Carol has been in the mood for Pho lately, and inconveniently, our closest Vietnamese restaurant recently closed. She also spotted a copy of Lucky Peach magazine’s The Pho Issue (Summer 2016), so we decided to make it ourselves with good results. This will make enough broth for 6-8 servings. I ate mine with the usual Read More …
This was a good Lenten lunch, adapted from a recipe in Mark Bittman’s The Best Recipes in the World. It is Malaysian and origin and is similar to Laksa. It could be made with shrimp or chicken. This made 4 servings and took about 45 minutes. With 1 serrano pepper it was moderately spicy. 3 Read More …
This cold Spanish tomato soup is an alternative to gazpacho. The main differences are that it does not include cucumber, peppers, or parsley, and is therefore less like a liquefied salad, and it does include tuna and hard-boiled egg. This recipe is adapted from the Wall St. Journal. The original article thinks this would make Read More …
This cold soup is based on a recipe in a famous and eccentric old cookbook, M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Eat a Wolf. She wrote this book in 1942, during wartime rationing, and added extensive margin notes for a later addition about 1954. It consists of ideas on how to eat economically and with limited availability Read More …
This post will be more of a commentary and memorialization of a recipe rather than the recipe itself. I recently bought Tim Anderson’s Tokyo Stories which is about the wide range of Japanese foods available in contemporary Tokyo, and I picked this dish to try because it was an example of the breadth of styles Read More …
Carol made for lunch yesterday a variation on a recipe in Japanese Soul Cooking. Her main change was substituting sliced pork loin for duck breast, since it was easier to get and adding fresh shitake mushrooms (since she likes them.) I am not including the recipe in this posting.
An American classic is the version of bean soup which has been served at the US Senate cafeteria for more than a century. This version is based on a recipe in Cook’s Country Eats Local as adapted to one of the principles of peasant cooking – use what you have! Thus I used pinto vs. Read More …
This is a very popular soup in Lithuania. The pink color is from the combination of beets and dairy. In Lithuania, the dairy would normally be kefir. In Richmond, while kefir is available, good quality buttermilk and yogurt are more available, and I have substituted 2 parts whole-fat buttermilk and 1 part whole milk yogurt Read More …
This is how I used up the stock and odds and ends of duck meat after I separated out the breasts for duck prosciutto and the legs for confit. I was following a recipe from The Essential Pepin for Duck and Bean Casserole except that I had more stock to use up so the final Read More …
We just got home from a week in the Caribbean and were looking for an Ash Wednesday dinner which would be easy on our stomachs, which are a little worse for the traveling. This was a successful improvisation using “Char’s Maine Fish Chowder” in Cook’s Country: Best Lost Suppers as a starting point. Many fish Read More …