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The Cooking Newsletter By Sam Sifton

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Top 10 Ways to Improve Your Cooking By Fine Cooking

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Salt, Pepper, and a Pinch of Disaster The Science of Solving Kitchen Disasters By Popular Science

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Putting the Home into Homecooking Quarantine Cooking is About More Than Just Feeding Yourself By Nisha Chittal

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Kitchen Knives and Homicide The Anxiety of Learning to Cook By Alice Boyes Ph.D.

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Au Gratin Potatoes By Carries Experimental Kitchen

By Sam Sifton Good morning. Gabrielle Hamilton is leaving us, she writes in her farewell column for The New York Times Magazine this week, closing her laptop on a column she’s written since 2016 and returning to the restaurant she was forced to shutter by the pandemic. That’s a boon to diners in New York but a sad day for those of us who luxuriated in her sentences and recipes, which now will appear only occasionally, like albino squirrels or snowy owls. Gabrielle’s column doesn’t have a recipe attached to it. It’s instead an exploration of the allegory of stone soup and what it’s like to cook a meal with whatever scraps and bits of food you have on hand. “You start out with nothing but a smart and sincere idea and stay very faithful to your idea, keep your head down, do your work as you believe it should be done,” Gabrielle wrote. “You stir your pot of water faithfully and contentedly and let the idea itself capture the imagination and curiosity of the villagers.” Somewhat self-servingly, that sounds like no-recipe recipe cooking to me, as in this whatever-you’ve-got fried rice. (Give that a try!) But it’s also a way of thinking about the communities we live in and feed, and how much we count on those at our tables to

bring forth what they have for the communal good. Gabrielle has contributed much to ours, and I hope we can all raise our glasses to her in gratitude and tribute alike. Of course we’ve got plenty of new (actual) recipes to delight you this week as well. Yewande Komolafe explored the role of plant-based cooking in West Africa and the diaspora and brought us new recipes for roasted mushrooms in ata din din, a red pepper relish, the steamed bean cakes known as moin moin and coconut-lemongrass tapioca with caramelized citrus. Yotam Ottolenghi, meanwhile, offers a recipe for devil’s food cake with hazelnut praline, that is, in his words, “a rich, dark cake (for a rich, dark December).” You’ll want to sink your teeth into that. And Jerelle Guy has come through with some amazing ideas for Christmas morning (though I think they’d play well on any morning of the month): a raisin cinnamon roll wreath (above), cinnamon toast popcorn and eggnog overnight French toast.

Please get in touch with us at cookingcare@nytimes. com if anything goes sideways while you’re cooking or using our site and apps. Someone will get back to you. (You can also write to me if you’re particularly outraged or want to say hello. I’m at foodeditor@ nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

she calls “gritted-teeth pop-punk, music for cheap cigs and driving with too many friends in the car.” I’m in. And I’ll be back on Friday.

Now, it’s nothing to do with smothered pork chops or supernatural brownies, but I’ve been grooving through Neal Stephenson’s latest, “Termination Shock,” alternating between the doorstop-thick novel itself and Edoardo Ballerini’s commanding performance of the words in the audio version. Here’s an important and exceptionally well-done two-part series from The Boston Globe and The Press-Herald of Portland, Me.: The Lobster Trap, about the existential threat that climate change holds over Maine’s lobster industry and the people it feeds. The Wire has dropped its paywall for its archive of work by Greg Tate, the influential culture critic who died earlier this month, at 64. Please explore it. Finally, in The Times, Isabelia Herrera put me on to Jean Dawson and Mac DeMarco, “Menthol,” which

Oh Fork! // 10

Salt, Pepper, & a Pinch of The Science of Solving Kitchen Disasters Popular Science

Oh Fork! // 14

Before you turn on a burner or pick up a knife, your food is already in flux: sugar levels are ebbing and flowing in fruits and vegetables, protein scaffolding is disintegrating in cheese and meat, and oxygen is wreaking havoc on everything from the aroma of olive oil to the color of avocados.

Unlimited do-overs in the kitchen are rare, however, because we almost never work with a pure substance. We could whisk stray oil droplets back into broken hollandaise forever, if it didn’t also contain delicate egg proteins that irreversibly clump together from the abuse, to form tight, gritty knots.

There is no Waze to map the shifting traffic of emulsified droplets in your hollandaise, so even the best chefs in the world are flying blind. No one is immune to mistakes in the kitchen, but by categorizing the unexpected, we can quicken our reflexes to respond more fluidly when a recipe goes sideways. From the smallest hiccup to the biggest disaster, the solutions to any culinary misstep fall into one of three categories: do-overs, workarounds, and pivots.

