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Skordalia
I have a fascination with recipes that utilize ingredients that seem to have lost their value: vegetable tops and bottoms, stalks and skins, bones and bits, crusts and scraps. I don’t like wasting food, so when I discover something that allows me to use these delicious rejects in a creative way, I get a little…
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Shaoxing Baby Bok Choy
The shaoxing wine (Chinese cooking sherry; a pantry staple for us) and soy reduction in this recipe provides just enough salt to season the vegetable as well as just a hint of sweetness, but not enough to overwhelm the delicate flavors the bok choy is already bringing to the dish. This is a delicious appetizer,…
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Smoky Baba Ghanouj
The baba ghanouj recipe is a little nod to the only Middle Eastern restaurant from my Oregonian hometown of Coos Bay/North Bend, simply named Cafe Mediterranean. My family is reasonably certain that when they first opened that we generated a venerable chunk of their revenue. Back in the early 2000’s, living in such a small town, we…
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Leek Powder
As odd as this may seem, this recipe is actually quite personal for me. My mother taught me how to make this. My mother was a very strange woman. She would pick wild mushrooms and bring them into the house to examine what colors they might make if you turned them into dyes, sometimes leaving…
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Strawberry Jam
When we bought the strawberries at the farmer’s market for our strawberry caprese salad, we had a pint and a half of strawberries left over. They were so ripe they left juice stains on the pint boxes. I said, “How about we make jam?” And Jon agreed. What else are you going to do with that…
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Morita Salsa
There are many different kinds of salsas out there, but more often than not, for one person who is educated in “salsa literacy” there is just The One. When someone finds The One, they usually end up putting it on everything. For some people this might be Tabasco. For others, Sriracha, Tapatio, Cholula. You get the…
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Nate’s Pinot Noir Marinara
Marinara is a mother sauce that you can use in all sorts of Italian dishes, from spaghetti to pizza to lasagna to meatball subs, even just for dipping breadsticks. Jon and I make marinara differently. His turns out smoky and rich. Mine is more bright and floral with a slight acidic edge. (I think it’s…