I know a lot of people out there think that garlic powder is only for the poor proles who don't have fresh garlic on hand, and I'm here to tell you that they're incorrect. Well, mostly. Garlic is a delightful herb, or perhaps even a delightful necessity. You'll hear people talk about the amount of garlic they add to things in terms of heads, rather than cloves, and yes, there are plenty of dishes where the more garlic, the merrier. You might not want to kiss your date after you eat them, but garlic is the basis of their flavor and if you don't use enough, you aren't getting the full effect. That said, fresh garlic is sometimes hard to keep on hand. So you can shift to canned garlic, or jars of garlic paste, and sure, they're a fine substitute in some ways. But they still require you to have the means to store them and in many cases the time and space to use them. Garlic powder keeps forever, it doesn't require refrigeration, and it seems like it's t...

So maybe you've got a favorite spice rub that they don't sell anymore. Or maybe you thought you had another bottle of that seasoning blend when you planned for this recipe but you can't find it anywhere. Whatever the reason, we've all wanted to make some more of a blended spice that we didn't make ourselves. First off, the best thing to do is to supplement before you start using. Don't season half your meat with the blend and then the other half with something totally made up. You're never going to match it precisely, so it's better to mix up more and then mix what you've got left of the original in. If you've got most of what you need, or if you're adding it to a dish throughout the cooking process (remember, spice early, spice often ), you can usually just stretch it with a bit of the major flavor. For an unfortunate number of spice blends you're likely to find in your local supermarket, you can just add some salt, pepper, or sugar, or ...

  Don't judge my bowls. They were cheap and they hold a lot of stew. This recipe is a bunch of cans and bags, comes together in a snap, and tastes like you simmered it for hours. Plus, depending on the ingredients you use, it's vegetarian, but hearty enough to satisfy even meat lovers. Plenty of veggies involved too, and I can't stress enough the fact that we all need to eat more vegetables. Tuscan? Well, the Tuscans eat lots of beans, and this is a hearty bean stew which uses plenty of rosemary, so I'm calling it Tuscan. If you changed the flavors a little, you could call it whatever you want, and we'll discuss those flavor alterations a little later. You Will Need: Beans Cream soup Onions Peppers Tomatoes Garlic and Spices Salt and maybe Sugar Oil Beans Traditionally things called "Tuscan beans" usually are meant to be cannellini beans in the US. They're fine here, but I actually prefer Great Northern or other small white beans because the skins are ...

Let's get this out of the way right now: white people, it's me, your brother in lack of melanin. Please stop telling people with more interesting culinary heritages that bay leaves are pointless. If you think bay leaves are pointless and have no taste, at least one of two things is true: 1) your bay leaves are older than dirt and thus taste like dirt; 2) you've never experienced the bay leaf flavor up close and personal so you think it doesn't add anything. As I am about to do, try chewing on one and see if you get no flavor from it. I bet it'll surprise you. Rant over. Please stick around to find out more about bay leaves. Bay leaves are widely used in dishes from all over the world, but most people don't do more than add one when the recipe calls for it, and if that's you, you're missing out. You can sometimes find fresh ones in international markets (or maybe even your local grocery store if you're lucky) which pack a major punch. India in particu...

I'm shamelessly stealing elements of this recipe from America's Test Kitchen, who did a version of tamale pie a while back that looked delicious but was, let's face it, too small. But they took garden-variety tamale pie, which is a bunch of cans dumped into a casserole and baked, and elevated it. I'm going to take it back down a few notches because let's face it, tamale pie doesn't need to be elevated that much. It's hearty and delicious, but there's no reason we have to content ourselves with garden-variety. You Will Need: Beef? Beans Tomatoes Onions Cilantro? Spices Oil Cheese Cornbread Beef? You can make this vegetarian and it won't lose much. Much. But it's better with beef. You could also make it with ground chicken or turkey, but you may need more oil to bloom the spices and keep things from drying out. I used pre-portioned frozen hamburger, 80-20, because I had that available. Frozen absolutely works, and don't let anyone tell you diff...

