On Saturday I helped to host a meeting, one of a series that has been going on for a while. They’re quarterly, and long, so we decided to include lunch. It was a fantastic decision. People love to be fed – especially real, homemade food. To easily accommodate a varying number of participants, we usually…
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…
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.)…
Winter Citrus Salad
It’s mid-winter, and let’s face it, even the Co-op and the CSA can’t provide much excitement in the produce department. The season provides plenty of two things: greens and citrus. I used some greens in yesterday’s Ghanaian Peanut Stew, but I still had a bunch of oranges and grapefruit in the bottom of my CSA…
Ghanaian Peanut Stew
I love African peanut stew. Its rich, complex flavors belie its simplicity of preparation. For years I’ve made a version with whole chicken thighs, from Mark Bittman’s The Best Recipes in the World. However, as I continue with my vegetarian weeks, that obviously wouldn’t do. (Interestingly, as soon as I decided to go all-veg for…