Бакладжанная икра (Eggplant Caviar)
Eggplant Caviar This is a great dish that I first learned from The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher. It’s best with the freshest eggplant possible. Some recipes call for salting and…
Month: October 2012
New Oriental Food Store
This is one of my favorite Asian food stores in Iowa. It’s smaller than many, but it has been in business a long time, and I’m a regular. They have…
In praise of braising
One of my approaches to cooking is to find a good, easy, and reliable technique, and to play with it using different ingredients. Braising is a good example. It’s pretty…
Goląbki (Stuffed Cabbage Rolls)
This is a Polish dish that I learned in the mid 1980s. It’s a hearty and filling dish, and can be made with meat, or with vegetables. It can be…
Шопска салата (Shopska Salata)
This recipe hails from Bulgaria, where I spent two summers, 1988 and 1989 at the University of Sofia. Salata refers to salad, of course; the shopska in “Shopska salata” refers…
Борщ по-московски (Moscow-style Borscht)
I learned this recipe from a woman named Lena in Moscow in 1983. This was a time when the ingredients–potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, cabbage–were all sold from small produce stores…
Thai Butternut Squash soup
This recipe brings together several things I grow in my garden each year–squash, bird peppers, cilantro. Coconut milk is an essential ingredient as well, which used to be hard to…
Making Mapo in Iowa
Garlic chives are one of the earliest things to come up in an Iowa spring, and they are an essential ingredient in mapo tofu, a famous dish in China. “Mapo”…
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