A Simple Loaf of Bread

November 21, 2024

Essays about bread baking all begin the same way. How bread is no more than flour, water, yeast, and salt. How bread is an ancient staple. Words are intoned about staff of life. From there, it’s off to feed the poolish. — Now, there is bread baking at home, and…

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  The inspiration for Asian Style Noodle Soup with Greens comes from Mollie Katzen’s Vegetable Heaven. While today’s recipe is quite different from Katzen’s, but I believe in credit where it’s due. If you are unfamiliar with Katzen’s books, I encourage you to seek them out.  A friend lent me…

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Purple Plum Torte

October 22, 2024

There are cakes, and then there’s Marian Burros’ Purple Plum Torte. People have feelings about this cake. Intense feelings. Certainly feelings not felt about, say, Ho-Ho’s. Food is like that sometimes. Consider Fergus Henderson’s Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad. Or Judy Rodgers’ Roast Chicken and Bread Salad. You see…

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It is difficult to read a recipe title like “skirt steak with tequila, peppers, onion, and lime” and not think “fajitas.” It’s also not hard to think “this is one loong recipe title.” Let’s get the obvious out of the way, shall we? Skirt steak with tequila and friends is…

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Italian Meatloaf II

September 16, 2024

Italian Meatloaf II, so called because the SEO choked on any other name, comes to us from Sophie Grigson’s A Curious Absence of Chickens. (Italian Meatloaf I appears here) What makes a meatloaf Italian and not, say, Croatian or Welsh? A search of my Italian cookbooks gave no answers. Meatloaf…

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Summer Squash Gratin

August 27, 2024

This morning a friend emailed. So, she said, you haven’t updated the blog for a while. Um, yeah. I know. Believe me when I say it wasn’t for lack of effort. Anyway, here we are. And here is a post. — Okay, so summer squash, which for today’s purposes encompasses…

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Fish poached in tomato water sounds pretentiously cheffy. Then again, it’s accurate. If I called it “fish poached in tomato juice” you might envision fish cooked in bloody mary mix, or worse. So fish poached in tomato water it is. Tomato water entered my culinary life via canning. Tomatoes are…

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Cherry Vodka

July 17, 2024

I realize we’re nearing the end of cherry season, but this cherry vodka is so easy to make that I want to get it under the wire. The recipe comes from Darra Goldstein’s marvelous Beyond The North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore. — This recipe calls for cherry pits…

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Over the holiday weekend a friend kindly gave me a copy of Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert. If you, like me, have never read Alice Medrich’s cookbooks, much less baked from them, please head for your nearest indie bookstore or library and acquaint yourself with Ms. Medrich’s oeuvre. Barring these options,…

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Hot weather foods

June 25, 2024

As I write, much of the Eastern United States is smothering beneath what climate experts call a “heat dome.” Rather than go into technicalities, know that heat dome basically means it’s extremely hot, with little relief in sight. Atop this, wildfires are burning in New Mexico and parts of California….

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