Beef stir-fry with leafy greens and rice sticks
Beef stir-fry with leafy greens and rice sticks began as “Beef Slivers With Water Bamboo” from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. Korean rice sticks, called tteokbokki are stubby, chewy, and completely addictive. I keep mine in the freezer, where they tend to crack. This has no impact on their better qualities. I used…
Chicken with Marsala, Mushrooms, and Olives
I am not somebody who spends her time wondering whether beets might snuggle up to pomegranates, creating a novel salad. Or tasty new ways with quinoa. Instead, I do lots of wheelchair jenga. (Not wheelchair jenga.) Saturdays mean soccer practice. I rise early and head out to the garage, where…
Beef Rendang
Rendang daging sapi, or beef rendang, is a specialty of West Sumatra. Rendangs are dry curries, not loose affairs you pour over noodles or rice. While beef rendang begins as wet curries do, with copious amounts of coconut milk, it diverges in cooking method. Prepared in a wide, shallow pan instead of a…
Dried Shrimp and Pickled Lettuce Salad
Occasionally you pick up a cookbook at random. You park it on your “to read” shelf with every intention of getting around to it. Meanwhile, various disasters transpire: dental work, feline illness, neighbor drama, spousal sickness, inept national leadership, world mayhem. Finally you open the cookbook. There, glimmering, is the…
Bitter Melon Curry
— Bitter melon, like okra, is a polarizing vegetable, capable of evoking extreme responses. Those who enjoy its bitter flavor don’t just like it, they crave it. Recipe headers invariably use the word “addictive” to describe the intensely bitter flavor note that sounds on the tongue long after you’ve…
Kitchen Note: Rage, Despair, and Baking
Recent events have left me careering between rage and despair. Occasionally there’s a comparatively calm moment of depression, a lull in the mental action, before some tidbit of horrible news sends me bouncing off the walls again. Writing is nearly impossible. How do you sit down and write: “Today I…
Stir-Fried Spinach with Fermented Red Tofu
Now, some of you read fermented tofu and freaked out. Don’t lie. Perhaps you’re thinking of that famously stinky stuff considered a Chinese delicacy, tofu that evokes Vincent Price, in another context, intoning about the funk of 40,000 thousand years. Am I right? The IK, she’s here to ease your…
Meatballs With Spinach and Chickpeas
This Thursday, Mr. IK is boarding a plane for Indiana, where he will participate in a large power soccer tournament. The preparations this journey have entailed would make one think he was parasailing to India. The IK has been busy buying bottles of Johnnie Walker to stash in the suitcase…
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….
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…