When we add too much salt to a pesto (after running out of basil), we can add more oil, which helps to coat the tongue and prevent some of the water-soluble salt from making the journey to our taste receptors. Flavor perception is a complex labyrinth of sensory cues, and the best cooks are usually those who have discovered enough trap doors to beat the system when mistakes inevitably happen.

All kitchen mistakes stem from unwanted transformations of the microscopic building blocks within our food. Most of those changes can never be undone, but some are reversible. Reversible processes give us the rare opportunity for a do-over when something goes wrong. Just as gold can be melted and recast, gritty ice cream can be melted and refrozen, dull chocolate can be retempered, and oily sauces can be re-emulsified. In these cases, physics has a short memory, allowing us to wipe the slate clean. We can even fix the same mistake multiple times— some restaurants refreeze their ice cream twice a night to keep it as smooth as possible.

Even when the initially conceived dish is no longer an option, all is not lost. When a workaround isn’t possible, it’s time to pivot. These situations can complicate and delay dinner plans, but the pursuit of ways to repurpose “ruined” food can yield some awesome and unexpected results. Tough, dry steak can be ground up to form the base of a savory Bolognese sauce; overcooked, mushy rice turns out to make a great binder for croquettes; and chefs in restaurants around the country are burning onions on purpose, to later use in small quantities as a smoky-sweet addition to spice blends and marinades. Whether you’re heating ramen noodles in a dorm room microwave or working the fish station at the best restaurant in the world, mistakes are gonna happen. The good news is that there are lots of ways to fix nearly any mistake, and they seldom involve a trash can.

Cooking isn’t rocket science — it’s way more complicated. Rockets don’t ripen on the way to the moon. Oh Fork! // 16

3. Use your hands. Hands are extremely sensitive and sophisticated cooking tools. You can develop this sense of touch by paying attention to how different foods feel at different degrees of doneness, even as you’re checking them with a thermometer, a toothpick, or a knife. Meat, for example, goes from being very soft when it’s rare to quite firm when well done. Touch can also indicate when a cake is baked, if a dough is kneaded enough, and whether a pear is ripe.

2. Start with the best ingredients. Imported Parmigiano-Reggiano is so much better than domestic parmesan that the two can hardly even be compared; excellent chocolate makes all the difference in a cake; and fresh homemade breadcrumbs are a world apart from packaged crumbs.

4. Switch to kosher or sea salt, and don’t be stingy with it. Kosher salt and sea salt have a much better flavor than ordinary table salt. Though food shouldn’t taste salty, going to the opposite extreme and using little or no salt in your cooking results in food that taste flat. Even if a recipe suggests an amount of salt to use, your ingredients—as well as your palate—may be different enough from the recipe writer’s to necessitate adjustments.

8. Let roasted meats rest before carving. Without a rest to let the meat’s juices redistribute, your roast will be dry. 9. Add a final splash of acid (vinegar or citrus juice) to almost any vegetable or meat dish or fruit dessert at the last minute to perk up the flavor. 10. Trust doneness tests over the timer’s buzzer. When you try a recipe for the first time, look to those descriptive words you’ll find in a good recipe: “bake until golden brown” or “boil until reduced by half.” Don’t be so concerned that the time it takes to reach the desired state is more or less than the time suggested by the recipe.

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1. Choke up on your chef ’s knife. For better control, choke up on the handle to the point of putting your thumb and the side of your index finger onto the side of the blade right above the handle. Speaking of chef ’s knives, invest in a good one (and keep it sharp). The longer, wider blade of a chef ’s knife will give you speed, control, and confidence.

7. Bake pie and tart crusts longer than you think you should. Pastry doughs taste much better when cooked long enough for the sugars in the crust to caramelize. You’re going for brown, not pale blond.

6. Reduce liquids to concentrate flavor. If you’ve braised meat or vegetables, take the main ingredient out when it’s done and reduce the sauce a bit more before serving. When you deglaze a pan, be sure to reduce the added liquid by boiling it over high heat. Reduce homemade stocks before use, too.

PEPP

You don’t have to go to cooking school to become a better cook. There are lots of easy, small things you can do every time you cook to get better, more professional results. Here are our top 10 tips for improving your cooking:

SALT

Your Cooking

By Fine Cooking

5. Don’t crowd the pan when sautéing. Be sure you can see the bottom of the pan betwee the pieces of food. Too much food will lower the temperature of the pan, creating a lot of steam, meaning you won’t get good browning. It’s also important to dry food before sautéing it and to make sure the pan is good and hot.

