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Indian Food at Home

June 21, 2026 //
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I had out of town friends visiting last Sunday and we ended up going to the new Indian restaurant in town for dinner. After a very long wait, we enjoyed chicken vindaloo, Indian eggplant (bartha), channa masala, rice and plain naan. Since my friends were departing on the ferry, I inherited the dinner leftovers — everything but the chicken, which the three of us polished off. I ate Indian food for my next meal and made the leftover rice into rice cakes for breakfasts (My mother made rice cakes like these: leftover rice mixed with beaten egg, nutmeg, vanilla, a little sugar and a few grains of salt, fried like pancakes in butter. I eat them topped with fresh fruit in the late spring and summer).

When I was a senior at university I took a room in a shared apartment with grad students from India and Thailand. We got along well and each of them taught me to make some of the foods from their home countries. I learned to make cucumber raita and a simple potato-coconut curry, a simple version of som tom, made with carrots instead of green papaya and a dish made with minced meat and basil.

As a junior abroad I had eaten a few curries in Indian restaurants in London and my mother made lamb curry over rice from leftover roast lamb, relying on commercial curry powder and lamb gravy, but the South Indian vegetarian cuisine of my roommate was new to me.

I remember that she taught me to remove the seeds from cucumbers and to cut them into small slices with a knife. I asked why we couldn’t grate the cucumber, but she said that the texture would be wrong.

Indeed. All of these years later when summer brings fresh green pickling cucumbers and cilantro to the market at the same time, I buy cukes by the half dozen, stock up on dried coconut and plain yogurt, take home a bunch of cilantro and make raita. Raita is an excellent side dish or salad to eat in warm weather.

I don’t measure anything for raita. Today I used four cucumbers, seeds carefully scraped away with a knife, three large dollops of plain yogurt, a handful of chopped fresh cilantro roots, stalks and leaves and a dash of sea salt. After mixing all of that in a bowl I heated about a teaspoon of peanut oil and added maybe half a teaspoon of mustard seeds, leaving them on the burner until the seeds began to pop. If chilies were in the market, I might have added up to a half of a minced serrano chile; as it is, I added a shake or two of red pepper flakes.

I ate this simple raita with an equally simple potato curry: peeled and boiled potatoes mashed with cumin seeds, coconut, salt and more cilantro, sometimes in a bowl, sometimes rolled up in a heated whole wheat tortilla.

After eating Indian food for a week at home, I am not tired of it, so today I made another bowl of raita, a pot of basmati rice and a simple version of aloo chole. I pored over various Indian and vegetarian cookbooks and looked online a bit before settling on the following method:

Mince one onion and add to one tablespoon of hot oil in a skillet (I use peanut oil for Indian food unless I am cooking with coconut oil). Stir onion until it begins to brown and add three cloves of minced garlic and a small knob of fresh ginger, grated. Add two teaspoons of ground coriander, and one teaspoon each of cumin seeds and tumeric, plus salt to taste. Add a bit of water if the mixture begins sticking to the pan.

When all of that smells toasty, but not burnt, add a can of tomato sauce (you can use chopped fresh tomatoes in tomato season), two cans of garbanzo beans — aka chick peas — and a dollop of tamarind paste. Cover and cook while you peel and chop three medium-sized potatoes. Add the potatoes and cook covered until the potatoes are done. Although the chick peas are already cooked, cooking them allows them to absorb some of the sauce and allows the sauce to develop flavor. While the aloo chole simmers, chop another handful of fresh cilantro to sprinkle on top after the cooking is done. One online cook suggested I add a squeeze of lemon and/or some garam masala. I did add the squeeze of lemon, but I was too lazy to make up garam masala today.

As of this writing, I have had two bowls of rice, aloo chole and raita, one for lunch and one for dinner. I am not tired of eating them yet. When I run out of whole wheat tortillas, I might make an Indian flat bread: rotis are pretty easy, made with whole wheat flour.

I have more complex Indian dishes in my repertory: long-simmered carrot halwa, bengan bartha, black-eyed peas cooked with mushrooms. I have the cookbook written by the original chef of Ajanta restaurant in Berkeley, which specializes in regional Indian foods. But on the cusp of summer I want simple recipes that do not take much time to prepare, especially because I am currently caring for a semi-invalid formerly feral cat with a seizure disorder. Onyx does not let me sleep many hours a night and I don’t like to leave her alone for more than two hours at a stretch. But even when Onyx was well I used the warmer weather to combat the weeds in my yards, leaving less time for meal preparation.

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Categories home cooking, Indian food, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized

In Search of Bright Things

January 17, 2026 //
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I have not taken my Christmas tree down, nor put away my Christmas tins. Christmas was over on January 7th, even for those of us who celebrate it as a season rather than a day.

Last week I washed the Christmas guest towels that had been in the powder room and I took the red, green and white swirled candles from the candle holders on the table and substituted white tapers. But I’ve realized that I don’t want to take down the bright and cheerful Christmas decor until I have a plan to replace it with something bright and cheerful. I looked through a box of matted paintings, pulled some to consider, remembered I had framed paintings somewhere still in boxes.

I went out last weekend to buy a 2026 calendar. I am getting a slow start on the new year. As I walked toward town I looked for bright things in the landscape. In midafternoon the sky was a soft gray, the green grass was bright. I saw an occasional red leaf.

By the time I left the bookstore it was drizzling. The sky was no darker in color, but less light was coming through. The only bright colors were the red, green and yellow of traffic lights, yellow mats at intersections, the odd neon sign, an orange peel on the pavement.

Yesterday and today we have had two bright sunny days, although there was frost on the grass this morning. Yesterday Safeway had bunches of lavender tulips for $5.99. I bought one and swapped my red and white checked tablecloth for a blue, green and white floral on a black background.

