** 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 […]
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 […]