Dried Shrimp and Pickled Lettuce Salad
Occasionally you pick up a cookbook at random. You park it on your “to read” shelf with every intention of getting around to it. Meanwhile, various disasters transpire: dental work, feline illness, neighbor drama, spousal sickness, inept national leadership, world mayhem. Finally you open the cookbook. There, glimmering, is the…
Bitter Melon Curry
— Bitter melon, like okra, is a polarizing vegetable, capable of evoking extreme responses. Those who enjoy its bitter flavor don’t just like it, they crave it. Recipe headers invariably use the word “addictive” to describe the intensely bitter flavor note that sounds on the tongue long after you’ve…
Kitchen Note: Rage, Despair, and Baking
Recent events have left me careering between rage and despair. Occasionally there’s a comparatively calm moment of depression, a lull in the mental action, before some tidbit of horrible news sends me bouncing off the walls again. Writing is nearly impossible. How do you sit down and write: “Today I…
Mandelhornchen (chocolate-dipped almond crecscents)
Apologies for the silence around here. The IK hasn’t been idle. If anything, she’s been cooking far too much food as NPR blares in the background. Just a few days ago, she bought far too much fruit. Before it could rot, she baked it into a cake adapted from a…
Chinese Takeout Noodles
Breezy little blog posts are increasingly impossible. This week gave us Chester Bennington’s death, the migrant tragedy in the Texas Walmart lot, Venezuela, Yemen, and Syria. Atop all this, a gibbering idiot is running amok in the White House. In this context, Chinese Takeout Noodles are beyond trivial. Then again,…
Oven Baked Chicken Fingers
In addition to being something of a food snob, your hostess is suffering recipe fatigue. She is heartily sick of recipes for s’mores, acai bowls, and anything involving avocado. She doesn’t want to see any more recipes using the words healthy or clean. Surely she isn’t alone in this? It…
Stir-Fried Spinach with Fermented Red Tofu
Now, some of you read fermented tofu and freaked out. Don’t lie. Perhaps you’re thinking of that famously stinky stuff considered a Chinese delicacy, tofu that evokes Vincent Price, in another context, intoning about the funk of 40,000 thousand years. Am I right? The IK, she’s here to ease your…
Kurdish Fried Chicken
Last weekend the IK attempted to update her computer. The last time she tried doing so, the hard drive crashed. This time, she discovered the external hard drive she’d purchased less than a year ago had ceased functioning. In September 2016. As in, the IK’s computer had not been backed up…
Good Son-In-Law Eggs
According to the internet, Good Son-In-Law eggs translates to either Khai Luk Khoei or Kai Loog Keuy. If you happen to be Thai and I’ve gotten this wrong, forgive me–I speak no Thai. Whatever the correct name, my recipe for Good Son-In-Law Eggs doesn’t even come from a Thai cookbook….
Meatballs With Spinach and Chickpeas
This Thursday, Mr. IK is boarding a plane for Indiana, where he will participate in a large power soccer tournament. The preparations this journey have entailed would make one think he was parasailing to India. The IK has been busy buying bottles of Johnnie Walker to stash in the suitcase…
