Kitchen note: sort-of selfies. recipe testing. Radish sprouts.

The IK is a many-imperfectioned blog. We will never offer fancy desserts, elegant photos of the artfully-arranged dishtowel variety, or get our act together in time to offer holiday-themed recipes. We’re just not that kind of site.

Nor are we mad keen on posting photographs of ourselves.

We realize how strange this is, and feel an explanation is in order. The trouble is, we don’t have one.

All we can say is we’ve never like being photographed. Long before computers or the internet or the possibility of people doing bad and weird things to another person’s image, we liked being behind the camera, not in front of it.

And until we brought this up, we doubt you even noticed. Because who cares what we look like? Isn’t the food more important?

(Besides, quite a few of you know what we look like anyway.)

But now that you’re burning with curiousity, here’s a sort-of selfie, taken last Saturday. Sort-of, because the phone obcures my face. Notice how I color-coordinate my tendonitis braces to match my outfits. Snazzy, eh?

I am standing just outside the amazing Mechanics Institute Library. If you are ever in San Francisco, or already here, it’s literally around the corner from the Montgomery Street BART station. The library is open to the public, and well worth checking out.

The dizzyingly beautiful stairwell. They also have elevators.

—

So, food. Yesterday I attempted Half-Moon Hand Pies, which come from Naomi Duguid’s amazing new cookbook, Persia. Long story short, the recipe went a little wild on me. I hasten to add this was no fault of Ms. Duguid, a clear and expert writer.

Condensing an entire afternoon and much drifting flour:

I made a basic dough of water, flour, and salt, and placed it in a bag. The recipe tells us to let it rest 1-3 hours.

You then break the dough into 16 pieces, rolling each piece into a thin round.

Okay, so these aren’t very round. But you get to trim the blobs after adding 2 tablespoons of filling and folding to form the half-moon shape, so I wasn’t too worried.

Check out that trimming action.

This is where things went astray. Duguid offers three suggestions for fillings: greens, pumpkin, or cheese. Opting to go the cheese route, I mashed two cups of feta cheese with some finely minced (mostly) parsley and scallion.

The thing is, I ran out of filling long before the flatbread dough was used up. Given how much edge I was trimming off, it seemed wasteful not to try and re-roll some scraps. Soon it felt like I had dough galore…but no filling. Yes, I could’ve made more, but the afternoon was getting on, and dinner needed cooking.

Meanwhile, having heated my cast-iron pan to bake the flatbreads stovetop, I remembered why I preferred oven baking: the house was filling with smoke.

As the breads come off the heated pan, you are instructed to brush them with ghee or melted butter. So somewhere in the midst of the above, while listening to Terry Gross interview David Farenthold about Donald Trump’s unsavory business dealings, I put a ramekin of butter in the microwave. The butter exploded, splattering all over the microwave.

I did not photograph this.

Above: after cleaning up.

In the end, the pies were wonderful. That the recipe didn’t work out exactly–yet was still delicious–demonstrates cooking as a living, breathing art. Kitchens and ingredients vary. In my experience, this is never more the case than when working with flour.

Badly written recipes will never work, no matter how often you try them. By this I do not mean recipes that exceed your skill level. Few of us would attempt Julia Child’s Gâteau in a Cage. Nigella’s Guinness Gingerbread? That’s another story.

In the spirit of full and happy disclosure, I received Persia as an Advance Review Copy–the book is published and commercially available–and I will have the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Duguid next month for Popmatters.com.

—

Final pretty picture of radish sprouts: have your Jackson Pollock and eat it, too.