While I was at Safeway, a $2.99 packet of Thai basil caught my eye in the produce section. Almost nothing at Safeway costs a mere $2.99, so I bought it and immediately began to think of making pad Thai. I have rice noodles in my cupboard, brown sugar, chili sauce. I needed limes. I bought some extra firm tofu. I hesitated about buying wild caught shrimp, but only because they were a larger size than I prefer. I bought some fresh green beans to add to my noodle dish, but refused to buy scallions because they were imported from Mexico. Why, with California two states away, are Washington state grocers buying scallions from Mexico?

I cruised the sauce aisle and found a house brand of “pad Thai sauce.” When I read the ingredients, the first was sugar. I made a mental note to look for tamarind paste at the local health food store instead.

Because I am a former Californian, I must have lemons. We grew Meyer lemons in our front yard on an eight foot “dwarf” shrub. I’m happy enough to buy sharper Eureka lemons before I figure out how and where to grow a lemon tree here and I bought a two-pound bag (about six lemons). I went home and roasted a big pan of Greek potatoes in olive oil, garlic, oregano and lemon juice. Without realizing it consciously, I am in search of bright flavors in January, as well as bright colors and blue skies.

This morning I went out to do my Saturday errands: Atomic Bagel, First Fed, Country Aire, farmers market. I usually buy myself a bagel sandwich on Saturday as a reward for walking to town and carting all my food home on my back. I also like to keep sliced bagels in the freezer for quick meals (toasted and spread with peanut butter, or butter and jam, or?).

At Country Aire, I found a bottle of Thai Kitchen pad Thai sauce. Once again, I stood and read the label before I put it back on the shelf and bought tamarind paste, rice vinegar and fish sauce. I am slowly building a pantry that allows me to cook a variety of dishes in my own kitchen. I also bought some rye flour because I have been wanting to make limpa, or Swedish rye bread flavored with orange and anise.

As I walked to the farmers market I wondered when I might see bok choi there. I think it is a fall crop here. I was pleasantly surprised to see savoy cabbage at today’s market — it will go nicely in a coconut milk-based soup, along with carrots. I was thinking about making such a soup as I walked home. I might even add frozen pork potstickers for an Asian-fusion soup: because I am the resident food critic, my cooking only needs to please me. An egg vendor, who also sells herbs, had a bunch of Vietnamese coriander. I’ve never had it, but it seems like it might fit well with Thai flavors.

This week’s cooking was inspired by the sight of that Thai basil packet at Safeway yesterday. I wasn’t looking for Thai basil — I just happened to see it in the produce section.

I am not, however, inspired by the “meal plan” that the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture put forward, reported to me as “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla and something else.” First of all, that is not enough food for a meal unless the something else is large, bulky and filling. Can you imagine feeding a hungry teenager just one tortilla? Or someone who does physical labor? Secondly, the cited items do not go well together and are not enough to make a dish. If you want to make Chinese-style chicken and broccoli, you will need rice, ginger, garlic, soy sauce; if you want to make Italian-style chicken and broccoli, you will need Parmesan and cream and red pepper flakes. If you want to make a chicken taco or tostada, you will need onions, peppers, limes, cilantro — and you won’t need broccoli. I think the Secretary should be required to report what she eats to the American public: I’m sure what she eats is not what she is advising all of us to eat.

Do your best to find brightness in your neighborhood, whether it is in the sky, in your landscape, or in the flavors of your food. Or just hibernate until spring.

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Categories seasonal recipes, Uncategorized

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Four

December 25, 2025 //
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Today, Christmas Day, I took the day off from baking and cooking. I had planned to cook a roast lamb feast, but had no takers, and I had a last-minute invitation to a turkey and trimmings Christmas dinner, so all I made today was a kale salad for the feast and a bowl of oatmeal with sour cherries and walnuts, which I ate at noon.

Yesterday, however, I combined searching for a red tablecloth, testing tree lights, moving boxes around and making French onion soup and kale salad with baking a few dozen ginger cookies and pfefferneusse, and frosting said pfefferneusse.

I made the onion soup base first, caramelizing sliced onions in butter and olive oil, adding thyme and white pepper, de-glazing the pan with chicken stock. Then I de-stemmed kale for salad. Then I decided to tackle ginger cookies.

Ginger cookies, when you want them wafer-thin and crisp, are difficult — there is no way around it. Lessons learned or remembered this year. 1) Chilling the dough for several days is not enough 2) Kick the silicone mat to the curb — it does not help. 3) Turn off the heat in the kitchen: this dough must be seriously cold to manage (It’s the molasses). 4) When the cut cookies wrinkle when you try to pick them up, give it up, scrape the dough off the marble slab and put the dough in the freezer for a few minutes. 5) While, you are at it, refrigerate the marble slab.

Yesterday I left the marble slab in the refrigerator with rolled out dough on it. I’ll see what happens tomorrow.

After I gave up on ginger cookies, I turned to pfefferneusse, easy to roll into balls and pop onto a sheet of parchment paper when you have used up your supply of butter wrappers. They bake in a nice slow 300-degree oven for twenty minutes. Nothing ever goes wrong with them except the royal icing.

I can’t tell you how many times I have made royal icing that doesn’t want to set. I don’t want it tooth-achingly sweet, so I might use less powdered sugar than some people do. I don’t measure it. I just dump powdered sugar into egg whites and whisk until I like the consistency. I add a generous amount of anise extract — you need to taste it in the frosting.

I hand-dip each cookie in the icing and set it on the cut-open paper bag that I have been using for all of the cookies. The bag catches stray colored sugar and absorbs excess fat from the cooling cookies. Doing pfefferneusse last adds frosting drips to the brown paper.

After I finished with ginger dough for the day, I turned the heat back on in the kitchen. It turns out that a heated kitchen helps icing dry. Who knew? In our Kensington kitchen the only possible heat sources were the ovens, the stove, or the dryer. Here in Washington, my kitchen has a heating vent and thermostat. What luxury.