You may notice that the plate isn't clean; I couldn't wait to eat these, so this is the second batch.   Falafel is delicious, relatively easy to make, and a good way to get people to eat beans. These patties are adjacent to falafel in that they're delicious, relatively easy to make, and a good way to get people to eat beans, but they differ in some aspects, including the need to deep-fry and the need to soak beans overnight. They also include some other ingredients besides chickpeas, so they're a complete meal instead of a thing you need to make sandwiches out of, though you absolutely can make sandwiches out of them. The main reason I created this recipe is because soaking beans is a pain, and falafel really should only be made with soaked dry chickpeas. If you feel like preparing something in advance, by all means get yourself some dry chickpeas and make falafel. Come back here when you've got to prepare a meal in a relative hurry. You Will Need: Beans Rice Spinac...

It's been a bit on the nippy side recently, and the depths of winter are upon us, so what better time to make split pea soup. I like mine with ham, but with a few alterations we'll discuss it's very easy to make this a vegetarian dish. Dried split peas, like lentils, are cheap and easy to find, plus they cook without any additional preparation and they're filling. You Will Need: Split Peas Ham? Onions Other Vegetables? Spices Oil Salt/Stock/Bouillon Cubes Water Split Peas If you happen to have them, you can make this soup with toor dal instead (toor dal is just split pigeon rather than green peas) but the traditional way is with split green peas. Buy them dry in the supermarket, and there's no reason to pay more for a brand here; the generic will do just fine. One pound makes four healthy servings, particularly if you have a nice crusty bread to go with your soup, but this soup freezes well and making more is just as easy. Ham? The best way to make this soup is with...

This isn't so much a recipe as a family of recipes, a technique for better chicken, or maybe just a string of ideas. That said, I'm going to give you the spice blend I started making this with, then in variations we'll talk all about the myriad different ways you can prepare this dish once you have the basic idea. You might have heard of buttermilk fried chicken and thought that the buttermilk must be part of the batter. But in fact the buttermilk is what you brine the chicken in, and while it does sometimes become a part of the coating, that's not its primary function. Chicken soaked in buttermilk becomes more tender and more resistant to overcooking. You might have read the preceding paragraph and thought, "Why is he talking about buttermilk? I thought this was yogurt chicken." And you'd be right, except that while American cooks have figured out that buttermilk marination is a good way to preserve moisture in chicken, many of them don't know that th...

  From top left clockwise: ground green, green seeds, whole green pods, whole black pods I promise, I'm not just doing all the spices that start with C. If coriander and cumin are the bases of a lot of savory spice mixes, cardamom is from the land of sweets, though you'll frequently find it playing in the savory pool in Indian cuisine. You're most likely to have experienced cardamom in Indian food, where it plays a prominent role in many desserts, and also in tea (chai frequently has cardamom in it, if you've wondered why simply adding mulling spice to your tea didn't make it taste quite right), but while it's wonderful when paired with sweet flavors, you're missing out if you don't try it with something assertive and meaty. Taste When most people think of cardamom they think of the green variety, but confusingly there's a black cardmom as well. Black cardamom is a slightly different variety of the plant, and the seed pods are larger and have been dr...

 To some people, chili without meat is sacrilege. This recipe is proof that they're just snobs. No one likes a chili snob, even though there seem to be an awful lot of them around these days. All snobbery aside, this recipe is a quick chili with lots of flavor that can be thrown together fairly quickly from non-perishable ingredients. And as we'll discuss, if you feel the need to add meat, you certainly can. I find that you don't need it, but if it'll trick that difficult eater into eating beans and vegetables, by all means use whatever weapons are in your arsenal. On the other hand, this chili is vegan if you don't add any dairy, and it's easy enough to make to avoid most allergens if necessary. You Will Need: Black beans Onions Tomatoes Peppers Oil Spices Salt and sugar Black beans Okay, so here's the time to talk about it: beans do have different flavors and aren't all interchangeable. Black beans add an earthy, almost meaty texture to chili, but some...