Oh Fork! // 12

“There is no Waze to map the shifting traffic of emulsified droplets in your hollandaise.”

Oh Fork! // 18

To fully appreciate the special anguish that is a home-cooked meal gone wrong, we’ve asked three people with particular knowledge in this area to tell us about their worst-ever kitchen debacles.

Jacques Pepin told us at first that he has never failed in the kitchen. “I’m the greatest,” he exclaimed, joking. But he did have a few thoughts on the subject of failure. His strategy for avoiding it: “Very often you do something a bit wrong and say, ‘That’s exactly what I meant to do anyway.’ “

Ruth Reichl wrote her first cookbook at 21. Since then she has amassed an impressive culinary resume: She was a feared and respected restaurant critic and the last editor of Gourmet magazine. But the story she told us takes place before any of that, when she was just starting out in the world of food writing and had invited her very proper cookbook editor to dinner.

But sometimes there is no chance of recovery. Pepin recalls an appearance he made on a live TV show in the early ‘70s. There were about 2,500 people in the audience. He was supposed to make a soufflé. So he showed up, made the dish and put it in the oven. He had no way of checking on it.

“I had decided I was going cook her the most amazing meal she’d ever had,” Reichl says. But first, the editor had to climb five flights of stairs to Reichl’s apartment, which was in what she calls “a scary neighborhood” of New York City.

Pepin didn’t notice, but the oven was on a setting that most of us rarely use. “That oven went on self-cleaning,” he says. It was 725 degrees. Whoops.

And the meal couldn’t have gone worse. “It was terrible,” Reichl says. “I made six courses. I started with a rich chicken liver pate, then I had a cream soup, salad with blue cheese dressing, and then four desserts, one richer than the next. And at the end of the evening [the editor] was looking sort of green.” Finally, after several excruciating hours, the meal was over. Reichl imagines the woman walking down those stairs thinking, “I’m alive, I’m alive!” Reichl says the truth is: It happens. “It’s just a meal. There’s always another one.”

Kitchen Disasters

Pepin laughs as he remembers the ruined soufflé. “You’ve never seen a soufflé as black as this one, as burned,” he says. “In fact, it was so black that the center was still liquid because it formed a crust. It didn’t even cook in the center.” Still, Pepin’s audience was not disappointed. He remembers pulling the dish out of the oven to a standing ovation: “People were very happy. There was no recovery on that one.” And finally we talked to Pati Jinich, who still remembers the moment disaster struck in her kitchen. “I just felt cold sweat dripping down my forehead,” she says. Jinich is the chef at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C., which is still the site of her worst-ever day in the kitchen. She had just done a cooking demonstration — a dish of duck breasts in a sweet sauce. There were 120 people there watching. The plan was to serve them the

“Admit your mistake, take a well-deserved bow, and thenmove on.” then

By Rose Friedman

She was going to “sear [the duck breasts] over very high heat until the skin crisped and became golden brown.” Then she would flip them over and finish them off in the oven. But the major fail came between those two steps. The duck was seared. The oven was heated, and then it shut off. Jinich was stuck with 120 pieces of raw duck and all the trimmings, including what she describes as a “delicious Jamaica flower and orange syrup with goat cheese and black bean tamales waiting to sit by the side of those lovely breasts.” So she got creative. She placed the duck breasts on cooling racks and stacked them above her skillet. She wrapped the whole thing in aluminum foil, and slowly the breasts cooked through. “It was really delicious” she remembers — it just came to the table about an hour late. Jinich also had another trick up her sleeve. She asked the bartender to open some extra cases of wine, and invited her guests to have another round before dinner. It worked. The guests drank happily while Jinich made do in the kitchen. “In the end, everybody had a beautiful plate with crispy skin and moist meat,” she says. “But oh boy, I sweated that one out.” So if you have a dish that flops that badly today, take heart — and then take a page from these three chefs. Admit your mistake, take a well-deserved bow, and then move on.