So, by the end of the day I had some of each of the classic four Dimmick cookies made: cocoa shortbread, maple butter cookies, ginger cookies and pfefferneusse with candied ginger and orange peel.

In times past there were more cookies. Mom would make Russian tea cakes, dream bars, even coconut macaroons. I make Russian tea cakes if I have time and I have experimented with apricot bars but have never found one I like with a serious amount of dried apricots and nuts — I want it to be mostly apricots and nuts on a not-too-sweet base. In times long past there were homemade divinity and caramels, homemade eggnog marinated in whiskey. I can make all of those things, but find it difficult to find the time. There was fruitcake and mince pie, neither of which I miss. Mom made walnut fudge and Grandma made rocky road fudge and sometimes double fudge as well as plain sugar cookies like hockey pucks: dead-white with flour, thick and hard. We liked them when we were kids, but every year Grandma used more flour and less shortening until they resembled sweetened hardtack: you could eat them if you dipped them in tea, coffee, cocoa or milk, but why bother.

Before my neighbor Eileen arrived for Christmas Eve dinner I made lemon-tahini salad dressing with garlic, added artichoke hearts and sliced green olives with pimentos for a festive touch. While she plugged in an extension cord she had brought and strung the lights on the tree, I made Gruyere croutons for the soup.

Eileen opened a bottle of Tempranillo. I routed out some punch cups from a large box of fragile glassware packed by professional movers (I have nowhere to display or store goblets, tea cups and punch cups so they are still in their box). She poured an inch of wine and we drank a Christmas toast.

We ate soup and salad, followed by cookies. We put ornaments on the tree. Eileen dried dishes, stowed leftovers and packed cookies to take home.

My current plan is to finish baking ginger cookies and pfefferneusse on Boxing Day and to box up cookie assortments to send to far-flung friends. If I run low, I will make more of anything except ginger cookies. Enough is enough. I also hope to roast the lamb, fix mashed potatoes, lemon pie, radicchio salad and cinnamon rolls. We’ll see how far I get…

Tell me about the holiday cookies you love. And let me know if you have a wonderful apricot-nut bar.

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Categories baking, Christmas baking, cookies, home cooking, seasonal recipes

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Two

December 18, 2025 //
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I thought about the kitchen. I wrote about the kitchen. I tried to avoid thinking about the kitchen. And then I went down to the kitchen.

Onyx followed me down, hoping that I would open a can of cat food at 4:20 PM. Not happening. I tell her it isn’t time. I tell her she has to wait. I don’t know how much of this she understands, but after watching me for a few minutes she disappears up the stairs. I turn on the oven for a commercial frozen turkey pot pie for dinner: when I am doing production baking I don’t cook meals — it will be muffins for breakfast, quesadillas or roasted yams or a bagel with peanut butter for lunch and whatever I can find for dinner for the next few days.

I put the glass bowl of molasses, butter and sugar back into the microwave. I just set it in there to get it out of the way while I sift flour. Three and a half cups into a metal bowl that held flour earlier in the day. When I bake more than one thing in a day I reuse cups and bowls without washing them whenever I can: a cup that only contained flour can be used for flour again; a teaspoon that has only measured dry ingredients can be used for more of them, sometimes with a quick wipe with a towel to remove dark-colored coffee or cocoa powder or cloves. I see that I will have to get flour soon, but I have enough to finish this recipe. The half and half I prefer in coffee has gone blinky, but I do not want to go to the health food store tonight — I want to finish this dough. I’ll open a can of evaporated milk tomorrow morning because I will have coffee long before the store is open.

I measure the flour, rescuing spilled flour from the counter and cutting board when I can to make up the last half cup. I have left measuring spoons out, so I measure a teaspoon of soda and eyeball the salt. Then I turn to spices: cinnamon, ginger. The nutmeg is on the counter where I have left it. Hmm. Pie spice. What’s in it? A quick read of the label reveals cinnamon, vanilla sugar, ginger, nutmeg, mace, cloves and fennel? None of those things will hurt the spicy molasses dough. Neither will the white pepper I just bought for pfefferneusse. I measure a scant teaspoon of cinnamon, a generous teaspoon of ginger and a level teaspoon of pie spice and whisk them into the flour mixture. I tap the last flour out of the measuring cups. Then I pour the molasses mixture into the flour and start stirring and folding with a rubber scraper. I scrape the dregs of molasses from a measuring cup and from the Pyrex bowl into the forming dough.

The dough turns a lovely mahogany color and smells spicy. Yum. It is very soft, but it will firm up some from chilling. This is the hardest dough I work with at Christmas (Molasses is like that, especially if you want thin, crisp cookies without excess flour). I will make use of both a chilled marble slab and a silicone mat and will probably do some unChristian swearing the day I roll out the ginger cookies. Into a bag goes the dough, still warm, but destined for the refrigerator.

I am done with doughs for the day. Getting three done is pretty good. I might have done the fourth except for the flour shortage. One result of having a smaller kitchen than my mother had is that I can’t stockpile ten or fifteen pounds of flour and fifteen pounds of sugar — there is nowhere to store them — so I have to shop more frequently. I will get more flour and a carton of eggs tomorrow. I have enough molasses to make another half batch of ginger dough, plenty of brown sugar and a big bottle of vanilla, at least three forms of ginger, pounds of butter in the freezer. I have the ingredients for another batch of cocoa shortbread and for more maple butter cookies.

Since I scraped all of the flour I could into the half cup measuring cup for the ginger dough I am able to run a damp dish cloth over the cutting board and counter to clear the rest. I wipe the flour container and close the sifter into its box. I gather the glass bowl and the metal bowl and the glass measuring cup and put them in my dishpan with detergent and hot water. I wash the pasta bowl to get it out of the way, put a cookbook away. I won’t clean the floor until I am through messing with flour several days hence.

