Category: Chinese

  • Let me set the scene for you. It is 5:16 pm on Monday evening. It is very dark out. I am still wearing my pajama top under my sweater, because I never got around to showering today. The boys had to stay home from school and Kita today and you know how these things go.…

  • Hello, good people! It is a beautiful June day. I am drinking a glass of Apfelschorle (which is the German term for when you mix fizzy mineral water with apple juice) and it is being cooled by the most beautiful ice cubes that I make using this mold, bringing me untold amounts of joy each…

  • Good morning! The sun came out today. Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. is president. Kamala Devi Harris is vice president. We stayed up late watching the various festivities and the virtual inaugural parade across America, which was far more moving than I expected. Our country, so broken in so many ways, still has so much energy…

  • My love affair with Fuchsia Dunlop and Chinese food continues unabated. My latest discovery: how to use up that pesky bunch of celery stalks you're forced to buy when you need but a single one. Ooh, how I hate the sight of those pale green stalks down in the crisper, how they fill me with…

  • I have been on a cookbook-buying bender lately, even though we really don't have room for any more books and I already don't cook enough out of the books that I do own. There is just so much good stuff out right now. (I promise to do a post or two on new cookbooks and…

  • The clock is ticking. In less than three weeks, I'll be on my way to the airport with a one-way ticket in my bag and my earthly possessions on the slow boat to China (well, or Hamburg, to be more accurate). I've gone from having a wobbly lip on every blessed New York sidewalk to…

  • I never met a vegetable I didn't like. Zucchini, with its sweet, creamy flesh; swiss chard, thick and papery to start, then soulfully silky to finish; kohlrabi, with its refreshing, vegetal snap; eggplant, spongy in one moment, melting the next. Green beans and Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccoletti, artichokes and spinach – I love them…

  • So, after finishing Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and feeling much like what I imagine our parents felt like after reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, I vowed to myself never to buy industrial beef again. Oh sure, I'd already given up on supermarket eggs and chicken a long time ago, but now I've…