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,…

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The Fried Chicken Wrap

June 7, 2021

  The ethics of blogging–and yes, such things do exist–contend that three changes to a recipe make it one’s own. So while it would be “ethical” for me to claim I invented the fried chicken wrap, I did not. The original recipe comes from Nigella Lawson’s Cook, Eat, Repeat, where…

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Uighur Lamb Kebabs

May 27, 2021

It is our misfortune to inhabit what is politely termed a “mixed” area. Meaning there are lots of apartment buildings mixed in with single family homes. AT&T has terrible difficulty with this. Every time somebody moves out of an apartment, a tech comes out to the nearby box and instead…

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  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…

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Still Here…

May 4, 2021

Apologies for my miserable posting history this year. Real life has been challenging, to say the least. There’s a term for this kind of excuse (irritating?) but I’ve forgotten it. Anyway, here we are, for the moment. Two things, while we wait for the next post. The first concerns The…

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Wacky Cake Revisited

April 19, 2021

As more people are vaccinated and lockdowns lift, social life is gradually resuming. People are once more gathering and eating together. Sooner or later, you may be invited someplace, and you may be asked to bring a dessert. Many people, rightly or not, find the entire business of baking anxiety-inducing….

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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….

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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…

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Cooking Cucumbers

March 10, 2021

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…

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Pictures

February 23, 2021

I had a tooth yanked, and despite antiobiotics, got sick. So, here are some photographs, because who knows when I’ll be well enough to produce a post. Baking, from a post that never happened. Fresh currants. I was all hot on giving a recipe for scones, but then realized these…

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