Category: Cooking Freeform

Back to kimchi for a little bit. There are still three jars in the fridge asking to be used. Here’s Braised Beef with Cabbage Kimchi. Tangy, sweet, and savory, this fusion dish seems so familiar and so different at the same time. It is easy to put together and it tastes especially good the next…

With the warm weather looming on the horizon, desperately filling up on soups. Here’s my version of the Italian Wedding Soup based on the one from Ina Garten. Compared to Barefoot Contessa’s version, my Sandaled Commoner’s one makes almost double because we need leftovers. My take has more vegetables — I like a thicker soup…

“Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food” is one of my favorite books on food and my go-to for special occasions. This book has a recipe for the best soup in the world — Polish white borscht, Bialy Barszcz. I have made this soup many times using the suggested ingredients. However — I cannot bring myself…

This Kimchi Fried Rice started with my Kimchi cookbook but deviated as I was rummaging through the refrigerator looking for green peas to add some green to the sea of red. There were none. But I found a really nice chunk of smoked bacon, the one from the Eastern European store — double smoked, not…

My taste for cumin scented everything probably comes from -Stan cuisines of Soviet Union’s Central Asia. When I was little, in snowy potato-cabbage-black pepper-centric Moscow, cumin did not exist. Its flavor seemed exotic, otherworldly, thus, desirable. A little more South East of -Stan countries, in China, Uighur people of Xinjiang — with their laghmans, polo,…

This pasta is a compilation of various recipes and techniques. Saving it here in case my housemates want me to do it again. It came out pretty good. To accommodate my Russian mind craving stories and movies, I organize my mise en place for this Italianish dish the way my first Chinese cookbook taught me:…

These days, it seems like mashed potatoes are everywhere. It is cold. And has been snowing. Couldn’t hold it and made my own mash. With Chicken and Pork Meatballs. The idea for the meatball mix stems from Ina Garten’s Italian Wedding soup recipe in Back to Basics. I substituted sausage for plain pork because that’s…

Summer has never been my time of the year. Demi-seasons are my favorite. But this year, for the first time I’ve seen other people doing actual countdowns to fall — hang in there, people, only a few days left. My daughter’s reaction to my this longing for cooler days manifestation was:— You know what, mom,…

Good jerk hurts — smoke gets in your eyes, scotch bonnets burn from within. Good jerk is hard — hard to find, hard to recreate, hard to photograph. Good jerk takes time — days of marinating, hours of smoking. Good jerk can be so good! When you find a good jerk, try not to lose…

This is probably the most talked about recipe of Russian cuisine — legendary chicken croquettes Pozharsky style. There are many arguments about the history of the recipe, its name, and ingredients:— It is named after Pozharsky family.— No, it’s named after a fire in a chicken coup (“pozhar” in Russian means fire).— Veal is the…