There’s nothing in the world like waking up to a beautiful, elaborate breakfast. I assume. Occasionally my sweetie brings me a Frontier breakfast burrito and orange juice in bed on special occasions, and I’ve had room service breakfast a few times. But for the most part, if I want an elaborate breakfast, there’s no button…
Easy Braised Sweet-and-Sour Red Cabbage
I’d never eaten braised red cabbage until three nights ago – and I’ve already made it twice. On a whim, I had bought a pretty little head of red cabbage, and I needed a side dish to go with a beef Stroganoff I was making. It seemed to me that the astringency of a sweet-and-sour…
Quick and Easy Refrigerator Pickles
After much dawdling trying to find the original, I have finally purchased a new power cord for my old digital camera. Though it’s ten years old and has fewer megapixels, this chunky old Sony has a beautiful Carl Zeiss lens and a lot more manual control than my newer, more portable Casio Exilim. I was…
Grilled Romaine Cobb Salad
I’ve been trying to recall where I first ate grilled romaine. I remember the salad itself, and my surprise and delight at the preparation. It was a Caesar salad, bright with lemon and smoky from the grill, a little shriveled and blackened on the ends. I think it was at the brilliant – and sadly…
Quick Eats: Melon and Feta Salad
Apparently it’s not so uncommon nowadays, but I first heard of melon and feta together in Nigella Lawson’s book Forever Summer – recently re-released as Nigella Fresh. (A hardback copy of the original Forever Summer is listed on Amazon.com for the unlikely price of $7,607.21.) Nigella’s version is much more complex than mine – and,…
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…
Overnight Brown-Sugar French Toast
A couple of years ago, my friend Dianne hosted a brunch. I think it was on New Year’s Day. In any case, there was a lot of delicious food there, but what everyone kept coming back to was a big pan of gooey, decadent brown-sugar-topped French toast. Happily, our hostess declared it easy-peasy and photocopied…
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.)…