Kurdish Fried Chicken
Last weekend the IK attempted to update her computer. The last time she tried doing so, the hard drive crashed. This time, she discovered the external hard drive she’d purchased less than a year ago had ceased functioning. In September 2016. As in, the IK’s computer had not been backed up…
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….
In Search of Marinated Tofu
Apologies for the quiet Chez IK. About two weeks ago, whilst photographing for a post, I bent to retrieve my camera and dislocated my left knee, which refused to slip back into place. This caused a whopping case of bursitis. It got a little difficult to locomote. Also mildly painful. The above…
Simple Chicken with Salsa
The ideal blog is flush with tempting meal options. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, low-fat, low-carb, no-carb, chosen from every cuisine under the sun–with a scattering of pomegranate seeds for good measure. Scan the options during your lunch hour, rush home, and get cooking. This is not that blog. Instead, it’s…
Cardamom Hazelnut Cakes
The quest to make breakfast appealing for John, no kind of morning person, continues. Expecting non-breakfasters to become lovers of the full English is unrealistic at best. Kind of like expecting people to voluntarily surrender their health care. The trick to an appealing John breakfast is simple, portable food: a muffin,…
Caregiver’s Noodles
You’re wondering what these are. These thigmajigs, scmetchiks, whaddayacallits, are a crucial part of a wheelchair user’s day–that is, if the wheelchair user has a “swing-away” style footrest on his chair. The above objects are called endcaps. Their job is to hold wheelchair footrests in place while allowing them to…
On Instagram
This is my first camera. It’s a Minolta X-570. I got it in 1982, for my sixteenth birthday. Photography was an expensive habit in 1982. First you had to buy film, commercially available in 12, 24, or 36 exposure rolls. Unless you were truly serious and had access to a…
The Bombay East Bay Vegetable Sandwich
If you want a recipe to fail, choose one you’ve been meaning to cook for at least a decade. Decide to cook it on a day when you aren’t home alone. A day when you must shop for ingredients before cooking. See chaos ensue. Of course you’ve chosen a recipe necessitating many…
Kitchen Note: repairing Pot Au Feu
Why not start with a nice NorCal flower picture? I was trying to take flower pictures the other day, and this seems like a good excuse to use them. Here’s another. You may be wondering flowers have to with pot au feu, or boiled beef. Nothing. They’re just pretty in…
Chicken Tikka Masala
We’ve been lagging in the post department round here. Sorry about that. The holidays, the news, all the usual reasons a blog goes dark. Never mind. It’s 2017. We’re back, bearing news of Chicken Tikka Masala. (A fair copy of a shot the IK took with her cell phone. This…










