It's easy to mistake duck for some sort of luxe specialty meat. The Chicken Industrial Complex holds near total dominion over the poultry aisle in our supermarkets, and we usually first encounter this most comical of waterfowl in a French or Chinese restaurant, if ever. In many cultures, duck is a staple, and visitors must be puzzled by its rarity here, like with lamb—or "futbol."

But you really don't need a lot of money, time or even skill to prepare duck at home. If you keep it simple with sides, this dinner can be made in under a half-hour. And duck is delicious too, especially the crispy skin, [...]

Sometimes, Kickstarter campaigns don’t meet their funding goals—but it’s not the end of the world! In this series we explore what happens next.

Freelance illustrator Gary Simpson began writing a zombie-themed cookbook called Dead Eats in 2009. In the summer of 2010, he took his idea to Kickstarter, hoping to raise enough money to create a few prototypes of the book to send to literary agents and publishers. After 60 days, Gary had received pledges for only $745 of his $1000 goal. Here he talks about the experience and shares a recipe from the book.

L.V. Anderson: How did you get the idea for a zombie cookbook?

Gary Simpson: [...]

My friend Matt is a great lover of bleach, guns, wigs, booze and chicken & waffles. And so, earlier this year when chicken & waffle cupcakes became a Thing On The Internet I knew without a doubt what we would be eating for breakfast on December 5th.

Every December 5, his birthday, the day goes something like this: At around 9 or 10 a.m., I scamper down the hallway to his apartment (even though we’re grown-ass adults we still choose to live dorm-style because it’s awesome) weighted down with packages and cupcakes and a bottle of bourbon. He makes coffee, into which we pour milk and Splenda and a [...]

John Ore and Ben Choi used to face each other across the line of scrimmage during high-school football practice. Now they face each other across the country, pitting recipes for America’s greatest dish—chili—against each other. Who wins? You do!

John Ore: Hey, guess what time it is.

Ben Choi: What time is it, John? Did I miss Indigenous People’s Day again?

John: Well, it's Chili Season™. It's that time of year when the air gets a little crisper, college football conferences start realigning—and tourists switch from Crocs to Uggs. Perfect for whipping up buckets upon buckets of chili. And hoo-boy, do I have a recipe for chili. You?

It all started with one of those women who won’t give out her recipes. You know the sort. I suppose if I were a tougher lady, more Joan Collins-esque, I would have told her to stop being a ridiculous Greedy Gerty over her stupid brownie recipe and then thrown my drink in her face for good measure but the reality is that I’m the type of sucker who says, and really means, things like “I totally get it, no no, I completely understand—don’t give it another thought, you’re so sweet to even apologize.”

However.

While I may be a simpering twit, I’m also a touch competitive. So as [...]

New York City has a 24-hour-subway system, gay marriage and David Chang. What we don't have are rolling suburban lawns on which to accommodate Charbroil Offset Smokers when we want to char the hell out of some animal flesh. With Labor Day fast approaching, 4th floor walkups and a lust for a perfectly grilled ribeye will soon collide, and an urban grillmaster will have to adapt. Here’s how (with bonus Beer Can Chicken recipe)!

Gazpacho is delicious, but sometimes it just involves too many greens, and not enough bread. Luckily, the Spanish already invented a carb-and-oil based version: salmorejo (sal-mo-RAY-ho), an invention from Cordoba, Andalusia. Using day-old bread and hard-boiled eggs, it’s designed to tie up loose ends at the end of the week, when the groceries are running out and no one feels like cooking anything. The best part: it only requires preparation and a refrigerator, no heat. Perfect for a midsummer meal.

Pomegranates: beautiful and delicious, but they scare me a little. All those little geometrically arranged blood-red seed pods embedded in fleshy nutritive pulp. If M.C. Escher, H.R Giger and H.P. Lovecraft got together and designed a fruit, it would be the pomegranate. I’m not alone in my ambivalence. Some say it was a pomegranate, not an apple, with which the serpent tempted Eve under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And if in some ancient cultures, the pomegranate was a symbol of fertility and abundance it was also, according to Greek myth, the Fruit of the Dead that trapped Persephone in the underworld. [...]

Are you a childless adult? Are you not charged with the care of any invalid friends or relatives? Do you live in New York, or some other place where it's possible to get decent groceries? Then listen, you have no excuse to ever buy jarred pasta sauce.

I can hear the complaints already:

YOU: I’m very busy and have no time to craft fanciful sauces! ME: No, you aren’t. Making sauce only takes around half an hour. YOU: But I’m too important to concern myself with such matters! ME: Fine, you’re excused. Go spend those I-Banker dollars on pasta prepared by professionals, and have it delivered to your [...]

ARE YOU READY? No of course you're not. Here, for you, some last minute inspirations, with gratitude from all of us. Don't hurt your families (unless they really deserve it, in which case, go to town).

DESSERT • Pie Crust. If we hear about any of you purchasing pie crusts, there'll be trouble.

• Cherry Clafoutis.

• Tardelle (aka Struffoli).

• Plumcot Yogurt Cake.

• Easy Lemon Meringue Pie.

• Lemon Squares.

• Pumpkin Flan.

