About Bitter Melon
To this day, the post for bitter melon curry remains one of my most popular. Every time I post a picture of bitter melon on Instagram, people ask about it. So I thought I’d discuss it a bit more here. Bitter melon is a member of the gourd family. Jennifer…
Patatas Bravas
Long ago, when your hostess was a baby cook with a very skinny boyfriend, she tore this patatas bravas recipe from a magazine. I made patatas bravas a few times, and we enjoyed them, but the instructions call for a food processor. Lacking one, I instead used a mini-chopper,…
Sauteed Chicken Livers
Chicken livers were standard fare during my childhood. Nobody was freaked by their being offal. Nor were they cooed over as nose-to-tail eating, because the concept didn’t exist yet. Back then, people just ate. We also walked miles in the snow. Back then there was snow to walk in. But…
Spinach with cheese and garlic
A few nights ago your hostess was paging through Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me With Apples when she happened across a recipe entitled “Dottie’s Spinach.” The original recipe fed six people and calls for a head of garlic, an amount some may find overwhelming, especially during the holidays, generally considered a…
Surviving the Holidays
One day my kindergarten teacher put some clay out for us to play with. I was thrilled until some boys started flinging it at each other. I crept outside to hide by the milk machine. The milk machine stood just outside the classroom door. It was tall and cool and…
Stir-fried Rice Cakes with Pork
As lunatics in the wider world wielded guns and mailed pipe bombs, your hostess was busy dealing with crooks and idiots. It’s been that kind of few weeks. Or maybe that kind of two years. (Not indicative of above.) — Stir-Fried Rice Cakes with Pork comes, in part, from Georgia…
Pasta with chickpeas and spinach
Pasta with chickpeas and spinach came about because I could barely walk. Not the most felicitous of culinary circumstances, but there you are. One never knows where a good dish will come from. Your hostess has a bursitic knee, long treated with cortisone shots. Last week the doctor decided further…
Marble Pound Cake
The past week saw your hostess dealing with rodents in kitchen (that screaming you heard? it was me), and a near automobile accident. The other driver–who was at fault–attempted to confront me. (That screaming you heard? It was me.) This driver, who was backing out of a parking lot…
Perfect Pound Cake Variations
You are either a baker or a cook. Very few people are both. Merrill Stubbs, A New Way To Dinner I believed the above until my late forties. Then humiliation got the better of me and I taught myself to bake. Because I was in my late forties–I am fifty…
Recipe failures and other disasters
The IK has been woefully quiet of late, and not for lack of interest. It’s at times like this that I recall David Lebovitz, who writes of having a 40-post backlog. This must be a source of confidence, virtual money in the bank, as it were. (It’s also a fine way…