Cooking ahead
Last month, while waiting to get a corticosteroid shot in my spine, I went on a major cooking/baking/freezing jag, much of it between three and six am. Cooking was a way of maintaining some control, however tenuous. The recipes below offered succor both before the injection and afterward, when your…
Chicken with Red Pepper Sauce
About a week ago I was rereading Diana Henry’s The Gastropub Cookbook and landed on Chef Peter Robinson’s recipe for Squid with Piri Piri Sauce. I page through my cookbooks a lot. Do other people? I hope so. It’s amazing how often you find something you missed the first…
Mock Porchetta
Judy Rodgers, writing in the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, describes mock porchetta as A very modest, very manageable interpretation of the Tuscan “big pig” that few Americans, or Italians, could ever manage at home. Indeed, this comparatively diminutive roast is nothing if manageable–making it my go-to dinner party dish for decades….
Fast Flatbread
I can’t tell you how often I’ve searched my cookbooks for the ideal flatbread recipe. By ideal, I mean a recipe you can mix, roll, bake, and eat in under an hour. Further, this recipe must use pantry ingredients and have a low yield. Why a low yield? We are…
Patatas Bravas
Long ago, when your hostess was a baby cook with a very skinny boyfriend, she tore this patatas bravas recipe from a magazine. I made patatas bravas a few times, and we enjoyed them, but the instructions call for a food processor. Lacking one, I instead used a mini-chopper,…
Spinach with cheese and garlic
A few nights ago your hostess was paging through Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me With Apples when she happened across a recipe entitled “Dottie’s Spinach.” The original recipe fed six people and calls for a head of garlic, an amount some may find overwhelming, especially during the holidays, generally considered a…
Pasta with chickpeas and spinach
Pasta with chickpeas and spinach came about because I could barely walk. Not the most felicitous of culinary circumstances, but there you are. One never knows where a good dish will come from. Your hostess has a bursitic knee, long treated with cortisone shots. Last week the doctor decided further…
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…
Moroccan Greens Salad with Preserved Lemon
So your hostess began this week by spending many, many hours with her new special friends at AT&T, arranging for special faster internet. Unrelated photographs. Anyone who has had the pleasure of interacting with tech support at AT&T comes to realize it is offshore. Meaning English fluency is at a premium….
Lamb Chops with Sumac
Should your fingers do this–that is, roll inward and sometimes lock–you’ll be forced to stop whatever you’re doing, put down/let go of whatever you might be holding, and unlock the offending finger(s) with your free hand. As you might imagine, this isn’t always a realistic proposition. One cannot stop whatever…