Cookbooks › Japanese Farm Food by Nancy Singleton Hachisu

About Bitter Melon

January 25, 2019

To this day, the post for bitter melon curry remains one of my most popular. Every time I post a picture of bitter melon on Instagram, people ask about it. So I thought I’d discuss it a bit more here. Bitter melon is a member of the gourd family. Jennifer…

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Miso Steak with Noodles

July 30, 2018

This is a fermented paste made from soybeans and grains, and it is used as a base for sauces and soups. Look for it in Japanese groceries or natural foods stores. Mollie Katzen, defining miso in The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Until the early aughts, most Americans knew miso as the…

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Apologies for the quiet Chez IK. About two weeks ago, whilst photographing for a post, I bent to retrieve my camera and dislocated my left knee, which refused to slip back into place. This caused a whopping case of bursitis. It got a little difficult to locomote. Also mildly painful. The above…

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He took one of the Excedrins from the counter, regarded it for a moment, then put it into his mouth and began to chew it, slowly and with relish. The taste flooded back like memory, making his saliva squirt in mingled pleasure and unhappiness. A dry, bitter taste, but a…

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Back-in-the-Pot-Pork

March 14, 2016

My community college photography classmates would have decimated the shot below. After slowly feeding my ego through the wood-chipper for using color film, a choice signaling rank amateurism, the group would have settled in for a nice long discourse about compositional elements. Meaning ninety minutes on the blue rubber band. Fortunately, none…

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Summer Fruit Cordials

August 12, 2015

    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…

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