Kitchen Note: Ruled By Cats. Chicken Lady Chicken. Flen.
Meet Napa. Napa is not our cat. Napa was here when we arrived six years ago. I learned her name from a neighbor. Napa knows a sucker when she sees one. She sat on our fence, meowing imploringly until I caved. Ever since, she asks for food by sitting outside…
Red Pepper Chicken Wings
Sunday Afternoon This post is nearly a year old. Well, not the post. It’s new. The handwritten draft and the recipe are nearly a year old: 9/5/15, to be exact. Somehow, this keeps slipping under the radar, three sheets of yellow notepaper migrating to the bottom of various piles in…
Kitchen Note: Social Media, Plum Liqueur
Some time ago Shauna James Ahern wrote a long post about negative commenters, including some of the most vicious and/or irrational remarks she’d received. These were startling in their ugliness. Yet the piece was remarkably level-headed, even kind. Ahern wasn’t seeking revenge or attempting to expose certain commenters. She wanted to shine…
Kitchen Note: Udon Noodles. Cat Blogging.
Madly craving fiery udon noodles today. I can’t really say “for lunch” because I eat at odd hours: breakfasting before 6am means by 9:30 I am ravenous for what most people would call lunch. Around 1pm I might snack. Or not. We eat dinner around 6:30. It works. Anyway, I…
Steak Fajitas
Home Cooking includes an essay entitled “Flank Steak: The Neglected Cut.” In it, Laurie Colwin extols the virtues of a cut that, since the essay was written, is no longer neglected. Indeed, like lamb shank and short rib, flank steak has become popular and therefore expensive. Much of said popularity…
Kitchen Note: radishes and persistence
Today: A summons for jury duty. No matter how many times I write back with doctor’s notes, they still summon me. I am both a caregiver and disabled myself. How many doctor’s notes do they require? Yesterday I woke with foot cramp. Nothing novel there. Except it refused to resolve,…
Kitchen Note: 100th post. Tomatoes. Zucchini.
Okay, yeah, so this is a food blog, right? I did say that, once upon a time. So, happy news. There is some, yes. The tomatoes have finally arrived. We’ve been doing nothing but eating them raw, sliced and salted with fresh Mozzarella. In between belts of bourbon. There…
Cheesecake with fresh cherries
Before going any further, this is Nigel Slater’s cheesecake. I tell you this because should you visit Mr. Slater’s website, as I often do, you might encounter this alarming sentence: “Litigators tenaciously protect Nigel Slater’s rights.” Believe me, I have no intention of violating Nigel Slater’s rights, or anyone else’s, for that…
Kitchen Note: 7/13. Cortisone Shot
“Your x-rays look fine,” the physician assistant said. “No arthritis.” Saying an x-ray of my knee looks good is akin to saying the surface of the ocean appears calm. Then National G or some other science show, narrated by a fellow with a plummy Oxford accent, sends a pile of…
Spicy Lamb Burgers
Saturday night, in a surpassing gesture toward adulthood, I decided to update my operating system. You know, install all those niggling updates it’s constantly pestering me about: tightening up the operating system….honing safety and security….something about email…plus improving all those programs I’ve never opened, like GarageBand. I set the update…