• Tiramisu.

There’s a thing that happens in the Fall and it always ends with random beers in your refrigerator. Which is fine if you’re normal, but perhaps you are a person who insists on being able to see the back wall of the fridge at all times and has a slight compulsion that causes you to remove price tags from foodstuffs and insist that all labels be facing forward? Because if you’re a person like that—not that you are—those stray beers rattling around inside your otherwise perfectly organized icebox might make you Shining-levels of crazy.

And sure, you could just drink the beers but perhaps you are also a person who [...]

The first in a series about recipes that may seem odd or outmoded and yet we're curious to try!

A couple of weeks ago, in the brief throes of a fit of domesticity after spending too much time looking at pictures on Martha Stewart's website, I took the kids to a local farm and purchased a five-pound bag of Gravensteins grown in the farm's orchard. We then went home to make a delicious apple pie. While I was double-checking the ingredients we would need—other than apples, of course—I happened upon a recipe for Chemical Apple Pie. This chemical pie was supposed to taste just like apple pie without [...]

Today the Times prints a recipe for "tomato salad on a roll," in which the final recipe instruction is this: "Cover sandwiches with a clean dish towel and wait for an hour or so before serving." (Sure, they want the sardines and garlic to "marry" and whatever, okay, sure, I get it, it's just: it's hot and I'm hungry.)

Here's my very own summer tomato sandwich recipe!

1. Get some bread, toast it lightly, just a little.

2. Put tomatoes (preferably little ones, and yellow, and cut in half) and torn basil, with some olive oil and salt and pepper, on one piece of bread. Put some mozzarella [...]

Putting aside for a moment that 'clafoutis' sounds like a venereal disease, clafoutis are super tasty and so easy that I’m actually thinking of not publishing this so people will still think I’m impressive (no one thinks I’m impressive) and they also are an excellent way to use up those cherries you bought because you are incapable of walking past a bag of cherries at the market without buying them but then you get them home and are all, “LOL what am I going to do with these cherries?!”

You’re going to make clafoutis, is what. And you could do it the gross New York Times way or [...]

Have you had shad for dinner in the past week? If not, you should do so tonight or tomorrow night. It is one of the most delicious fish in the universe, and incredibly easy to cook, and due to the same mild winter than has local flowers and, apparently, Republican primary voters, so confused, the American shad spawning season, which usually heralds spring in March or April, has arrived early this year.

Our relationships with condiments can become rote: ketchup/fries, mustard/hotdog, salsa/chips—even sriracha/pho. We robotically dip, drizzle and douse without a conscious thought. In this column, we'll be trying to shake up our collective condiment consciousness. Proust wrote, "The only real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes," and with that in mind, I thought I'd take you along in search of lost time—to my first condiment: Gochujang.

As a Korean kid growing up in American Samoa, I was part of a subculture made up of the families of Korean fishermen and sailors that had sprung up around the tuna industry of the South Pacific. [...]

It's not every rummage sale at which you'll truly score, but this weekend I picked up a copy of Political Pot Luck: A Collection of Recipes from Men Only, published in 1959 by the Peninsular Publishing Company in Tallahassee. It was edited by Meg Madigan, whose father was a Florida state comptroller and lobbyist. And she went all out for the cookbook, from governors to senators to media barons. Some of them can cook. And others…. are just racists. Heh. Well, let's start with some good ones. For instance, it should be pointed out that John F. Kennedy's waffle recipe is pretty right on the money! And Mrs. Hubert Humphrey's [...]

Because I live in a college town, the back-to-school season gives me one awful flashback after another. The sidewalks are a cringe-worthy pageant of undergraduates reenacting the libidinous idiocy of my own youth. It’s not unlike re-reading the middle chapters of Brideshead Revisited each fall, if Waugh had added in sorority girls. Though autumn may evoke spiced cider to the innocent of heart, to me it's the season of the margarita—the season of puking on a bouncer and getting kicked off public transit late on a Sunday (yes, Sunday) night. Over the past 15 years, I have gradually reclaimed my ability to have a healthy, adult friendship with tequila, [...]

How have you been celebrating National Bourbon Heritage Month? Probably by drinking a lot of whiskey, plus the usual parades, fireworks, sending roses to all the people you threw up on, etc. So although this weekend is the final weekend of Bourbon Month, I want to show you how to make bourbon an even more integral part of your life all year long. No longer should you feel limited by the amount of bourbon you can drink, because you can also be eating it in every meal, including breakfast. Tie on your apron, here comes a bunch of ideas!

The very sweet and a little bit shy Jon-Jon Goulian, the author of the memoir The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, is the guest in Emily Gould's home kitchen. SPOILER: There are outfit changes! (Like a Cher concert!)

Cooking the Books is directed by Valerie Temple and shot and edited by Andrew Gauthier. You can see all the Cooking the Books episodes here or even subscribe via iTunes. Previously: Bryan Charles Makes Spicy Chicken; Sigrid Nunez Makes Szechuan Green Beans; Emma Rathbone Makes Strawberry Wafer Cookies; Doogie Horner Makes "Gettin' Laid Lemonade"; Tao Lin Makes [...]