishes is the roux, a cooked flour and fat mixture that thickens, colors, and flavors […]
How To: Break Down Artichokes
Artichokes. They are delicious. They are versatile. And their edible portions are so small compared to the effort it takes to get through the spiky exterior! But like the first person who looked at an artichoke and thought, “I bet I can cook the tiny center of that armadillo-flower,” we […]
Family-Friendly Stir-Fry for Lunar New Year
At the same time many of us are packing away our noisemakers and funny 2020 glasses, people all over the world are just beginning to prepare for the new year. Chinese New Year is a celebration of the lunar new year — the first day on a calendar based on […]
Strings and Wiggles: A Guide to Pasta Shapes
We haven’t counted, but by our estimates, there are like, ten million different pasta shapes in the world. More accurately, there are probably more than 300 different shapes, and depending on where you are in the world, each one may have a completely different name. Luckily, knowing the ins and […]
Perfect your Mise en Place
Knowing how to cook is obviously important, and just like every chef and student at the CIA is on the same lifelong journey of culinary learning, you’ll want to review the essential techniques and fundamentals of cooking (start here!). But past that, the first thing you’ll learn at the CIA […]
Tips for Plant-Forward Cooking
Have you heard about the CIA’s partnership with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health? For several years, we’ve worked together on the Menus of Change initiative, which aims to refocus restaurant cooking to include more plant-forward and sustainable menu planning. Simply put, we believe plant-forward eating is better […]
Thanksgiving Stuffing Free-Style
Stuffing (or maybe you call it dressing?) is highly personal. You might follow the same family recipe each year, or maybe you go out in search of something new and exciting. More often than not, you might be let down. This isn’t because the recipes are bad, but it’s because […]