Daily Food Blog Roundup: Stay Home and Cook Tonight

If you haven't heard, people, there's a recession on. That means, even if you're one of those folks who think a mandolin is just a minstrel instrument, you need to adopt a Depression Era mentality, get back into the kitchen, and start cooking for all those hungry mouths you produced in better times. Fortunately, you have something that your great grandmother didn't: Food blogs out the wazoo. They offer a number of tasty recipes for you to try:

• District Plates cooks his winter blues away with Michel Richard's roast chicken. How about a group self-help meeting next time, DP?

• The Arugula Files whips up a big bowl of rigatoni with prosciutto and—what else?—arugula pesto. You might call this recipe a "fix," given that AF views pasta much like a junkie views heroin.
• Angela's Food Love (Nepotism alert! Angela is a good friend of the Carman-Allan household) has developed a spicy chicken dish, with tomato chutney, that works well with red wine.
• Kitchen Unplugged has concocted a mouthwatering recipe for "cardamom cakelets," these cute little tea cakes, perfumed with the aromatic spice, which are supposed to taste better on the second day. As if I'd ever let them last that long!
• Smitten Kitchen gives us the edited-down, if not dumbed-down, version of the meatball sliders made famous at chef Joey Campanaro's Little Owl restaurant in New York City.