As a transplant from Illinois, I am often somewhat taken aback by this time of year in New Mexico. I spend the late summer months craving the chill evenings of all, the time of year for stewing and braising and roasting. Instead, as often as not mid-December rolls around and it’s still shirtsleeve weather –…
Archives for 2010
Yaki-Soba: Japanese Stir-Fried Noodles
Yaki-soba is one of those essentially simple, endlessly flexible dishes, perfect for times when the cupboard is relatively bare and you have some odds and ends to use up. Today I made it as an unusual destination for Thanksgiving leftovers, using chunks of turkey. It would be great for those days when you’re sick of…
Post T-Day Breakfast: Stuffing Croquettes
We made way too much stuffing this Thanksgiving. Maybe because I love stuffing above all the other Thanksgiving foods, and I have no qualms about a bucketful of leftovers. (Honestly, I love everything in the “wet bread” genre – bread pudding, bread salad, you name it.) My family’s traditional stuffing includes breakfast sausage, so the…
Basil Ice Cream with Tomato Jam
I must thank my nephew Joseph and his new bride Melanie for this recipe; if their lovely wedding luncheon had not included a beautiful dessert of basil whipped cream over blackberries, I would never have thought of it. I’m not entirely sure which component I decided to make first, but once I thought of the…
Tomato Jam
This recipe, from reliable Mark Bittman, is a treasure. Easy to make and simply delicious, it’s a great recipe to have in your arsenal in the summer, when tomatoes are piling up and you need something new and exciting to do with them. The batch I just made used up a windfall of free tomatoes…
Very Strawberry Frozen Yogurt
The strawberries just called to me. They seduced me with their incredible fragrance and forced me to bring them home. And then what was I to do? A little surfing found me this recipe, in the archives of David Lebovitz’s blog. I had once made an almond cake from his recipe, and it was divine,…
First Market Basket of the Season!
I love my farmers’ market. The Nob Hill Growers’ Market is walking distance from my house (though I almost never walk there – bad me!) and timed for the lazy: Since it’s at 3:00 on Thursday afternoons, instead of O-dark-thirty on weekends, I can actually be one of the first ones there and get the…
Mussels with Chinese Black Bean Sauce
I love Chinese black bean sauce. I love mussels. And the first time I heard about this combination (thank you, Hanne Blank!), I knew it would be brilliant. The salty, pungent earthiness of the fermented black beans and the heat of the chile against the plump, slick, sweet, briny mussels – this was something I…
Sichuan Hot-and-Numbing (Ma La) Cucumber Salad
Following my great success with Fuschia Dunlop’s second cookbook, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province, I decided to go back to her first book, Land of Plenty, on Sichuan food. I love cucumber salads and am always on the lookout for a new one. (The old salt-sugar-chile-vinegar one pales after a few hundred variations.)…
Potato and Sunchoke Gratin with Leeks
This light, elegant gratin is perfect for spring. The oven-baked gratin form acknowledges still-chilly spring evenings; the delicate flavor of leeks and sunchokes evokes visions of the first green shoots of spring. Sunchokes, also known as Jerusalem artichokes, are the tubers of a flower that looks like a small sunflower. They are dug in the…