Jennifer Lavelle
Audio By Carbonatix
Phoenix New Times recently partnered with Familystyle Food, a recipe website offering easy, family-style recipes from Karen Tedesco, a professionally trained chef, cookbook author and former food editor at the Village Voice in New York.
You’ll find the Familystyle Food section on our homepage. As you’re perusing our site, if those classic Italian meatballs look amazing, then a recipe for dinner is just a click away.
That’s how I came across the Tuscan tomato basil soup (pappa al pomodoro) recipe. It uses just a few ingredients – tomatoes, garlic, onion, and basil – but instead of a dairy product to thicken the soup, it calls for crusty bread. It works perfectly.
Karen Tedesco is the creator of Familystyle Food, a recipe website readers can find on the New Times‘s homepage.
Jennifer Lavelle
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Tedesco’s love for food and cooking grew from time spent around the kitchen table with her Italian-American family. That meatball recipe is her mother’s. Her recipe includes helpful tips to make superior meatballs (which include, in part, ground beef chuck for a higher fat content and milk-soaked bread crumbs). There’s also a tip on how to make the dish gluten-free.
We asked Tedesco about what goes into creating such a large trove of recipes, including who gets to taste-test the dishes and how many times it takes to perfect one recipe.
“It really depends on the dish,” Tedesco says. “Most of the time I’ll test a recipe at least twice before publishing. Although I might nail the exact ingredients, process, and timing on the first go, I often cook it again and refine the details even after I publish it. That’s the beauty of having a dynamic recipe site where I can make tweaks and changes that appear instantly.”
Family, friends, and neighbors get to enjoy most of the test-runs.
Familystyle Food recipes are broken into categories, such as trending (creamy turkey pumpkin chili), Mediterranean, chicken, vegetarian and vegan, plus clusters of recipes embedded in those groups, including 25 simple vegetarian recipes.
So in addition to reading about great restaurants around the Valley, we also now have great recipes from Familystyle Food.