We started our Great Minds Eat Alike series in order to mix up the usual BGSK offerings with interviews and submissions by cooks and eaters whose mentality towards cooking and eating meshes with ours. Today we are incredibly excited to bring you a great anecdote and some quarter-life reflections from Lauren Shockey, author of Four Kitchens, which came out this week. Lauren Shockey is a food writer whose articles have appeared in many print and online publications including “The Village Voice,” “The New York Times,” “The Wall Street Journal,” “Slate,” and “The Atlantic Food Channel,” among…

Here’s a big old disclosure: this dish isn’t really all that compatible with the kinds of limited resources we talk so much about. It doesn’t really save on space-in fact it uses quite of a few pots, pans, and bowls. Time? Not with all the rising of the dough and washing of the fresh arugula. Money? It certainly is economical to make bread from scratch, and the merguez in this dish gets stretched. But merguez, like most meat, isn’t exactly cost-free either. And skill? Depending on your confidence level, you won’t find anything here hard, per se; but the…

Check out some of these other BGSK tacos: Chicken and Chorizo Tacos, Seared Salmon Tacos, and Mini Pulled Pork Tacos

When we were out in LA, Cara and I spent a lot of time trolling the food truck scene. Probably too much time. But with so many choices, how can you eat it all in one day? While Cara was adventurous and tried the new-fangled Nacho Truck, I pretty much stuck to what LA food trucks are known for: around-the-world tacos. (For the record, our…

BEST GRAIN SALADS: Rice Noodle Salad with Vegetables and Cashews; Grandpa Caprese Panzanella; Lemon Couscous Salad With Cilantro, Raisins, & Almonds; Quinoa Tabouli with Mint, Parsley, and Preserved Lemons; Teriyaki Soba Salad.

One of the perks of having written a cookbook besides, well, pride and joy, is having an archive of perfectly tested recipes that cater precisely to your tastes. While it’s rare that I follow a recipe in the kitchen, choosing instead to follow my whims and the ingredients in my fridge, it is nice to have a base formula…

We started our Dude Food series this spring in order to mix up the usual BGSK offerings with interviews and submissions for and by dudes. As you can image, having “big girls” in our name has been a bit of a deterrent for the male population. We like to think of this section as the man cave below the BGSK kitchen. If you have ideas, become a dude food contributor!

Food Republic is not too old but already it’s become the go-to food site for guys on the net. Its daily articles, recipes, and news…

Trust me, after nearly three years of doing this, we know how to win your heart. Whether it’s pancakes, beer and beef, or lotus blondies, we’ve found a way to appeal to the people in our lives with the creations of our kitchens.

But if you want to win my heart, here is what you do: drive up to Ipswich, Mass, buy me the largest basket of fried clams they sell, and instantaneously transport them back to Brooklyn, where they’ll arrive briny and still crunchy and perfect. Fried seafood,…

OTHER CUCUMBER RECIPES: Vegetable Mint Salsa; Sweet and Sour Cabbage Salad; Grandpa Caprese Salad

As any of my high school friends will tell you (especially Cara and Jordana), I have a freakish love of garnish. You know, the random lettuce cup in the corner of your spring roll plate that contains nothing but a slice of cucumber and a carrot shaved to look like a rose? Most people who claim membership to the clean plate club will devour these flourishes before their server has a chance to clear the…

Check out some of these other delicious dips!

My friend Ali was one of my only housemates senior year who didn’t violate the “do your own dishes” rule, and contribute to a perpetually full sink of dirty plates. But that’s not because she was a neat freak. Rather, she didn’t have any dishes to speak of. If the only route to the garage wasn’t through the kitchen, Ali probably wouldn’t have realized we had one.

As one of the people who used the kitchen the most (duh), I certainly didn’t mind…

Don’t forget to enter the Small Kitchen College Brown Bag Challenge for a chance to win some great BuiltNY prizes!

In honor of the SKC Brown Bag Week, we’ll be featuring our favorite portable lunch items all week long!

Since becoming officially gluten-free, I’ve been pretty much living on quinoa. I keep a tub of it pre-cooked in my fridge, and am now trying to find ways of disguising it for lunch so that I don’t go crazy from boredom. Luckily, it’s a very versatile…

There’s quite an art, as you’ll be finding out all this week, to brown bagging. We are big believers in the benefits of bringing your lunch with you to work (we have a whole chapter about “packing the quarter-life lunchbox” in our book!), on planes and trains, and wherever your day may take you.

We want to motivate the college set-post-grads starting first jobs and undergrads doing summer internships-to get in the habit early. So this week we’re co-hosting a Brown Bag Challenge with Small Kitchen College and a host of other bloggers. The challenge…