Reality

  I doubt anyone in the blogosphere is, apart from the occasional scroll….anything new? Nope? Click. Your hostess, meanwhile, has been working hard, cooking like a crazed person, and failing repeatedly, despite her many culinary efforts. That the faulty recipes involved cabbage had nothing at all to do with matters….

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Pickled Onions

July 14, 2021

Once again your hostess would like to apologize for being such a laggardly poster. It’s not lack of interest in the blog, or in you, my readers. The truth is the same dull reason it’s always been: my health. More precisely, my back. Last week I had yet another cortisone…

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Cooking Cucumbers

March 10, 2021

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…

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Pictures

February 23, 2021

I had a tooth yanked, and despite antiobiotics, got sick. So, here are some photographs, because who knows when I’ll be well enough to produce a post. Baking, from a post that never happened. Fresh currants. I was all hot on giving a recipe for scones, but then realized these…

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  Just as some people marvel at flour, water, and yeast becoming bread, I never cease to be amazed at the transformation that occurs when cabbage, some sort of pork product, and fat encounter a pot, low heat, and time. This decidedly dour vegetable softens into tenderness, its fumes turn…

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Greetings from your hostess…

December 19, 2020

Apologies for the radio silence. The IK has been contending with a protracted bout of ill health. (Not covid. Just her usual problems.) While a post is readied in the background, here are a few photos for your pre-holiday entertainment. It rained last week. With any luck, it will rain…

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Pretty Pictures

November 2, 2020

I don’t know about you, but if I read the word “comforting” one more time in a culinary context, I may throw a daubiere. At the moment the very idea of stew, maraconi and cheese, polenta, or any other thick, hot dish of food makes me ill. I suspect many…

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As the world grows increasingly disorderly, I find myself seeking refuge in the past. By “the past,” I mean cookbooks. I don’t have a time machine. Let us turn to Britain between the wars. Built during World War II, but not in Britain. Shot several years ago. — It is…

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Summer Vegetable Saute

August 4, 2020

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,…

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Hummus

June 14, 2020

A  month of silence, and your hostess returns with a recipe that’s simultaneously controversial and lacking in originality. Like you’ve never made hummus before. Seriously, recent events have left me speechless. What was I going to do? Hop online, write a few trite sentences about Black Lives Matter, and start…

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