I am thorough about getting all of the ingredients out of mixing bowls and measuring cups, off whisks and scrapers. This is respectful of the ingredients and it also makes the bowls, cups and utensils easier to clean: they are not swimming in molasses and butter or crusted with sugar. When I can no longer get more out of a bowl with an implement I use my index finger and get a lovely taste of a finished dough. Part of me wants to eat spoonfuls of it, but these stolen tastes are enough to assure me that I have made good stuff. I wash my hands thoroughly and frequently and dry them between uses so I can’t really explain the floury fingerprints on the microwave. I wipe them off.

I pop open the can of food that Onyx craves, mash it up and take it upstairs to her. Then I take my pot pie out of the oven. She will get some of that, too, but not until I am done. Onyx comes back down to get me — she wants company while she eats. I turn off the oven, the heat and the lights downstairs and go upstairs where I eat, serve the cat a torn up cube of turkey, and compose this post while listening to rain fall on the roof.

To be continued.

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Categories Christmas baking, cookies, seasonal recipes

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part One

December 18, 2025 //
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I am avoiding my kitchen at the moment.

This is my first Christmas in my own house in a December where I have misplaced my house keys, contracted a virus, hired men to bring pallets into my garage and re-stack boxes and furniture to keep them from flood damage from what someone dubbed “the Godzilla of atmospheric rivers,” and then hired them again to bring over sandbags when I noticed puddling on my driveway. I have wondered why the curbs are not higher and why there is no drain in the driveway. Also, my oven seems to be running low after performing well at Thanksgiving, just in time for baking season.

This morning I began mixing up Christmas cookie doughs, softening sticks of unsalted butter in the microwave, measuring granulated sugar and cocoa powder, sifting flour, adding espresso powder and vanilla. The aromas made me happy. I didn’t make Christmas cookies in 2023 when I was taking care of my mother and I didn’t make them in 2024 when I was living in a rental without my kitchen equipment. Now I am back in production.

Cocoa shortbread dough made, I popped it into a Ziploc and into the fridge to chill. I wanted to make pfefferneusse next, but I couldn’t find a paper recipe copy and I didn’t want to stop to go upstairs for my laptop, so I made up maple and nutmeg sugar cookies next. More wonderful smells arose: maple syrup and freshly grated nutmeg, butter. The maple dough went into another bag (I used to chill doughs in metal bowls, but I bought a small refrigerator to fit my kitchen and I don’t have shelf space for four or five metal bowls if I want to keep eating regular meals before Christmas; plus, I don’t buy plastic wrap anymore).

I turned to ginger cookie dough. The first step is to heat butter, shortening, molasses and brown sugar together. Microwaves and Pyrex bowls are handy for this. I was nuking and stirring, nuking and stirring by turns to melt the butter when my neighbor texted me that it was a good time to bring her some muffins I had promised her.

My late mother taught me to clean as I go in the kitchen. It is unlike me to leave a baking project half-finished, but if I stayed long enough to finish the ginger dough Eileen and Harry would not get their muffins. I hastily screwed the top onto the flour jar, but left everything else as it was.

When I got home, I had minutes to assemble a lunch of leftovers and to practice a guitar part I wanted to play at a musical Zoom — no time to finish the dough or clean the kitchen. I saw swirls of congealed shortening on top of the dark brown mass. Fragrant with molasses and brown sugar, but unattractive at this stage.

My genuine happiness at working again with sugar and butter as primary ingredients collides with a shudder as I picture the flour-strewn counter, the glass bowl of glop, not to mention the floor. And so, for now, I delay by writing about the clean-up I am avoiding.

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Categories Christmas baking, cookies, seasonal recipes

Dear Madge (a Letter to My Deceased Mother)

November 30, 2025 //
4

Dear Madge,

My Thanksgiving dinner was two days late this year. I got a virus a week before Thanksgiving and was not well enough to shop and do food prep. My neighbor Eileen, who lives just around the corner, suggested that she could take me to Grocery Outlet on Wednesday morning and we could have dinner on Saturday, so that’s what we did.

Prices have gone up. The “free” turkey that you get with purchases required $125.00 of spending at Grocery Outlet and $150.00 at Safeway. And some things on my list were not on the shelves at all — maple syrup, for instance.

Friday morning I was standing in the kitchen, noticing how well the fast burner on my stove browned onions. I knew you would be pleased. I actually had to turn off the heat for awhile while I chopped celery and grated carrots.

I learned a new trick for roasting chestnuts: after you cut the cross in the shell, you soak them in water for an hour before roasting them. Oh. You and I didn’t know that. It worked like a charm.

What I really miss, Mom, is your kitchen: the zinc-lined bread drawer, the bread boards, the double ovens, the cooler, all of those big low cabinets and drawers. You and Stan the carpenter did a great job of designing a practical working space.

It’s all gone now. The people Bryan sold the house to took out many desirable things, converted closets to bathrooms, ruined the bay window in the breakfast room to make a deck (handy for the chilly Kensington summers). We were fortunate to live in that well-designed house for so long.

I was tired on Saturday morning because your cat Onyx jumped over my head at 2:45 AM. She came here to live with me this month. Surprisingly, at fifteen and a half she still goes up and down the stairs — I feed her in my bedroom, but she likes to supervise the opening of the can, which happens in the kitchen. When she woke me, I realized that I was hot and that the hallway outside my door was hot.

I had tried out the heat in the kitchen and adjoining dining room for the first time on Friday, anticipating dinner guests who would expect me to heat my house. I knew I had turned the heat off, but it was clear that it had been blasting away. Basically, the control knob malfunctioned: it turned, but it didn’t make contact with the mechanism that controls the temperature. I wrenched it off again, hoping that I had been successful (The vent was so hot that I couldn’t tell if it was still on).

I went back to bed after 3:00 AM, but could not get back to sleep. I forced myself down to the kitchen at 8:15 AM where it was still warm enough to go barefoot. Usually it is about 45 degrees in there this time of year, good for rolling out pastry.

