Pantry Items

Thai-Style Chopped Chicken

February 5, 2020

Before the cultural appropriation police come knocking, know I make no claims of authenticity regarding this Thai-style chopped chicken, save one: it’s delicious. This is an immodest claim, but the ingredients do all the work. And yes, the ingredient list is longish, but committed cooks likely have most of this…

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Cabbage Soup

December 30, 2019

Pity the poor cabbage. It gets a bad rap. Too many people are scarred by bad cabbage experiences: boiled beyond recognition….or the cabbage soup diet. Lacking illustrative photos of overboiled cabbage or the soup diet, I give you San Francisco’s Union Square. More accurately, a street near Union Square. Handled…

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It’s October. The season of pumpkin spice is upon us.  Everywhere you go, pumpkin spice: pies, cakes, cookies. Pumpkin spice candles, therapeutic oils, scented sprays. Okay, maybe not everywhere. My local office supply store has no pumpkin spice in sight. They’re closing October 18th to make way for a high-rise…

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According to my kitchen notebook, I recently prepared a version of Diana Henry’s Israeli Chicken with Mograbieh, Harissa-Grilled peaches, and Mint. I write “recently” because the entry is undated. There is a helpful note: “winner! adding lemon after cooking a yes!” The lemon was added afterward because, um, I’d forgotten…

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Stir-fried chicken livers

August 28, 2019

It is a sad fact that many people dislike chicken livers. One of those people is my husband, leaving me to consume these morsels alone. There is no photo of me doing this. Instead, here’s downtown Berkeley, taken last week. Granted, unrelated to chicken livers, but much nicer looking. On…

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Cooking ahead

June 9, 2019

Last month, while waiting to get a corticosteroid shot in my spine, I went on a major cooking/baking/freezing jag, much of it between three and six am. Cooking was a way of maintaining some control, however tenuous. The recipes below offered succor both before the injection and afterward, when your…

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leftover rice

March 12, 2019

Apologies for the quiet. My computer decided to stop working properly, and the people I hired to repair it made it worse. My photos are safe, but I can’t upload all of them right now. So we’ll limp through together, okay? — Every rice-eating culture in the world has devised…

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Fast Flatbread

February 21, 2019

I can’t tell you how often I’ve searched my cookbooks for the ideal flatbread recipe. By ideal, I mean a recipe you can mix, roll, bake, and eat in under an hour. Further, this recipe must use pantry ingredients and have a low yield. Why a low yield? We are…

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Patatas Bravas

January 16, 2019

  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,…

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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…

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