Wacky Cake Revisited
As more people are vaccinated and lockdowns lift, social life is gradually resuming. People are once more gathering and eating together. Sooner or later, you may be invited someplace, and you may be asked to bring a dessert. Many people, rightly or not, find the entire business of baking anxiety-inducing….
Cooking Cucumbers
So, hi. I could regale you with the horror story entitled “my latest dental extraction,” but I’ve been gone for weeks. That says it all, right? For comic relief, it rained for ten minutes on Friday night. Northern California’s entire rainy season was compressed into those ten minutes. Trees, they…
Cottage Pie
In How To Eat, Nigella Lawson describes the British traditional Sunday lunch thus: Proper British Sunday lunch is everything contemporary cooking is not. Meat-heavy, hostile to innovation, resolutely formalized, it is as much ritual as meal, and an almost extinct ritual at that. With their military vocabulary and timetables, my…
Pot Au Feu revisited
Pot-au-feu is one of the big classics. As such, it never goes out of style. I’ve yet to hear of attempts to veganize it, keto it, or substitute cauliflower for the meats and call it “clean” (this is not a suggestion. Food is not dirty unless you drop it on…
Chicken Liver Mousse
We can all agree this holiday season isn’t the merriest. Covid 19 has decimated the population, wrecked the economy, and generally wrought havoc in a shockingly short time. Offering up some fancy dish along the lines of foie gras feels pretty tone deaf…kinda like suggesting $600 is enough to help…
Baps (Scottish Breakfast Rolls)
A bap, if you are wondering, is a Scottish breakfast roll. The recipe below comes from Elizabeth David’s English Bread And Yeast Cookery, published in 1977. David, never one to mince words, rails against the state of English bread. If your copy has American notes by culinary historian Karen Hess,…
Apple Cider Muffins
Last year I was reading a cookbook that gave a recipe for baked apple cider doughnuts. Not fried, leaving you with gallons of used lard to somehow unload. Have you ever read a cookbook that told you what to do with used cooking oil? Me either. Anyway. My husband, he…
Pork Hand Pies with mismatched pictures
So, yeah, it’s been entirely too long. I have committed the blogger’s cardinal sin of not posting. I could give all the reasons, but you read the news, don’t you? And the news, it’s very bad. Read it enough, and you will become depressed. Seriously depressed. And if you are…
Mexicanish Chicken
The New York Times is covering California’s fires, heat wave, and pandemic under the headline “California’s ‘Horrible’ Month.” That sounds about right. Friends are under threat of evacuation. The air is filled with smoke and ash. We were warned our power would be shut off in rolling blackouts between…
Summer Vegetable Saute
So far as I can tell, people are responding to the pandemic in two ways. The first group Marie Kondos everything in sight, moves on to reading all of Tolstoy and/or Proust, then tackles that novel they’ve always meant to write. All of these accomplishments are shared on social media,…