Oh Fork! // 20

Quarantine Cooking is About More Than Just Feeding Yourself

ast week, it seemed like everyone I knew started baking: My Instagram feed was filled with loaves of sourdough, raspberry scones, blueberry muffins, chocolate chip cookies, Nutella banana bread. I’m not much of a baker, but I joined in, too. So far I’ve made cream cheese-topped brownies, scallion biscuits, and banana bread, and I have focaccia in my future. I’m seeing more cooking, too. My Twitter feed has been filled with friends sourcing recipe ideas and inspiration from their peers while Instagram stories are full of home cooks showing off the dishes they’ve been making in solitude in their kitchens: Long-simmering stews, braised short ribs, elaborate lasagnas, chocolate chip cookies. As the coronavirus pandemic spreads through the US, and the world is increasingly practicing social distancing to slow the spread of the disease, millions of Americans are spending a lot more time in their homes than they used to. With shelter-in-place orders in many states, work-from-home directives from many employers, and many public spaces such as theaters, museums, bars, and restaurants all shut down, people are turning to cooking while self-quarantined not just for sustenance but for comfort and entertainment, too. Food writers and home cooking experts are rising to the occasion, offering home cooks resources and recipes, answering their questions, and creating new spaces just to talk and bond about cooking and baking. Publications like the New York Times Cooking section and Bon Appétit have been offering curated collections of recipes that can be made with pantry ingredients while people are staying home in quarantine and avoiding shopping. Samin Nosrat, the cookbook writer and host of Netflix’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, recently launched a pop-up podcast called Home Cooking, where she and cohost Hrishikesh Hirway answer listener questions about how to cook creatively with whatever pantry ingredients they have at home. “Our goal with the podcast is simply to spread a little joy, perhaps a little cooking knowhow, and to ease some anxiety for people who might be lost in the kitchen,” Nosrat said over email. “The two of us are so privileged in so many ways — we are housed, fed, employed, cared for — and it just feels right to share some positivity and warmth with the world in a time of global crisis.”

Oh Fork! // 24

hile I’ve been stuck in my apartment, cooking and baking have become my outlet to channel all my fears and anxieties, and I’m far from alone. Sure, part of it is functional: We have to eat, and restaurants are shut down — other than for delivery and pickup orders — so home cooking is simply necessary. Even for those of us who cooked regularly before the term “social distancing” arrived in our lexicon, we’re still cooking more meals at home than we might have in the past — I used to have lunch at my office every day, for instance, but now I’m cobbling together lunches with whatever’s in my fridge on weekdays while I work from home. But home cooking and baking also function as a way to pass the hours and feel productive, a form of entertainment when many other activities — movie theaters, museums, concerts, bars — are closed or canceled. Not everyone has more free time as a result — parents, for instance, have their hands full with schools and daycares are closed — but many of the quarantined Americans who do have newfound time on their hands are using it to take on more labor- and time-intensive cooking projects that they might not have otherwise attempted, since they have nowhere to go and therefore plenty of time at home to tend to their stew all day, make pasta from scratch, or bake their own bread. Jenna Golden, 36, a consultant in Washington, DC, agrees: “Right now, there are a lot of unknowns and many of us are feeling a complete lack of control. Cooking and baking have been productive activities, and something that I have been able to enjoy even with the scary backdrop of a global crisis,” Golden says. “It’s my slice of normal amid an incredibly abnormal time.” I’m also a highly anxious person, and there are a lot of uncertainties with the coronavirus pandemic. If I’m idle too long, it’s easy to start ruminating and go down a panic spiral. But when I’m cooking, I can’t do that, simply because I’ll mess up the recipe. If I don’t pay close attention to what I’m doing, I’ll get the proportion of ingredients wrong for the dough or burn the meat. Cooking forces me to focus on the task at hand instead of watching cable news or scrolling through the infinite

loop of increasingly horrifying updates on Twitter. (I mean “force” in the most literal sense; my hands are covered in flour, so it physically prevents me from touching my phone.) In a way, cooking serves as a form of mindfulness: You can only focus on one thing, and you have to be fully present to get it right. Nosrat agrees that cooking can serve as a way to distract yourself from anxieties about the world at large: “It’s a lot more pleasant to spend my brain power thinking of what I want to cook later today or tomorrow, or even next week than it is to fall into a pit of anxiety or worry,” she says. So much of what’s happening right now is out of our control: We can follow the CDC guidelines and practice social distancing and wash our hands and stay home and donate to relief funds, but it’s still hard not to watch the news and feel powerless. The number of cases keeps climbing every day. Our normal lives have been put on hold indefinitely. We have no idea when we’ll be able to see our friends and family in person again, travel, attend weddings, or even enjoy a visit to a favorite restaurant. For those of us who love planning out every detail of our schedules in advance, this kind of uncertainty is incredibly frustrating. There’s nothing we can do about that — but at least making a braised pork shoulder is a way to soothe our nerves and feel like we have a tiny slice of power over something in our lives, no matter how small that may be. Sharing food, as Kosoff did with her sister, as well as sharing food experiences can also help create a sense of community while we’re socially isolated. While we can’t leave our homes and see our friends in real life, we can gather on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to discuss what we’re cooking and swap recipe ideas. Talking about cooking has become the new online support group — something we share while we all try to get through this strange, scary time together. Helen Rosner, a food writer for the New Yorker, asked her Twitter followers for their questions about home cooking and grocery shopping during quarantine and answered them in a new quarantine cooking column. Cookbook writer Emily Stephenson announced on Twitter that she was starting a zine collecting pantry-friendly recipes and asking other food writers to submit ideas.

