As the season draws slowly to a close, you may consider this my thank-you note, or perhaps my sappy sappy love-letter, to my farmers’ market. Last year, Roxborough had no farmers’ market. There used to be an Amish farm stand that would set up in a parking lot near the Post Office once a week, […]
** Update: The answer, dear friends, to the question of whether my yeast problems would kill this beer, is a big, resounding yes. I bought some additional yeast this morning, thinking that I would re-pitch. And when I opened my fermentation vessel, what I found was kind of horrifying: colorful, clearly bacterial colonies floating on […]
I intended to make a peach galette for dessert Friday night. I really did. It would have been sweet and tangy, rustic, crusty, and glazed with homemade jam that my friend Linda had gifted me a couple of months back. I had the dough for the crust ready and everything. But then I went and […]
This makes two non-food posts in a row. This trend will cease, I promise. Before you know it, I’ll be back to recipes, or write-ups of my local farmer’s market, or odes in verse to Manchego cheese, or what have you. But like I said with regards to our recent spate of inclement weather: sometimes […]
Sometimes we cook. And sometimes the world impinges. Hurricane Irene came through Saturday night, bringing with it wind and rain, and knocking out power on half our block. The neighbors, like Sarah and I, came outside onto their porch to watch the spectacle. They told us that the people on the news were calling it […]
Sometimes I cook because I’m excited about a new idea. Sometimes, it’s because I’m hungry, or because I want something specific, or because I want to impress my friends, or because I’m guilted into it by Sarah, who tells me: Really? You want to order in again? Didn’t we just get a bunch of vegetables […]
Kofte (or kofta, or köfte, or koobideh) has long been popular across the Middle East, Asia Minor, South Asia, and Southern and Eastern Europe. In its guise as a spiced-lamb meatball-on-a-skewer, it is a staple of the Turkish grill, found (I am given to understand) on street carts all over Istanbul, and found (I know […]
My friend Linda is a canning prodigy. For a couple of seasons now, she has looked out into her vegetable garden, and into the ripening stocks of our local farmer’s markets, and asked: how can we make all this last through the winter? From peaches and strawberries and apples, she has made jams, preserves, and […]
Most of the content I’ve posted here so far has come in the form of recipes. But it occurs to me that ninety percent of the cooking that I do is recipe-free. I start with a couple of ingredients that I think would go well together, I cook them up in some predictable way, we […]
Indian breads, it seems, are bound to become a series on this blog. Not that it’s a surprise. They’re scrumptious, they’re easy to make, and they’ve long been a favorite meal accompaniment — and utensil — of mine. I don’t have a tandoor (much to my lasting woe), but as I wrote in my Roti […]