So Many Recipes, So Little Time
Thai Khao Tom Kung Lae Kai, or rice soup with shrimp and chicken, is similar to Chinese congee but it is much lighter, brothier. Without any particular Thai ingredients — no fish sauce or lemongrass, no galangal, no lime or makrut leaves — it’s unmistakably Thai. This is probably the best soup I have ever…
Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year resonates with me like no other book on food and cooking. The concept of kitchen year should be entered into a dictionary with a proper definition as a year of recovery, reset, a year of pulling thoughts and getting acts together — a preparation to move on in a different…
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…
Our refrigerator is currently packed the way my mom loved it — no way to stick a hand in. Not even a finger. Two gigantic camping coolers packed to the brim are stacked one on top of the other by the side door. And there is nothing to eat in the house. In the morning,…
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…