Kosoff has also used new tools, like Instagram Live, to connect with people over cooking and recipes. Recently, while baking pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, she decided to livestream her baking process on Instagram and chatted with her followers while doing so. “It’s weird to basically cosplay the Barefoot Contessa, but it was fun and definitely made me feel less lonely,” says Kosoff. “The response was great — there were 115 people who tuned in, according to Instagram, and people interacted in the comments, telling me what they were planning to bake or cook this week or asking questions about how I’ve been doing.” Even though we have to keep six feet of space between ourselves and other people, some are still using cooking as a way to connect with people IRL while maintaining a safe distance. Golden has started hand-delivering her baked goods to friends and neighbors, doing what she calls “distanced deliveries.” “I’ll bake things and then go out on a long walk and drop off goodies on doorsteps,” she says. “It’s a way for me to get some fresh air and also bring a little joy to friends and family during this uncomfortable time.” Cooking itself may be a solo activity, but during this period of social distancing, it has also served as a tool to bring communities together in new ways — even when they can’t gather together for a meal. “We’re all looking for slices of happiness, and cooking and baking during quarantine have allowed that to happen both online and offline,” says Golden.

Oh Fork! // 26

By Ali

ce Bo

y e s Ph

.D.

A nxiety

about cooking can arise in a couple of different circumstances. Firstly, sometimes people have no experience with cooking. They’ve never done it and therefore have no confidence. If you’ve never cooked, even “basic” recipes may be intimidating.

In another scenario, you might’ve cooked reasonably frequently in the past but you’ve gotten out of the habit for some reason. This happened to me when I moved to the US. I started eating a lot of pre-prepared meals, and the more time went on, the more daunting cooking anything from scratch felt. This is a pretty typical pattern. Whenever we avoid anything, our anxiety grows. This can happen even in situations in which avoidance is unintentional. For example, we lived in a hotel while we were house hunting so I didn’t have access to a full kitchen for a few months.

Whichever category you fall into, here are practical tips for overcoming anxiety about cooking. You can get all sorts of perfectly functional basic cooking equipment at dollar stores. For example, measuring cups and spoons, a spatula, mixing bowls, a can opener, aluminum trays for making lasagna or other recipes that require a huge pan, freezer containers etc. By utilizing the dollar store you can buy all the absolute basics you'll need for under $15, creating a low barrier to entry. If you need items like pots and a good chopping knife, try a discount store (like Ross Dress for Less or TJ Maxx in the US). Why? You'll be able to buy good quality, individual pots for low prices, without needing to buy a whole set. Moreover, these stores usually have just a few choices, so you won't get completely overwhelmed by too much choice. If you're starting from zero, I'd recommend buying one large pot (big enough to cook pasta in) and one smaller one. Many of the recipes you'll see online aren't well tested and ratings may be fake. Ideally, ask friends for recipes that they make a lot. As an example, this is a chocolate cake recipe that's very reliable. The only thing I do differently is cook it on a lower temperature. I love using YouTube for recipes but I utilize a couple of strategies to mitigate the risk of getting a bad recipe. Firstly, If I'm going to use a recipe from YouTube I like recipes where someone makes and recommends someone else's recipe. This way you know for sure that the recipe worked for another person. Here's an example of this - a YouTuber makes another YouTuber's blueberry pancake recipe.

