Brick

If New York Times food colum­nist Mark Bittman ran his “Min­i­mal­ist” piece “The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work” in Novem­ber 2006, then this has been my go-to method week-in week-out for 6 1/2 years. I began bak­ing bread in about 1989 so I’ve tried lots of recipes. Bittman “dis­cov­ered” Jim Lahey of …

I love roasted veg­eta­bles, but to me they’re a nui­sance. Fill two cookie sheets with chunks of veg­gies, after toss­ing with oil and herbs in a big bowl, bake nearly an hour, return­ing to toss a few times, and you get at most three serv­ings. So find­ing com­pa­ra­ble fla­vor in Mark Bittman’s “Pan­fried Pump­kin” inspired …

The prob­lem with home baked piz­zas is crispi­ness, because who has a oven that goes to 700 degrees? I’ve fig­ured out a solu­tion: Make the tomato sauce on the pizza while it’s bak­ing. (If you are fine with thick crusts or pan piz­zas, best if you move along now, as you have it easy.) The issue …

Thanks­giv­ing. America’s Feast Day. It was yes­ter­day. Before I for­get what my notes mean, here are two of the dishes whose recipes I’ve been tin­ker­ing with for years and now have just about set­tled on. We don’t eat meat — well, a piece of salmon maybe every month — so we keep exper­i­ment­ing with the hol­i­day meal …

In Food Sec­tion World, this long-evolved Irish Soda Bread recipe would be pub­lished before St. Patrick’s Day. But in Brick World, I bake a loaf on St. Paddy’s, rely­ing on col­lected recipes and some­times a new one that pops up. Brick could sched­ule the recipe for March 16, 2013, but why wait? Every news­pa­per every year …

Copy­right 2011 Ben S. Pol­lock Though we who note the news have known about the Greek eco­nomic cri­sis for quite some time, it seems to have come to a head here in the first week of Novem­ber. Maybe if Greece exported more of that sunny yogurt, the bud­get would teeter back a bit. But in check­ing …