T. Susan Chang
T. Susan Chang regularly writes about food and reviews cookbooks for The Boston Globe, NPR.org and the Washington Post. She's the author of A Spoonful of Promises: Recipes and Stories From a Well-Tempered Table (2011). She lives in western Massachusetts, where she also teaches food writing at Bay Path College and Smith College. She blogs at Cookbooks for Dinner.
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This year's cookbooks point to big dreams, and a kind of comfort with concepts once considered the province of professional cooks. -
2014 was a year for faraway cuisines to take up residence in U.S. kitchens — cookbook authors cast their nets for flavors from Paris, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and points in between. -
Summer is the time for indulgence, whether that means lingering in farmers markets, or partaking in some usually forbidden pleasures — the fried, the icy sweet, the charred and meaty. -
These edible treasures would be too pretty to eat — if they weren't so delicious. Bake a batch of gingerbread or shortbread hearts, bedeck them with royal icing — and if it suits your mood, break them in half before devouring them. -
What's cozier than curling up by a window on a starry night, watching a few starry flakes of snow drifting down, nibbling the sugary points of a star cookie one by one? Nibbling three different types of star cookies!
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Dressed in caramel notes, with a suggestion of salt and a big wink toward vinegar, a roasted tomato's most memorable feature is its long, sensuous, deep and savory finish.
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Jennifer Lin-Liu's On the Noodle Road takes readers on a journey along the former Silk Road, looking for the origins of the noodle. But reviewer T. Susan Chang says that the book gets tied into knots when the quest turns cold.
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Buttermilk somehow seems perpetually cool and unruffled. It evokes cream without cream's over-the-top heft; its tanginess goes up to the threshold of yogurt and stops just shy. No matter how you cook it, a little bit of buttermilk has a thousand ways of making life taste better.
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Scapes are the gardener's dividend. The taste of that green garlic is haunting — biting, fresh, vegetal and verdant. It is to mature garlic what a string quartet is to an orchestra; what a sonnet is to a novel.
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Rather than waiting for someone to give you a treat, why not make one of your favorites for yourself? Something you can snack on all week when no one's around. Or, better yet, something you don't have to share. Food writer T. Susan Chang recommends slow-roasted pecans, salty-sweet matzo candy and more.
