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…
Letting You See Us
To get permission to say “cripple”, I have to let people see me. And I don’t like people to see me. Lucia Perrillo, I’ve Heard The Vultures Singing I sing of those who cannot. Andre Dubus, Meditations From A Moveable Chair After many false starts bounded by brightly vacuous…
Zucchini Preserved in Olive Oil
Being a non-gardener means never experiencing the zucchini cycle: rapture over the first zuke gradually morphing into insomnia over what Barbara Kingsolver, in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, calls “the pyramid of excess vegetable biomass that was taking over our lives.” In fact, having to come to summer squash rather recently (more on…
The Insufficient Kitchen Makes Muffins
Welcome to The Insufficient Kitchen. All blogs must begin somewhere. This one begins with muffins. I bake a lot of them. For years I struggled to find a breakfast my husband would tolerate. John is not a breakfaster. More accurately, he finds any food before 11a.m. unbearable. I wasn’t pleased…
