Elizabeth is a folklorist, a teacher, and a culinary experimenter with a low boredom threshold. She and her partner have recently added a giant puppy to their household; he impedes the experimentation, but she loves him anyway. They live in a large, old house with a small, old kitchen in upstate New York. Elizabeth blogs […]
Sharyn is a professor of English, avid runner, and champion napper. When not teaching, running, or under her beloved Slanket, she bakes vegan treats and greedily reads her friends’ blogs. Originally from Massachusetts, Sharyn has lived in southern Indiana for the past 8 years and earned her PhD in December 2011. (She’s wicked proud of […]
I didn’t grow up eating a lot of pork. I’m Jewish, yes. But that’s not the reason. My father was in the Navy during World War II, you see. And while he was shipboard, as he described, it, we would eat everything that was good, first. And then, all that would be left were the […]
I can’t say that I have much of a story to tell here. But I will offer a word of unsolicited advice. Should you ever happen to go to a reputable restaurant, and should you, on the menu, ever happen to have a choice between a tender fillet mignon and an off-cut — a short […]
Long story short, this bread is sort of a happy accident. For about a year, I’ve been working on a whole wheat brown bread — tweaking it, modifying its parts, trying to come up with a workable dough that would yield an open crumb, a thick crust, and a ton of flavor. Last week, I […]
I thought, since I didn’t include a recipe with my last post, that I’d give you a quick one here. Dinner rolls aren’t exactly sexy. They aren’t exactly the height of culinary fashion, unless you have a group of friends who are really keen, say, on chicken tetrazzini, or macaroni salad, or casseroles laden with […]
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 […]
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 […]