So Many Recipes, So Little Time
Erik Kim’s Pepperoncini Tuna Salad from The New York Times has been on my list since forever. But when the craving hit, it didn’t feel like fiddling with a can opener and draining. Summer laziness takes unexpected forms. That day, a piece of salmon in place of canned tuna — 10 minutes at 425°F on…
Dog days of summer — last Monday was officially the hottest day on record on the planet. Summer is sliding off the top of my list. The one good thing about it is less traffic where we live — schools are closed, everyone is traveling elsewhere. I miss cold weather cooking — long slow simmering, oven,…
Accidentally stumbled on a package of salmon and tuna scraps at H Mart. My first thought was to greedily scoop them up with an avocado. As I was driving home, a thought came up to stretch the scraps for dinner and maybe even lunch. Here we go! In a nutshell, 3 cups of short grain…
Some dishes cross borders taking small steps. Like meat wrapped in dough — from dumplings, to manti, to pelmeni, to peramiach, to khinkali, to samosas, to pierogi and pirozhkis, to ravioli, and beyond. Others take a bigger leap — like Russian salad with its Belgian roots or Chicken Kiev with its French origins, like Tikka…
A very therapeutic salad when there’s a need to take the mind off things — lots of chopping. And minimum cooking. For this salad, I like smaller squid cut in about 3/4” rings. Smaller shrimp also seem better. Cut lengthwise, they create nice corkscrew shapes that not only look nice but trap the herbs and…
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,…