Corn, Bacon, and Shallot Salad
Corn, Bacon, and Shallot Salad started as a riff on a Pepper Teigen recipe, but fridge contents forced some detours. Besides, as Laurie Colwin so presciently noted in More Home Cooking, all plans go to hell during the summer. Then again, Colwin had no way of knowing that all plans,…
Thai-Style Mushroom Salad (Yam het)
Fortunately for us, mushrooms aren’t endangered, bad for the environment, or likely to provoke the righteous wrath of the well-intentioned. Before they do, let’s get to the recipe: Yam or yum het–Thai mushroom salad. Yam het comes to us from Thailand. Yam or yum is Thai for salad, het…
Lamb with Spring Vegetables
Lamb with Spring Vegetables might more aptly be titled: how to save dinner when you buy the wrong ingredients. Which is what yours truly did. Not the original ingredients. I stared at the recipe I’d meant to cook for a while, then at what I actually bought. Dinner needed cooking….
Zucchini with Chaat Masala
So, I had my first Covid vaccine. I have lived to tell the tale. My insurer offered appointments online or by telephone. The web was impossible. The phone was little better: when I could get through at all, I waited on hold for hours. This is not overstatement. A few…
Cooking Cucumbers
So, hi. I could regale you with the horror story entitled “my latest dental extraction,” but I’ve been gone for weeks. That says it all, right? For comic relief, it rained for ten minutes on Friday night. Northern California’s entire rainy season was compressed into those ten minutes. Trees, they…
Deconstructed Cabbage Cake with Sausage
Just as some people marvel at flour, water, and yeast becoming bread, I never cease to be amazed at the transformation that occurs when cabbage, some sort of pork product, and fat encounter a pot, low heat, and time. This decidedly dour vegetable softens into tenderness, its fumes turn…
Stuffed Cabbage
Stuffed cabbage exists in numerous cuisines, but the French have turned this abstemious dish into a delicacy. Recipes for chou farci range from the simple pork-wrapped parcels in Lulu’s Provencal Table to Goose Fat And Garlic’s outrageously rich recipe calling for ham, heavy cream, and cheese. Then there are miques:…
Mexicanish Chicken
The New York Times is covering California’s fires, heat wave, and pandemic under the headline “California’s ‘Horrible’ Month.” That sounds about right. Friends are under threat of evacuation. The air is filled with smoke and ash. We were warned our power would be shut off in rolling blackouts between…
Summer Vegetable Saute
So far as I can tell, people are responding to the pandemic in two ways. The first group Marie Kondos everything in sight, moves on to reading all of Tolstoy and/or Proust, then tackles that novel they’ve always meant to write. All of these accomplishments are shared on social media,…
Green Beans With Fresh and Preserved Lemon
Let me tell you about blogging during a pandemic. It’s very challenging. There’s the question of tone. When people are dying left and right, one doesn’t want to appear flip. Then again, gloom isn’t good, either. People visiting your site want to be entertained. Then there’s the food question. Thank…