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…
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,…
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…
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.)…
Hunanese Smoky Bacon with Tofu and Broccolette
Lately I have been making myself very hungry by reading Fuchsia Dunlop’s beautiful Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province. It features lots of interesting ingredients, some of which I bought yesterday at Talin Market and am a little daunted by (fermented bean curd, anyone?) The ingredient I was surprised to find liberally used throughout…
Kerala-Style Egg Curry
I love Indian food, and it leaped straight to mind when I decided to focus on vegetarian cooking. One of my favorite quick meals is a simple Indian chicken curry with tomatoes and yogurt, so it’s probably unsurprising that this recipe jumped out at me from the pages of Celia Brooks Brown’s “Party Food for…
The bento lifestyle
A year or so ago, after a long time working at home, I got a job that required monthly attendance at lunchtime staff meetings. Inevitably I would fail to plan ahead, and wind up rushing into McDonald’s to grab lunch for the meeting. I wasn’t fond of this situation. And I had always wanted a…
Quick Eats: Dumpling Soup
I threw this together for lunch today, as I have a million times, and was several bites in before it occurred to me to share it with you! Dumpling soup has been my go-to quick lunch for a long time. I usually make it Asian-style, but it lends itself well to an Italian treatment as…