Green Beans with Mushrooms
Green beans with mushrooms is an easygoing, undemanding dish. Anyone searching for dazzling summertime fare is advised to look elsewhere. I mean, I suppose one could fancy things up with expensive mushrooms or cold-pressed olive oil, but that would lose the point, which is simplicity. Nobody needs some fancypants dish…
Chocolate Ice Cream
The writer Anne Fadiman has this to say of ice cream: I go through the motions of scooping a modest hemisphere of ice cream into a small bowl, but we (she and her husband) both know that during the course of the evening I will simply shuttle to and from…
Spicy Oven Roasted Fries
Spicy Oven Roasted Fries began as Batata Harra, a recipe in Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty More. I’ve prepared Batata Harra a few times, and it is delicious. I strayed from the original for reasons both personal and environmental. Springtime in a world gone mad. Ottolenghi and Company live and cook in…
Amanda’s Chocolate Cookies
Amanda’s Chocolate Cookies comes from Amanda Hesser’s Cooking For Mr. Latte, where it is called Chocolate Chunk-Pecan-Coconut Cookies. As I have changed the recipe a great deal, removing the both the pecans and the coconut shreds, I have altered the name accordingly. The result is a hefty chocolate chip cookie,…
Chicken with Zucchini and Water Chestnuts
Chicken with zucchini and water chestnuts is a departure from the usual chez IK. It’s not a stir-fry in the classic sense of high heat, fast cooking. Instead, the heat is turned down, and the wok gets a lid. New table? New cups? Nope. The above is dollhouse furniture. I…
April is the Cruelest Month
So, hi. Sorry for the long absence. It was unplanned, unwanted, and just…well…let me explain. For some time my trusty Mac hasn’t been all that trusty. As in, taking five minutes or so to boot up only to crash, the photo app not working at all. Long story short, the…
Laurie Colwin’s Boiled Beef
Last week, between bouts of doomscrolling, I remembered Laurie Colwin’s essay about boiled beef. The best boiled beef I ever ate was at the Ukrainian Restaurant at the Ukrainian National Home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I would gladly go out in a violent storm and walk over…
Spinach and Potato Saute
Before I began blogging, I bought a how-to book: blogging for luddites. It covered all the basics: posting regularly, how to shoot pictures for a blog (the thing I feared most, believe it or not), SEO, advertising, newsletters. I didn’t follow most of the author’s advice, but found the book…
Chocolate Malted Muffins
Chocolate malted muffins? Chocolate for breakfast? Okay, a muffin barely this side of cupcake isn’t exactly breakfast of champions. This said, the chocolate malted muffin’s nutrition profile may be improved by exchanging chocolate chips for dried fruits or nuts. Consider dried cranberries, currants, or a handful of almonds. Frozen strawberries…
Roast Pork with Carrots and Fennel Seed
Roast Pork with Carrots and Fennel Seed represents a womanful effort to make something besides Judy Rodgers’ peerless recipe for Mock Porchetta, which appears in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. This recipe asks the cook to create small pockets in the roast along the natural muscle divisions. You then stuff these…
