This recipe came together rather by chance. Ethiopian spice mix? A castaway from the Kandake beer-making experiment. Yellow, orange and red peppers? I had about five pounds of these, some a little soft and wrinkled, for reasons too laborious to get into here. Rather than make a hot sauce, or roasting the peppers to put [...]

This little twist on a classic sandwich came in honor of the hens’ seasonal return to laying eggs. There are at least a dozen brown eggs from the ladies in the fridge now. What to do? I’m reminded of all the ways I tried to sneak eggs into other dishes over the summer, or based [...]

There’s a lot of leftover squash risotto from last week’s holiday party. First tip: it’s really easy to underestimate how much risotto you’re going to make. (Think the volume of the dry rice, times three.) Unlike soups or stews, risotto is one of those dishes that doesn’t really reheat gracefully. There was nothing appealing about [...]

We considered pickling eggs. We thought about making hot pepper sauce with beer. We tried to gather enough okra pods to pickle, and we dawdled on which herbs to pick. In the end, Laena McCarthy (founder of Anarchy in a Jar) and I tore through six mason jars last Friday, on our jam-making date. We [...]

What a luxurious working-day lunch. It’s casual and uncomplicated to make — an open-faced sandwich — but on top of this bread lies slices of home-cured wild-caught red Alaska salmon surrounded by jewels from the garden. Funny to think that cured salmon (not smoked, but similar in texture and taste, sans smokiness) was once a [...]

It’s really just those four things, plus salt and pepper. But with this and so many other dishes lately, I’ve found that it’s not what the ingredients are, but how good they are that matters more. Sure, if you had “really good” horseradish and served it with “really good” bananas, it might still not taste [...]

I never thought I’d be saying this before, but I have too much arugula. I managed to have too much (too much?) of the most sophisticated of salad greens, a delicate and expensive ingredient that perishes quickly, so better get just a small amount at a time. At least, that was my understanding of arugula [...]

It was so silly I had to do it. When I read that I would be getting a pint of donut peaches in the newsletter of my fruit CSA this week, the idea took hold of me: must make “donut peach donuts.” I just saw Inception like the rest of our society has, it seems, [...]

This follows the same sort of principle as my fried rice post a while back: you take a stale grain (in this case, a loaf of bread), and revive it with everything and anything that’s ripe, or just around. It could be everything that’s past ripe, and needs to get used up soon. Works just [...]

I’ve been cooking and eating the potatoes that we’ve been growing on the roof all summer, usually dug up just a short while before. This has led me to discover the particular differences between these very young, fresh or “new” tubers and the kind you’d typically buy from a store. It’s a blessing, for sure, [...]