Then I just worked: I stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven, pulled the neck out and started a stock pot with vegetable scraps. I made Grandma’s roll dough and your pie crust, pumpkin pie filling, cranberries. I trimmed and poked yams. I trimmed Brussels sprouts and cut crosses in the bottom.

My neighbor Eileen arrived when I had reached the point of utter exhaustion and was functioning on determination and willpower. She had a workman in tow (Her husband begged off because he is currently subject to coughing fits). Dave the workman brought the glass top from the old breakfast room table up from the garage, unwrapped it, cleaned it up, and set it on its pedestal. I had dragged up the pedestal and chairs on Thursday.

I don’t love it in my dining room — it’s too big for the space, especially the chairs — but I had to have a table in place for holiday entertaining so it will stay there at least until January 6th. Kelly, my friend and former landlady, is coming for pie and coffee in the next few days and she will appreciate having a chair at a table. I eat in my bedroom and on the front porch a lot.

Anyway, the food was delicious — all the things we usually made, except salad: working alone I can’t make a salad on Thanksgiving Day. I had thought to make a kale salad with lemon-tahini dressing because it improves as it sits, but I didn’t have the energy to make it on Friday, or the time to make it on Saturday. I asked Eileen to carve the turkey and to mash and season the potatoes because I was decanting dressing, making gravy, shaping rolls. I had her make after dinner coffee, too, while I whipped the cream.

Thank you for teaching me to cook this good, basic Midwestern food. I still enjoy cooking it and eating it and sharing it with others. Eileen pitched in to do a lot of the clean-up — she’s much more careful about wrapping food than I am. I sent her home with food for her husband, packed into my cake pans and then I had a hot soaking bath.

Onyx is enjoying a small dish of turkey scraps every day. She would like a bigger dish of them, or perhaps for me to serve them more frequently, but i don’t want her to develop digestive problems. She is much more vocal than she used to be: she runs through her repertory of yowls and howls and complaints every morning when she wants to be served breakfast earlier than I wish to get up, but she’s basically a good kitty and has largely adapted to life in this house. She hides in the bedroom closet if she hears a stranger on the stairs. She still roly-polys occasionally and I sing her little Onyx songs (“If i Were an Onyx,” “Rock-a-bye, Onyx,” and “Roly Poly, Onyx little cat girl”). She is definitely a survivor cat.

I don’t know what else to say. I just wanted you to know I was thinking of you and all of those holiday dinners we made together and thinking of your mother’s eagle eye when I was peeling and de-eying potatoes. Today I enjoyed a breakfast of pie, coffee and rolls and started listening to Christmas music. My house has wide window sills so I will scavenge greenery and put up birds and ornaments.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Love,

Sharyn

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Categories grocery shopping, home cooking, seasonal recipes

Seasonal Eating in Western Washington

April 27, 2025 //
2

My weekly trip to the farmers market is always an adventure: what will there be in the last week of April? After decades of farmers market shopping, farm box subscriptions and growing my own food in California, I had a pretty good idea what to expect in the markets there. I knew homegrown cherry tomatoes might be ripe on June 30, or Fourth of July and sweet corn would soon follow, but I have lived two states to the north for less than a year and do not know what to expect.

I’ll adjust, but I am not adjusted. The days have gotten long here and cavalcades of flowers are blooming: bulbs and shrubs and flowering trees: peonies, iris, tulips, lilacs, rhododendrons, cherries and plums. And yet the food crops are stubbornly behind sunny California or even foggy coastal California.

I got excited on Friday because the market newsletter had said there would be strawberries this week. I packed empty glass containers to carry them home in and got to the market just as it opened to be sure to get some.

I didn’t see any strawberries when I walked through the market. I stopped to buy radishes and spring salad mix and a loaf of whole wheat sourdough. I walked through a second time. No strawberries.

I stopped by the market booth. “The newsletter said you would have strawberries this week. Did the vendor not come?”

The woman in the booth looked at me.

“Strawberry plants,” she said, naming the vendor.

Oh.

I spotted some rhubarb. Perhaps it was dreaming of strawberries like I was.

I did not buy any rhubarb this week. Once, in an effort to try everything in a market, I bought a bunch of rhubarb and made all kinds of things with it. You can read about those experiments here. I may get so I crave rhubarb in the spring after a few years in Washington, but I am not there yet.

There are no root crops in the market except radishes. Where are the carrots, the spring beets, the new potatoes?

On my way out, I bought arugula with my last six dollars. I’ll be eating both salads and cooked greens this week: spring salad mix, arugula, radish greens, bok choy and the last of some savoy cabbage I bought some weeks back. The arugula farmer had cauliflower, but I do not like cauliflower (If I want some, I can get some next week).

Once home I cooked my last two beets: I will eat those in salads this week with walnuts, feta, various greens and a vinaigrette with pomegranate molasses (I found pomegranate molasses at the health food store this week and am delighted to have it).

I am beginning to long for fresh fruit. I have blood oranges, oranges, lemons and limes. I have frozen blueberries. I have canned sour pie cherries. I have dried cranberries and dried cherries and dates. I eat all of these things. If I were in California I would be feasting on strawberries by now. I can make wonderful cherry pie out of canned sour cherries. I can make candied orange peel and eat it in oatmeal with dates and cinnamon. I have jams and apple butter as well. I can make do.

The truth is I am tired of winter eating. I am glad of spring salads. And I wonder what we will have to eat next week in western Washington.

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Categories frugal eating, salads, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized

Christmas Cookies, an essay

December 31, 2023 //
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No one makes Christmas cookies like we do.

My mother baked a lot of cookies when I was growing up: Toll House chocolate chip cookies with walnuts, oatmeal cookies with raisins or coconut, peanut butter cookies marked by the criss-cross tines of a fork, snickerdoodles, butterscotch refrigerator cookies, brownies. She had a cookie press and I remember a few experiments with spritz.

