I have, as you may have guessed about me already, a great deal of sympathy for ham obsession. I have myself, on a number of occasions, made the circuit in Philadelphia from the Reading Terminal Market, to the Di Bruno Brothers, to Claudio’s, looking for just the right crudo to pair with scallops, or melon, […]
Elizabeth is a folklorist, a teacher, and a culinary experimenter with a low boredom threshold. She and her partner have recently added a giant puppy to their household; he impedes the experimentation, but she loves him anyway. They live in a large, old house with a small, old kitchen in upstate New York. Elizabeth blogs […]
As the season draws slowly to a close, you may consider this my thank-you note, or perhaps my sappy sappy love-letter, to my farmers’ market. Last year, Roxborough had no farmers’ market. There used to be an Amish farm stand that would set up in a parking lot near the Post Office once a week, […]
My friend Linda is a canning prodigy. For a couple of seasons now, she has looked out into her vegetable garden, and into the ripening stocks of our local farmer’s markets, and asked: how can we make all this last through the winter? From peaches and strawberries and apples, she has made jams, preserves, and […]
Most of the content I’ve posted here so far has come in the form of recipes. But it occurs to me that ninety percent of the cooking that I do is recipe-free. I start with a couple of ingredients that I think would go well together, I cook them up in some predictable way, we […]
So … in my experimentations with making char siu — the Cantonese-style barbecued pork — I stumbled upon this. It’s Chinese red wet bean curd. It is key in a lot of the recipes I’ve found for making the sauce. And it is … *really* unfortunately named. Although, as it turns out, the name is […]