This recipe for carrots simmered with cumin, mint, and vinegar is really old: it’s derived from a book written more than 1,700 years ago, around the days of Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius.
Ancient Roman-Style Carrots
A Sampling of Vintage Kale Salad Recipes from 100+ Years Ago
Kale salad — superfood in a bowl, a nutritional powerhouse, a bold canvas for bold flavors — has been a major trend in recent years. A recent article in Food52 — A New Genius Salad from the Chef Who Started the Kale Salad Craze — notes that it was introduced to a wide audience in late […]
The Inside-Outside Game: Cooking Eggplant Flesh and Skin Separately
People often say that the San Francisco Bay Area doesn’t really have seasons. Weather-wise, they have a point – we have wet and dry, nothing nearly as dramatic as New England, for example. But for those who obsess about local food, there are scores of seasons, each one marking the appearance and disappearance of certain […]
Liquid Burdock
Back in June, I wrote about setting up garden infrastructure to grow burdock root (a.k.a. gobo, Arctium lappa) so that I could have a local source for recipes in Elizabeth Andoh’s Kansha: Celebrating Japan’s Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions (my review of the book is here.). My plants seem to be doing well, with each one […]
The Incredible Shrinking Fava Bean
I bought some fava beans yesterday to use in a recipe from Elizabeth Andoh’s “Kansha” and decided to pull out my scale to document the tedious bean peeling routine. I started with 552 grams of whole fava bean pods. Pod removal netted me 192 grams of skin-on beans. I blanched the skin-on beans for 1 […]
Making Turnip Pickles and Turnip Greens for National Farmers Market Week
(Updated 10/27/16: New images, fixed broken links) In honor of National Farmers Market week, August 1-7, Bonnie Powell asked farmers market enthusiasts to cook outside of our comfort zones (Ethicurean and Grist). It’s good to shake things up sometimes, so I thought I’d give it a few tries. This is part 1: tokyo turnips. Yeah, […]
Salad of Wakame, Cucumber and Radish Sprouts with Smoky Vinaigrette
When it comes to salads, I’m much more interested those made with vegetables, fruit, nuts and other ingredients than anything with lettuce or other leafy greens – creations like the Tosa sea salad in Washoku, Elizabeth Andoh’s splendid book about Japanese home cooking. It has three main ingredients – cucumber, wakame and radish sprouts – […]
Okra Without the Slime
Inspired in part by Shuna of Eggbeater, I have been cooking okra since it started appearing at the Farmers’ Market in Berkeley Okra’s Oozing – Why Okra Makes Slime Okra is one of those “binary foods” where people seem to hate it or love it (also in this family are mushrooms, seaweed, and tofu). The […]