When November came each year she chopped pounds of dried and candied fruit and nuts for homemade fruitcake, soaking the baked loaves in brandy. And in December she began holiday cookie production. Her specialty was thin, crisp cookies, rolled, cut and decorated with colored sugar. She made Moravian ginger cookies. She made butter cookies flavored with lemon and vanilla. She rolled her cookies out on flour-sack dishtowels on a wooden cutting board with a wooden rolling pin. The recipes made at least six dozen each.

I don’t know how she did it. I began apprenticing with her as a Christmas cookie baker when I was perhaps twelve years old. The floured cloth would wrinkle. The dough would stick to the rolling pin and tear. Some of the cookie cutters would not pick up the cut cookies and if I forgot to flour a cutter between each use the dough would crumple. The thin cookies had to be watched in the oven, pulled at the first sign of browning. Moravians burned really fast.

My first efforts were lackluster. I would use too much flour to try to control the sticky dough. The room would be too warm. I would not roll the dough thinly enough — usually Mom would take another pass or two with the rolling pin, or even take over, stretching the dough further than I could.

When I was in my thirties, I bought Mom a marble slab and a marble rolling pin to make cookie-making easier. I had read somewhere that working on chilled marble helped keep cookie dough at the correct temperature. She didn’t use the marble much, not liking to pick up the heavy slab. I used it at her house, clearing a shelf in the refrigerator to hold it, putting the metal bowls of cookie dough on top of it. I found it easier to roll cookie dough on marble than on cloth and when a construction crew was demolishing the old Cogswell College building in San Francisco I carted home a piece of marble from the walls. My boyfriend at the time cut it into a baking slab for me.

By the time Mom was eighty, she had ceded thin, crisp Christmas cookies to me. She still made dream bars and Russian teacakes, Rice Krispie candy, poppy seed bread baked in old coffee cans, and fudge. I spent long hours in the breakfast room rolling, cutting, decorating with colored sugar, ferrying finished trays to the oven and then to cooling racks.

One Christmas a friend gave me a silicone baking mat, a tool which made it possible for me to master Mom’s thin, crisp pie crust (Mine had always been too thick). A floured silicone mat will not stick, allowing you to roll thin sheets of pie dough, cookie dough, noodles. I acquired a bench scraper, which I had seen on some cooking show, and a microplane zester. My baking life got easier, although Christmas cookies still required long hours of work.

Somewhere along the line, I invented a third rolled and cut cookie: cocoa shortbread. I had the thought to swap one half cup of cocoa powder for one half cup of flour in a classic shortbread cookie. Those joined the roll and cut Christmas cookie line-up, but did not have to be rolled as thinly as butter cookies and Moravians. Then I read about Deb Perelman’s butter cookies made with maple syrup and nutmeg. I made them one year instead of our traditional butter cookies. My brother and I preferred them, so I swapped the maple recipe for the older one and never looked back.

I added one more cookie to our permanent Christmas cookie repertoire. One day twenty-some years ago, my mother was reminiscing about pfefferneuesse, a cookie they bought from the store during her childhood. Pfefferneusse are traditionally made with ginger, cloves, mace, cinnamon and allspice and candied orange peel. I remembered those tubs of commercial candied mixed peels from the days of fruitcake and shuddered. But both of us like candied ginger, so I decided to substitute that for the candied peel. Later, I started candying my own orange peel and made the cookies with a combination of the two ingredients.

The first time we made pfefferneusse they lacked something. Mom thumbed through some old cookbooks and discovered that the cookies used to contain ground white pepper. I threw some white peppercorns in the coffee grinder and added the fragrant powder to my next batch of dough. That was it — the “pfeffer” in “pfefferneusse.”

Most of our cookies are plain, not frosted, topped only with a sprinkle of colored sugar, but pfefferneusse require a coat of royal icing flavored with anise. I still struggle with getting the icing to set properly and watch for a dry day to make it.


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Fast forward to 2023. My mother is ninety-three and has severe dementia and terminal cancer. I became her primary caretaker some months ago and do not have the time to bake Christmas cookies. I bought some chocolate stars she wanted from Trader Joe’s. We’ve eaten a few, but we don’t really like them: we miss our traditional cookies.

I put out a plea on Facebook, describing our Christmas cookie traditions. A friend offered to send us some cookies, to order them from a local bakery. I began to look at bakery menus. No one made the right things: there was too much chocolate, too many year-round cookies. My friend Kate offered to bake us some cookies if I could come up with something simple. I assigned her Russian teacakes, sending her the recipe that Mom had used for years. She brought them by a few days before Christmas with a small bag of her traditional homemade Christmas cookies. The teacakes were almost right, but a bit underdone and sporting only a thin and mottled powdered sugar coating (What we would consider the first of two required coats). Someone else dropped off first a bag of gingerbread cookies and then a bag of cut out cookies and rocky road fudge. A third friend, an experienced baker, volunteered to bake a batch of cookies for us. I sent her the pfefferneusse recipe and the maple sugar cookie recipe. When no one chose the pfefferneusse, I candied a batch of orange peel, hoping to make just that one cookie before Christmas Day (That is as far as I got with that project, but several of the twelve days of Christmas remain).

Alice chose the maple cookies and brought them by on the evening of Boxing Day, along with lemon biscotti, anise biscotti and stamped gingerbread that she had made. After she had gone, I opened the boxes to look. I found small maple stars, at least a quarter-inch thick, bearing marks of flour, sans decorative sugar. You could stack four of our cookies in the space of one of hers.

The flavor of the maple cookies was good, but, alas, they were not our cookies, rolled so thin as to be almost translucent. The lemon biscotti, however, were delicious. I might ask Alice for the recipe.

After sampling Alice’s cookies and Peg’s cookies and Kate’s cookies, I realized that our Christmas cookies, which I have always loved, are truly special. Other people make thick cookies, doughy cookies, under-baked cookies, when they make cookies with cookie cutters. Some of them apply white icing. I have not tasted a single cookie this season like our cookies.

