Dungeness Crab
Forbidden fish and seafood include… all shellfish and crustacea.. The Askenazim have been much stricter in their practice of kashrut, whereas the Sephardim, even when deeply religious, are known to have been more tolerant and easygoing. Claudia Roden, The Book Of Jewish Food Lobsters are essentially big fucking bugs; they’re…
White Chocolate Raspberry Truffles
After years of loathing white chocolate, I realized the trouble lay not with the ingredient itself, but with the disconnect between expectation and reality. Once I stopped expected white chocolate to taste like the stuff that with geographical pedigrees and percentage points, I stopped loathing it. A parable for hard-won…
Candied Citrus Peel
Some people excel at marketing themselves. They read self-help manuals filled with buzzwords; they engage in tactical online behaviors; they practice affirmations before mirrors. Me, I’m terrible at all that. This is a long-winded way of saying I keep forgetting to tell you my photography is now available at Shutterstock.com. You…
Chicken with Marsala, Mushrooms, and Olives
I am not somebody who spends her time wondering whether beets might snuggle up to pomegranates, creating a novel salad. Or tasty new ways with quinoa. Instead, I do lots of wheelchair jenga. (Not wheelchair jenga.) Saturdays mean soccer practice. I rise early and head out to the garage, where…
Pork Rib Curry
I apologize for the quiet around here. We live about thirty miles south of Santa Rosa, California. As I write, firefighters are slowly gaining control over the fires. People are returning to their homes, or what’s left of them. Berkeley Fire Engine Six was called to help fight the fires…
Dried Shrimp and Pickled Lettuce Salad
Occasionally you pick up a cookbook at random. You park it on your “to read” shelf with every intention of getting around to it. Meanwhile, various disasters transpire: dental work, feline illness, neighbor drama, spousal sickness, inept national leadership, world mayhem. Finally you open the cookbook. There, glimmering, is the…
Bitter Melon Curry
— Bitter melon, like okra, is a polarizing vegetable, capable of evoking extreme responses. Those who enjoy its bitter flavor don’t just like it, they crave it. Recipe headers invariably use the word “addictive” to describe the intensely bitter flavor note that sounds on the tongue long after you’ve…
Kitchen Note: Rage, Despair, and Baking
Recent events have left me careering between rage and despair. Occasionally there’s a comparatively calm moment of depression, a lull in the mental action, before some tidbit of horrible news sends me bouncing off the walls again. Writing is nearly impossible. How do you sit down and write: “Today I…
Mandelhornchen (chocolate-dipped almond crecscents)
Apologies for the silence around here. The IK hasn’t been idle. If anything, she’s been cooking far too much food as NPR blares in the background. Just a few days ago, she bought far too much fruit. Before it could rot, she baked it into a cake adapted from a…
Stir-Fried Spinach with Fermented Red Tofu
Now, some of you read fermented tofu and freaked out. Don’t lie. Perhaps you’re thinking of that famously stinky stuff considered a Chinese delicacy, tofu that evokes Vincent Price, in another context, intoning about the funk of 40,000 thousand years. Am I right? The IK, she’s here to ease your…