Sourdough Scones
The IK not a news site. Nor am I a pundit. That said, blithely nattering on about sourdough scones after a week like the one we’re concluding feels heartless indeed. So, let us acknowledge what a hell of a week we’ve had, as a world, as a nation, as individuals. In…
Sourdough Starter
Last week, while researching an as-yet-unwritten book review, I consulted Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation for information on miso. Within moments I’d veered off topic, reading instead about sourdough starters. Cultivating sourdough is much easier than making homemade miso. So easy, in fact, that I felt moved to begin one immediately. This wasn’t…
Pyrex And The Pity Of Things
Wednesday I dropped some clothing off at our local Goodwill. Before leaving, I checked out the kitchen section. It’s rare for me to find anything there. But Wednesday was different. Working my way through the crammed kitchen section, I spied a pile of clear glass Pyrex wedged on a bottom shelf….
Chicken Without A Recipe
People with chronic health problems spend a lot of time at doctor’s offices. There is a misconception that we of the poor health enjoy this. We do not. Countless hours are forever lost at doctor’s offices, tumbled deep into a pit called “waiting.” In the case of incurable disease, one rarely emerges from…
Summer Fruit Cordials
I love to drink. The above sentence is a rule-breaker. Grammarians frown on beginning sentences with “I”. The anti-temperance league frowns on drinking. So do the D.A.R.E. folks, who were tabling outside the market where I bought bourbon this morning. And admitting a fondness for alcohol is unseemly, particularly if…
Middle Eastern Yogurt Bread
Commercial bread is so good here in the Bay Area that nobody needs to bake their own. But after picking up Diana Henry’s A Change Of Appetite, I all but ran into the kitchen. The Irish born Henry lives and works in London, where she’s well-known. According to her website, before…
Notes on Canning Tomatoes
The literature of canning abounds in talk of capturing time. Terms like “peak freshness”, “seasonality”, and “ripeness” are certain to appear whenever people begin musing over the meaning of canning. It’s all true. To can tomatoes in August is to hope you’ll be opening the jars in February. To gaze upon…
Paranoia and Fava Beans
In preparing to debut this blog, I cooked a clutch of ingredient-laden, spicy dishes. I made extensive notes, readied each recipe, took lots of photographs. The food was okay, even good: an Indian-influenced chicken dish, flatbread with tomato and scallion, a fiery yogurt marinade. But as I served and ate…
Back to School Chicken Wings
In the early nineties, a friend and I cultivated a yearly back-to-college ritual involving a local brewery serving platters of fiery wings accompanied by a sour-cream dip. We slathered the chicken in dipping sauce before sucking each wing dry, washing everything down with rivers of house I.P.A. Thus fortified,…
Oven-Dried Cherry Tomatoes
Note: This recipe has been updated to correct errors. I’ve also added omissions from the original post. We eat seasonally in the IK, though ours is not the precious pastime of snooty Northern Californians. Yes, we live an area of agricultural bounty, making seasonal eating easy and pleasurable. Yet this…
