Japanese Rice Bowl
When I moved to California in 1985, it was rather like being dropped on Mars. Everything–the landscape, the weather, even the English people spoke–was different. I wandered around in a state of perpetual culture shock. The food was different, too. I’d never seen, much less tasted, authentic Chinese, Mexican, or Vietnamese…
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…
Fava Beans with garlic, olive oil, and lemon
In preparing to debut this blog, I cooked a clutch of ingredient-laden, spicy dishes. I made extensive notes, readied each recipe, took lots of photographs. The food was okay, even good: an Indian-influenced chicken dish, flatbread with tomato and scallion, a fiery yogurt marinade. But as I served and ate…
Oven-Dried Cherry Tomatoes
Note: This recipe has been updated to correct errors. I’ve also added omissions from the original post. 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…
Zucchini Preserved in Olive Oil
Being a non-gardener means never experiencing the zucchini cycle: rapture over the first zuke gradually morphing into insomnia over what Barbara Kingsolver, in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, calls “the pyramid of excess vegetable biomass that was taking over our lives.” In fact, having to come to summer squash rather recently (more on…