I own a pressure cooker; I’ve had it for years. A dull-colored metal pot with a lid and a carefully balanced pressure regulator, it comes to life on the stove. The pressure regulator vibrates, hissing and spitting like an angry rattlesnake. Which is why the cooker sits at the top of a cabinet, well out…
Double-Apple Oatmeal
As anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while can tell, I love breakfast. But it’s a lot more constrained than dinner, and it’s made first thing in the morning, when I am not at my most patient or imaginative. That means it’s easy to get into a rut. About a week ago, I…
Thai Tomato Soup
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…
Equipment Note: BeaterBlade
If you have a stand mixer, you probably know that it is a wonderfully powerful kitchen tool. Tasks that are a major pain with a hand-held mixer – or nearly impossible by hand – just require you to throw the ingredients in the bowl, turn it on, and go. But you probably are also familiar…
Michelena’s Tres Leches Cake
Until I moved to New Mexico, I had never tasted tres leches cake. And the first few times I did, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. The samples I had in local restaurants didn’t have much flavor – and, shockingly, they were actually kind of dry! I couldn’t figure out how they…
Creamy Honey Mustard Salad Dressing
A little over a year ago I swore off bottled salad dressings. I grew up on Kraft dressing – sticky white ranch, sweet and oily dark-red Catalina, and (my favorite) bright orange French. I’d stopped using those several years before when the tangy orange dressing stopped tasting pleasant to me and just tasted like chemicals….
Moo Shu Pork with Vegetables
Cravings often come on hard and fast. Sometimes you don’t even know where they came from. I know right where last week’s craving for mu shu pork came from, though; I opened my bag of extras from the Los Poblanos CSA and spotted the package of Leona’s tortillas from Chimayo, NM. Something about their nonuniform shape,…
Creamy Baked Ziti with Cottage Cheese and Tomato Sauce
Baked pasta is incredibly appealing, especially on chilly winter evenings. Yielding pasta, tangy tomato sauce, creamy cheese, chewy brown edges – what’s not to love? Unfortunately, baked pasta often fails to live up to its Platonic ideal. The pasta overbakes to mush, or comes out dry and unappealing; the ricotta layer that should give such…
Browned-Bone Chicken Stock
You might say there’s nothing unfussy about making your own chicken stock. I would counter that, while it’s pretty fussy to insist on cooking everything with homemade chicken stock, making your own is simple. And, like baking bread or roasting a chicken, there’s something about it that gives a primal satisfaction. This is cooking at…
Chewy Cherry-Almond Granola Bars
We go through granola bars like crazy in my house. Arne eats two for breakfast on those days when we don’t have the time or organization to eat breakfast together. (Or when the cat lets me sleep in.) Plus he eats them for snacks, and we always take them when hiking and disc golfing. The…