In the past, only two people have come to bake Christmas cookies with me. The woman who is now my brother’s wife came to learn to bake them, spent a long afternoon with me in San Leandro cutting and decorating one year. She never came again. And an old friend came to take part in the holiday cookie marathon. She enjoyed decorating cookies with colored sugar, but soon suggested we abandon the project and walk to the mall instead. “This is a lot of work,” she said.

Indeed. A more recent friend suggested that I develop a sideline in baking cookies. “I would buy them,” she said.

“Too much work,” I responded, “I would never do production baking.”

At my current age of sixty-five, it probably takes me two days to make the four main cookie doughs and perhaps another two or three days to roll, cut, decorate and bake three kinds of cookies, plus a half-day to ice the pfefferneusse. It is a lot of work, special to the Christmas season: I only make these cookies once a year in a year when I have time to bake. I enjoy baking them and baking them tires me: once a year is enough, but I miss them in years when I don’t make them. Sometimes I pack up tins of them to send to friends or send them home with Christmas dinner guests.

I don’t know whether I’ll get even the pfefferneusse made this year. Yesterday I made homemade noodles and cloverleaf yeast rolls. I have not made any Christmas pie yet (twelve days remember) and I still have to bake my Mom an elaborate lemon-filled coconut cake for her 94th birthday. I’ll make Christmas cookies again though in some less busy year because their absence has taught me how unique and wonderful they are.

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Categories Christmas baking, seasonal recipes

Seasonal Transformation: Summer into Fall into Spring Again

April 17, 2016 //
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Summer of 2015 was all about tomatoes for me: the forty-some volunteer tomato plants sprang from seeds of fallen tomatoes I planted last spring. They grew, blossomed, played host to myriad aphids and, in spite of that, produced more tomatoes than I have ever had to work with, mostly cherry tomatoes and a drying variety called Principe Borghese. All July and August I picked them, washed them, dried them, put up vats of pasta sauce in the freezer. I made experimental tomato sugar plums. I considered making tomato caramel. We ate them in Greek salad and BLTs. I developed two versions of a pasta using pan-roasted cherry tomatoes and fresh corn with either andouille or chicken chorizo (The Mexican version is my favorite).

The only thing I didn’t do is can them — we don’t have a dishwasher and I don’t have a canning kettle or a living grandmother to show me all of the old-fashioned tricks for canning in a simple kitchen.

The summer ended with a week-long heat wave. I watered the plants on the first day and then they were on their own because it was too hot to venture into our unshaded yard.

Last weekend I cut the abundant dry weeds from the side yard, probably twelve or sixteen grocery bags of them. Some of them were taller than I was. That felt like a fall chore. Then, yesterday, I sang at the Farmers’ Market in Berkeley. It was a fall market all of a sudden. There were strawberries, but not enough for everyone who wanted to take them home. There were a few peaches left, but more pears. And there were apples everywhere — I bought fifteen pounds of mixed varieties for ten dollars and cut down a cardboard box so that I could shove them in my refrigerator to join the bowl of Gravensteins I bought for pies a few weeks ago (It has been too hot to turn on the oven). I do not know the names of all of the apples I got, or the flavors and textures: lunch today may be a hunk of bread, pieces of cheese and slices of different apples. My new favorite, identified by the farmer who sold me the mix, is a Royal Empire, a mid-season apple: they taste exotic, spicy, and have plenty of juice and crunch.

The tomatoes are still producing fruit and blossoms. I begin to think of drying more of them, running the dehydrator at night. I also begin to think of soup, perhaps a corn chowder with the last of the sweet corn, or a butternut squash soup from last year’s squash — I still have a few in the garage. Perhaps I will cook them all and store the puree in the freezer for easy fall and winter soups. I freeze the seeds and skins, too, for stock.

I am not assured of cool weather. The weather is the wild card in California. Four years of drought. Record heat. There are clouds in the sky this morning, which means it will not get as hot as it otherwise could, but it has been a crap shoot whether to turn on the oven for months — as soon as I make pie crust, it turns too hot to bake. Make iced tea and we will have a cool day and I will get out the tea pot and drink hot tea instead. I have taken to watching the news on TV just to hear what they are saying about the weather.

It is dark later in the mornings: soon I will begin my walk to BART in the dark. It is dark when I get up now and the light fades early. I don’t remember dark mornings coming in early September, but I guess they do every year.

I do remember the food transitions. Right now I have lemons, peaches, Armenian cucumbers and red bell peppers, plus all of those apples.  I did not cook last week, living on milkshakes, smoothies, the occasional Greek salad and canned re-fried beans. Yes, I stock those for emergencies, hot weather and days when I am too tired to make my own from dried pintos. I think I should make some roasted strawberries for Johnny for the winter if I see strawberries next week.

When I was writing this post last, it was becoming fall 2015. Now it is spring 2016 and volunteer tomatoes are up in the yard, along with lots and lots of chard and kale that re-seeded themselves (I don’t mind at all — they compete with the weeds). I have three butternut squash plants — I threw a rotting squash from 2014 into a heavily mulched area and, voila, new squash plants.

We are eating fresh strawberries again and lots of fresh salads, which helps us both in our efforts to lose pounds we accumulated over 2015. I am baking sourdough bread once more. My latest quest is to eat “clean food” — i.e. food not touched by the industrial food system. For now we have given up white sugar and most white flour. We use maple syrup and dried fruit in our oats. We eat polenta. I use commercial whole wheat and rye flours in bread, with just a little bread flour, but I am on the track of a freshly-milled whole wheat flour. Although I miss cheese and pasta, I do buy some organic milk and yogurt from a dairy farmer. We eat a lot of legumes, too, and wild-caught shrimp and fish.

