Want To Cook From The Daily Meal? Here's Help
We're happy to announce the beginnings of an association with Plated.com, a beautifully produced website that basically does your grocery shopping for you, shipping you all the makings of a continuing series of delicious dinners — one-plate meals, each one including a protein, a starch, and a vegetable. A number of illustrious chefs and great recipe resources contribute to the site. This week, it's our turn.
Editors at The Daily Meal tend to know their way around a kitchen. A number of us are culinary school graduates. Some have worked in restaurants. Even those who don't have any formal cooking background — like me (I didn't go to journalism school, either, and yet I've made a career of writing about food; go figure — are pretty serious about cooking. (Just look how many of contribute recipes to our weekly recipe SWAT Team competitions, for instance.) Some of us know the French culinary canon; others are specialists in pasta, or various Asian cuisines. But mostly what we tend to cook, both at home and for the site, is just plain good food.
Back in 1985, when New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne was inducted into the first edition of what was then called the Who's Who of Cooking in America (it's now the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America), he was asked what his favorite food was. He replied: "Anything with ground meat." I'm with him there, so one of my favorite Daily Meal recipes is for Sicilian-style turkey meatballs, enhanced with raisins, pine nuts, and kale. We like to serve these with gorgonzola-flavored polenta and braised greens. We're not obsessively diet-conscious, but when we discover that you can coat chicken breast in panko breadcrumbs and bake it and end up with something that's not exactly the indulgence of fried chicken but that tastes awfully good and has a lot fewer calories, that's definitely going to go on our menu. (Healthy quinoa and asparagus fill out the plate.) Then there are our fillet of beef with scalloped potatoes and a light watercress-spiced salad, herb-crusted halibut with fingerling potatoes and sugar snap peas, and an all-in-one preperation of shrimp pad Thai, including mushrooms, carrots, zucchini, and pea shoots.These are all the kinds of dishes we food-crazy editors at The Daily Meal eat ourselves. The folks at Plated.com have worked with us to help bring them to life for our readers. All you need is a stove, some basic kitchen tools, and a good appetite.
Click here to start cooking from The Daily Meal with Plated.com
Watch for more collaborations between The Daily Meal and Plated.com in months to come.