Dinner

Roasted Red Onions With Thyme

April 13, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast Leave a Comment

It feels pretty ridiculous to say, but until relatively recent times (I’m talking the last year or so), I didn’t like onions in most applications. As a background note in soups and stock, sure; diced and lightly cooked, or worse, raw, hell no. Most people have an aversion to a few foods, but most people aren’t food writers, and most people don’t dislike such a fundamental ingredient. (What can I say, I’m an odd one.) So it feels a little funny to now be praising a recipe that has onions at its heart.

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Indian Red Lentil Soup With Spinach

April 8, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast 1 Comment

I’d quite happily eat both soup and Indian food every day; combine the two, like with this recipe, and I’m over the moon. Complexly-spiced, this Indian red lentil soup is just the sort of thing I like to fill my fridge (and freezer) with, ready to be reheated for a quick meal when hunger strikes.
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Shrimp and Quinoa With Mango-Avocado Salsa

March 30, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast Leave a Comment

After years of living in San Francisco, where beautiful farm-fresh produce is practically a given year-round, the adjustment to New York’s seasons has been a bit of a shock. The snow and cold hardly phased me (granted, the past winter was freakishly-mild); grocery shopping was a different matter. I’m not particularly proud of it, but I basically gave up on the farmers market after a couple depressing mid-January trips where I came home with naught but a couple sad, wrinkly onions and a few pounds of storage apples. On the flip-side, this seasonality makes the first peeps of spring produce all the more exciting. Absence makes the heart grow fonder?
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Baked Sweet Potatoes With Miso Butter and Scallions

March 29, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast Leave a Comment

Sweet-leaning vegetables like beets, butternut squash, and sweet potatoes have always been a tough sell for me. (Truly, it’s the earthy-sweet, vaguely-dirty flavor that I have trouble with, not the brix level of these vegetables.) That is, I had trouble with them before I learned how to treat them right. The secret is a classic flavor pairing principle: pair like with like; in this case, bold with bold. This can mean something acidic (think beets and yogurt), something spicy (think butternut squash and ginger), or, in this case, something deeply-savory, even funky (helloooooo, miso).
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Brown Butter Gnocchi With Spinach

March 15, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast Leave a Comment

As some readers may know, this isn’t my first food blog. Years back, before my time at POPSUGAR Food, I created my first blog, BowlLicking. While BowlLicking no longer exists, a handful of the recipes I shared there are still in my rotation and deserve a second go-around. This ridiculously-speedy gnocchi dish is one of them.
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Kale and Sweet Potato Soup With Cumin

March 2, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast 2 Comments

In our pantry, you’ll pretty much always find a package or two of instant ramen stashed away. While it serves well as dinner in a pinch, especially when dressed up with a poached egg, sliced scallions, and sriracha, it’s really there for when either Andrew or I are sick with a cold. (Some might crave chicken noodle soup, but I prefer the sinus-clearing heat of instant ramen and other spicy soups.) Andrew recently had the flu, so our stockpile of instant ramen was raided. I only wish I had discovered this kale and sweet potato soup recipe before then, as ramen — while tasty — isn’t exactly the most nutritious option, and this would’ve been the perfect supplement to that.

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One-Pan Sesame Salmon With Shiitake Mushrooms

February 24, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast 1 Comment

Over five years, my boyfriend Andrew and I have shared too many meals to count, but this simple, elegant salmon dish is one I’ll always remember. One of the first things I cooked for him, it felt like an unequivocal success, a meal enjoyed by all parties. Years later, when I made it again, Andrew gently revealed that he wasn’t too keen on it that first time; to his tastes the salmon was a bit too rare, something he was far too polite to point out at the time.

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Duck Fat Smashed Potatoes

February 18, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast Leave a Comment

Duck Fat Smashed Potatoes | amodestfeast.com | A Modest Feast
French fries are tempting, but I’ll take a side of duck fat and thyme smashed potatoes over a pile of fries nine times out of 10. (That 10-percent: duck fat fries or shoestring potatoes.) When earthy duck fat meets crisp potato, magic happens. Add a generous dose of freshly-ground pepper and minced thyme — both classic potato pairings — and it doesn’t get much better.
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Perfectly-Crisp Roast Chicken Thighs

February 3, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast 2 Comments

Perfectly Crisp Pan Roasted Chicken Thighs | amodestfeast.com | A Modest Feast
Typically, I’m very skeptical of things dubbed “best” or “perfect”. My perfect is not necessarily your perfect, and worse, these terms are so often overused by lazy writers looking to grab attention that it’s hard to trust that it’s not overblown. So when I saw that Bon Appetít was claiming a recipe with such a simple ingredient list (chicken thighs, salt, and oil) was superlative, I was both intrigued and doubtful that it could live up to these lofty claims. Well, as you may have surmised, I was wrong. Since I first tried out this technique for cooking chicken thighs, I have rarely strayed from it, as it is a pretty much foolproof.

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Broccoli White Bean Soup

January 30, 2016 by Nicole | A Modest Feast 2 Comments

Broccoli White Bean Soup | amodestfeast.com | A Modest Feast
As someone who spends a lot of time reading, I find it endlessly interesting to see what titles are on the bookshelves of others. Right now, we’re living in my boyfriend Andrew’s dad’s apartment in Manhattan — thanks, Mark! — so I’ve had some time to peruse his collection. Tucked in-between two photography books was a memoir that had long been on my to-read list: Heat by Bill Buford. A former New Yorker editor, Buford tells a fascinating story about leaving behind his position at the magazine to learn the ins and outs of Italian cooking, starting with months spent staging at Mario Batali’s Babbo.

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