Eating less sugar was the big surprise. My skin improved. My gums improved. I still daydream about good desserts, but fresh fruit tastes really good when it is ripe, local and seasonal, whether it is strawberries or blood oranges. Dried fruit offers other options. Sometimes I will have yogurt with fruit and honey. Right now I am enjoying the freshness of a lot of things we eat: today my lunch was a salad of watercress, lettuce, cilantro, roasted beets, raw carrots, walnuts, feta and blood oranges in a balsamic vinaigrette.

I have had a left knee injury since December 2015, which is slowing me down and keeping me from things I like to do, but I found this draft post and thought I would send it out to all my patient readers to say that I am alive, still feeding us and growing things, still playing music, not painting much or writing much, watching the seasons turn through the plants in the yard and the food on our plates.

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Categories gardening, home cooking, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized

March Transformation: The Ascendance of Thinking

March 31, 2015 //
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Hello. It is the last day of March and I have moved again: on March 21 I moved out of my mother’s house and back to San Leandro. I am still unpacking things and rearranging them — I can’t remember where everything went last time around, although I remembered the locations of all of the pieces of furniture. As I settle into the house and take up routines of cleaning and cooking I find myself thinking a lot.

These are the kinds of things I think. “I want to make some bread. I don’t have any whole wheat flour. I have oats and cornmeal and molasses and white flour. I can make anadama bread. If I make double amounts of the cornmeal mush we can have cornmeal pancakes for breakfast tomorrow. If the oven is on to bake bread, I should roast a butternut squash from the cache that I grew last year. We can have that tonight with baked beans and fresh bread.” Then I bake bread and roast squash, saving the squash innards in the freezer for some future batch of butternut squash soup. Using the oven to prepare more than one dish at a time is something I learned from my mother in her kitchen.

I think about the garden. Because I am going on a short trip to New Mexico in late April I do not want to start seedlings or plant anything new outside until I get back. The garden, however, had plans of its own. Forty tomato plants have started themselves from the smushed remains of last year’s tomatoes, tomatoes that fell off the huge Sun Gold vine. Many of them decided to grow between the tiles of the only paved area in the yard, although some have reasserted themselves in the soil by the fence where I planted them last year. The largest of the patio tomatoes is now in flower. We will have to wait to see what we get because Sun Gold tomatoes are hybrid tomatoes. I had also planted Amish paste tomatoes and Principe Borghese. It remains to be seen if any of them have come up in the tomato forest. The chard asserted itself as well and formed two healthy clumps in a boggy area near the shed. So far my gardening activities have been limited to weeding, cutting down dandelions and thistles and teasing out oxalis from the stems of the chard. I cut chard everyday to eat, adding it to pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives and feta or scrambling it into eggs with scallions. I think, eating from the garden, that I would like to plant some lettuce soon, maybe some radishes for variety, and then I remember that I am going away in less than a month and it would be better not to plant anything until I can be here to tend the garden.

I think about what I need and what I don’t need. At certain points in unpacking I declare “I don’t need any more stuff.” Then I realize I haven’t seen my set of biscuit cutters (“Maybe they are in the cookie-cutter tins by the kitchen bookshelf”) or my dough cutter. Because two of my bookshelves sit in the kitchen as a makeshift pantry and china cabinet respectively I have to edit the books that I display on the bedroom shelves. Last time around I consigned the short story collections to the shed. This time I have them out, but I am thinking they will be boxed up once again so that I have room for music books and volumes of poetry. Another strategy is to place books I have bought but have not yet read on a high shelf and to ask Johnny, who is tall, to get them down as I need them. Tomorrow, my “day off” I will face the book-sorting issue: last time I rearranged the books three times before I was satisfied.

When I spill water on the floor I am full of desire for a new, more effective mop and a large batch of cotton rags. When I think of making soup I covet an immersion blender, or, at least, a working regular blender. When I bake bread in conjoined loaf pans I remember the nice set of bread pans I saw at a thrift store in Berkeley and wonder if they are rust-proof and if they are still there. I make mental lists of groceries: whole wheat flour, lemons, sour cream, cinnamon sticks. Whenever I put something away in some inconvenient place I think, “Is there a better place for that in the kitchen?” (or the bedroom, or the bathroom).

As per the last time I moved I cannot find my camera battery on the evening that I write this blog post. If I find it soon I will perhaps add some pictures of the tomato forest.

Anadama Bread

In a saucepan combine:

1 and 1/2 cups water

1 tsp salt

1/3 cup cornmeal

Stir constantly until cornmeal thickens and bubbles. Pour into mixing bowl.

In a glass measuring cup, measure 1 and 1/2 Tbsp of corn oil or soft shortening. Add to cornmeal mixture.

In that same greasy measuring cup, pour 1/3 cup molasses. Add molasses to cornmeal.

DO NOT WASH THAT CUP YET. Into that molasses-smeared cup, put 1/4 cup water. Pop it in the microwave for a few seconds until lukewarm and add 4 and 1/2 tsp yeast. Stir with a fork until the yeast dissolves.

In another bowl measure 4 cups sifted flour.

Either go away and leave cornmeal mixture to cool to lukewarm and then add dissolved yeast OR start adding flour to the cornmeal mixture, which will help cool it. When the mixture is lukewarm add the rest of the flour and the dissolved yeast and begin to knead the dough. You may have to add more flour to overcome the stickiness of the molasses. I like to turn the dough out of the bowl and knead it on a lightly-floured  wooden surface.

When the bread is smooth and no longer sticky, add 1 Tbsp butter or oil or shortening to the mixing bowl and place the dough in it again. Cover with a dampened and warmed linen or cotton towel and leave to rise in a warm place until doubled (over an hour). Punch down. Let rise again (about half an hour).

Grease a bread pan or pans and shape dough. This recipe makes a good-sized round loaf or four small loaves. Preheat oven to 375 Bake for forty to forty-five minutes until nicely browned. Remove loaves from pans and let cool before slicing.

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Categories baking, bread, gardening, home cooking, Philosophy, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized, vegetables
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