Thai-Style Stuffed Cucumbers
Thai cookbooks abound in recipes for geng jeut mara yord sai, or pork-stuffed bitter melon soups. “Soups,” plural, as this recipe has countless variations. Some cooks stuff cucumber instead of bitter melon; others abandon the vegetable container in favor of squid. Yet another variation of geng jeut mara yord sai abandons…
Thai Shrimp Paste
Today’s recipe, for Thai Shrimp Paste, flouts a Major Food Blog Rule: Thou Shalt Not Post a Recipe Of Unknown Outcome. The thing is, shrimp paste is a summer project, requiring protracted periods of heat and warmth. Meaning now–May–is the time to get shrimp pasting. (Never mind that I write on…
Squash Fritters
In reviewing the IK’s vegetable posts, I realized: 1. there aren’t many, and 2. what few there are skew fritterwards. We of the IK consume a varied vegetable diet. Yet here we are, about discuss squash fritters. Were that not enough, today’s variant recipe is….a red pepper fritter. In all…
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,…
Sauteed Chicken Livers
Chicken livers were standard fare during my childhood. Nobody was freaked by their being offal. Nor were they cooed over as nose-to-tail eating, because the concept didn’t exist yet. Back then, people just ate. We also walked miles in the snow. Back then there was snow to walk in. But…
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…
Surviving the Holidays
One day my kindergarten teacher put some clay out for us to play with. I was thrilled until some boys started flinging it at each other. I crept outside to hide by the milk machine. The milk machine stood just outside the classroom door. It was tall and cool and…
Stir-fried Rice Cakes with Pork
As lunatics in the wider world wielded guns and mailed pipe bombs, your hostess was busy dealing with crooks and idiots. It’s been that kind of few weeks. Or maybe that kind of two years. (Not indicative of above.) — Stir-Fried Rice Cakes with Pork comes, in part, from Georgia…