Laurie Colwin’s Boiled Beef
Last week, between bouts of doomscrolling, I remembered Laurie Colwin’s essay about boiled beef. The best boiled beef I ever ate was at the Ukrainian Restaurant at the Ukrainian National Home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I would gladly go out in a violent storm and walk over…
Spinach and Potato Saute
Before I began blogging, I bought a how-to book: blogging for luddites. It covered all the basics: posting regularly, how to shoot pictures for a blog (the thing I feared most, believe it or not), SEO, advertising, newsletters. I didn’t follow most of the author’s advice, but found the book…
Chopped Liver
There’s the old joke that goes four Jews, five opinions, and this is especially true where food is concerned. So it is with some trepidation that I offer a recipe for chopped liver. I consulted about a dozen books before settling on the chopped liver recipe in Anthony Bourdain’s Appetites….
Chicken Thighs with Chickpeas in Tomato Sauce
Hi. Your hostess returns. On December 16th I got my third Covid booster. The first two were Pfizer, and no big deal. The third was Moderna, and made me so sick John considered calling an ambulance. (Despite the above, I still think everyone should get vaccinated and boosted. A few…
The Frozen Fish Sandwich
I attended elementary school during the mid-1970’s. Hot lunches were served daily for a nominal price. The food was inedible, but nobody expected otherwise. Not my elementary school. The exception to this was Fridays, when fish sticks were served. These fish sticks came straight from a box. They were served…
Hello….is it me you’re looking for?
I doubt anyone in the blogosphere is, apart from the occasional scroll….anything new? Nope? Click. Your hostess, meanwhile, has been working hard, cooking like a crazed person, and failing repeatedly, despite her many culinary efforts. That the faulty recipes involved cabbage had nothing at all to do with matters….
Cream of Turnip Soup
Turnips have a reputation for harsh, biting flavor. While larger, mid-winter specimens are indeed pretty sharp, requiring long cooking to soften them, the Tokyo turnip is smaller, gentler, and mildly flavored. Simmered into a soup with potato and cream, it is amiable and surprisingly sweet. I confess to modeling my…
Savory Cheddar Cheese Muffins
Ah, November. The container ships are in backed up in the harbor, and with them, some of the holiday craziness normally upon us by now. Am I a grinch to be grateful? Not that I hate the holidays. I don’t. But the enforced cheer is wearying, especially when it starts…
Pate IK
Anthony Bourdain, ever irreverent, has this to say of paté-making: You’ve made meat loaf, right? You’ve eaten cold meat loaf, yes? Then you’re halfway to being and ass-kicking, name-taking charcutier. ‘Oooh…paté, I don’t know.’ Please. Campagne means country in French. Which means even your country-ass can make it.” Les Halles…
Seitan at home
Prior to encountering seitan in How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, on page 668–when Bittman says everything, he means it–I’d met it once before, in a Chinese restaurant on University Avenue in Berkeley, California. (The name of this place eludes me. Nor could I find it on the net.) Technically it…