During the peak of last year’s plum season, Elise Bauer’s upside down cake recipe provided us with numerous delicious desserts. The apricots had been long gone, so I was eager to apply her excellent recipe to one of my favorite fruits. This year, it worked out quite well, thank you very much.
Rightside-up upside down apricot [...]
Category Archives: Food
Optionally upside down apricot cake
Monday, 29 June 2009
Sautéed fava beans with shallots
Monday, 8 June 2009
Yesterday I harvested the last of the fava beans (a.k.a., broad beans). This task reminded me of something: that I haven’t posted a recipe where said legume is the main ingredient.
I’ve long been inspired by an appetizer, foul moukala, that we had at a Lebanese restaurant, Al Waha — all the way in Bayswater, London. [...]
Two winter gratins: squash and leek, cauliflower and fennel
Sunday, 15 March 2009
[I nearly forgot about this article, so with winter is coming to a close here in California...] Gratins are an excellent merging of comfort food and decadence. I mean, what do you do with leftover winter squash or root vegetables? Add cheese! Add cream! Bake until bubbly!
Members of the onion family, such as leeks and [...]
Miso sauces and a marinade
Monday, 9 March 2009
I enjoy reading Elizabeth Andoh’s Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, which includes a very useful collection of ingredient tips. She provides nearly two dozen sauce and broth recipes, which are fun to improvise on, such as the dashi I wrote about a while back. So today I present my trusty miso marinade, along [...]
Chai, version 2.0
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Okay, I think this is an improvement over version 1.0 of my chai recipe. While the spices still need optimization (i.e., to attain southern Indian resto quality), it is better. Part of what greatly helps is the use of evaporated milk (but not sweetened condensed). You might ask, “Why not use fresh whole milk, rather [...]
Meyer lemon curd
Friday, 6 February 2009
My first memory of lemon curd is a recent one — that is, from adulthood rather than childhood. My friends and I used to frequent Lisa’s Tea Treasures, to satisfy our hunger for afternoon tea. Ultimately, I found the tea, food and atmosphere, too expensive, not fresh enough, and too damn twee. But they served [...]
Potato pancakes with sweet potatoes and scallions
Sunday, 25 January 2009
Why limit yourself to latkes during Hanukkah? Potato pancakes are for anyone, anytime! After all, they do look like little FSMs, albeit somewhat flattened. I’m sure His Noodliness would still approve.
Moreover, savory pancakes can be made from many different root vegetables, in my case baking potatoes and sweet potatoes, with a kick of scallions and [...]
Chicken stock
Monday, 5 January 2009
Chicken, seafood and vegetable stocks are liquid gold. Not only are they essential for soups, but for a wide variety of sauces, they’re indispensable. I’m somewhat surprised I never managed to post a recipe for chicken stock, so here it is.
For an added roasty flavor, I bake the chicken carcass beforehand in a 375ºF degree [...]
Sally Lunn bread, version 2.0
Friday, 26 December 2008
It’d been nearly a decade since I’ve felt confident about making Sally Lunn bread again. The last time I tried to bake it, about a couple of years ago, it was dense and unpleasantly over-yeasty. I thought I had lost my touch. Then I decided to weigh out the flour, review Marion Cunningham’s Sally Lunn [...]
An extremely untraditional cassoulet involving green lentils
Thursday, 18 December 2008
I often enjoy dishes made with chickpeas and lentils. But my répertoire is deficient in recipes where these delightful legumes participate.
So this brings me to the cassoulet, or rather “cassoulet,” which I recently made. The only vaguely French ingredients are green lentils (from France, yet not the Flageolet beans of traditional cassoulet), duck confit, bay [...]