Instead of making every element of a dish from scratch, an alternative is to start with prepared foods as a base. For example: You love a red curry you buy from your favorite Thai restaurant. However, there's always too much sauce. You could cook extra rice, tofu, meat and/or vegetables and add these to the meal you buy so that you get extra meals out of it. Start with jarred pasta sauce and add fresh herbs and extra vegetables. For example, grill eggplant and zucchini to put in it, and add fresh basil. Once you get to the point you want to cook curry on your own, instead of making the paste from scratch, doctor up canned paste with fresh lemongrass, ginger, garlic and herbs. When making a complex dish like lasagna for the first time, you can always buy jarred pasta sauce and even pre-grilled frozen vegetables to save yourself some steps the first time you make the dish. Each time you make the dish, you can make one more element from scratch.

Secondly, I "triangulate" recipes by looking at 3 different recipes for the same thing, to see if anything seems wildly off in any one version. For example, I look out for situations in which the recipes all have the same basic ingredients in similar qualities but one recipe has twice as much of one particular ingredient as the others, such as when a basic risotto recipe uses twice as much wine as most other risotto recipes for the same amount of rice. Oh Fork! // 30

Cooking is part art and part science. There are always differences that impact your final product, for example, a banana bread recipe calls for 2 bananas when bananas vary substantially in size, or the size of your pan impacts the cooking time. Write down exactly what you did, especially if you tend to deviate from recipes. You'll think you'll remember for next time, but chances are you won't. By writing down exactly what you did, you'll be able to get a recipe perfected to exactly how you like it. Cooking is part art and part science. There are always differences that impact your final product, for example, a banana bread recipe calls for 2 bananas when bananas vary substantially in size, or the size of your pan impacts the cooking time. Write down exactly what you did, especially if you tend to deviate from recipes. You'll think you'll remember for next time, but chances are you won't.

By writing down exactly what you did, you’ll be able to get a recipe perfected to exactly how you like it. Although this might seem like an odd topic for a psychology article, anxiety about and avoidance of cooking can impact people's lives. You may feel embarrassed about it, or incur a lot of extra costs buying pre-prepared or restaurant meals. When all sorts of delivery services are available, and supermarkets stock a wide variety of appealing prepared foods and freezer meals, not cooking is an easy habit to get into. Take a growth mindset approach to cooking. Wherever you're starting from, you can get better at it, and when you do it'll feel much easier and less anxiety provoking. As with any type of avoidance-related anxiety, you can typically overcome your anxiety much more quickly than you expect. Even cooking a few times will likely leave you feeling much more comfortable and less anxious about it.

Au Gratin Potatoes By Carrie’s Experimental Kitchen

These au gratin potatoes are made with russet potatoes combined with butter, garlic, heavy cream, White Cheddar, Jarlsburg and Pecorino Romano cheeses; then topped with a potato chip fried onion crust.

Start by using a mandoline or a sharp knife, thinly slice potatoes and place into your ramekins; which are individual portion size, oven-safe dishes. Place the ramekins on a baking sheet.

I went off my diet here a little bit folks because I just had to replicate one of our favorite side dishes at Capital Grille; their Au Gratin Potatoes. My husband and I don’t get to go out alone often as a couple, I mean really alone.

You can also use a 1qt. baking dish; however, the time to cook might change slightly in order to fully cook the potatoes.

No kids, no other couples, just us. So when the opportunity presented itself recently because previous plans had fallen through, I took a chance and logged into Open Table (love this site!) and booked dinner for two at one of our favorite restaurants, The Capital Grille. The closest chain is about 35 minutes away, but it is also connected to a mall where we needed to do some Christmas gift returns anyway so it worked out perfectly. For this recipe you’ll need Russet potatoes, butter, garlic, flour, heavy cream, White Cheddar, Jarlsburg and Pecorino Romano cheeses, potato chips and french fried onions.

In a small saucepan, melt some butter over low heat; then add garlic and saute garlic for 1 minute. Net, whisk in flour to form a roux; then add the heavy cream. Mix until the roux has dissolved; then add your cheeses.

Ingredients 3 medium russet potatoes, peeled 3 tablespoons butter, divided 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour 1 1/2 cups heavy cream 1/2 cup shredded white cheddar cheese 1/2 cup shredded jarlsburg cheese 1/2 cup grated pecorino romano cheese 2 cups crushed potato chips 1 cup french fried onions

Simmer the sauce for 5-8 minutes until all of the cheese has melted; then pour the mixture over the potatoes in each ramekin. While the sauce is cooking, add the potato chips and fried onions to your food processor and pulse until the mixture is crumbly. Melt some butter and add to the topping. Mix well then sprinkle the topping over each ramekin. Place the entire pan into the oven and bake 30-40 minutes until the topping is golden brown and the potatoes are tender.

Oh Fork! // 34

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OH FORKI