On Canning
A few words on safe canning practices might be useful as we move into spring. Today’s post is an overview, as a comprehensive lesson would be overwhelmingly long. As it is, this post is already too long. Sorry for that. But I had a post on cherry jam all ready to go,…
Lamb Tagine with Preserved Lemon
WordPress bloggers have the instantaneous ability to check reader stats just by logging in.The first page we see on the “back end”–the dashboard–is a graph of blue bars whose relative heights indicate how many people hang around on a given day. So far I’ve managed to avoid constant checking, a behavior…
Preserved Lemons
So, are we having fun yet? Indeed we are. Here at the IK we’ve spent the past two weeks and much of our savings flying about California. We were ill-assisted by an airline team whose experience with wheelchair users was minimal, an accessible van rental agency who left the…
Hot Pepper Sauce: A Ghost Recipe
All cooks save recipes. It can be a peculiar pastime. For every two dozen recipes stuffed into a folder or box or computerized whatnot, one might slide into regular rotation. And that recipe often ends up so altered over time–the onions becoming scallions, the tomato sauce morphing into paste, the…
Notes on Canning Tomatoes
The literature of canning abounds in talk of capturing time. Terms like “peak freshness”, “seasonality”, and “ripeness” are certain to appear whenever people begin musing over the meaning of canning. It’s all true. To can tomatoes in August is to hope you’ll be opening the jars in February. To gaze upon…
Oven-Dried Cherry Tomatoes
We eat seasonally in the IK, though ours is not the precious pastime of snooty Northern Californians. Yes, we live an area of agricultural bounty, making seasonal eating easy and pleasurable. Yet this same location confers a certain responsibility: we have no excuse for consuming fruits or vegetables from…