A good honest burger made over hot charcoal. Mighty hard to argue with.

Cole slaw recipe courtesy of Tyler Durden, I mean Tyler Florence.

In the background: Southern Sweet Tea, our own recipe. Also, a sliver of Don in his Hawaiian shirt for the day. Chillin' on our Fourth of July weekend vacation.

I picked up the burger ingredients at the new neighborhood grocery, Pierce's, after spending a couple of hours there writing my article for ANEW magazine for August. Subject: beekeeper Mary Celley. Pierce's has a comfy coffeeshop-like area, with free wireless Internet. They even have free coffee, which   more »

A few weeks ago, Don saw a Good Eats episode where host Alton Brown, a fanatical do-it-yourselfer, constructs a smoker out of terra cotta flower pots, using a hot plate and a pie pan for heating wood chips and a round grill to suspend the food. He's been talking about it ever since. Then he sat me down and made me watch the episode, too (he had recorded it). "After you watch this, you'll want to do this right away!" he said. He was right.

So we've both been excited about this and laying plans to built this clay smoker contraption for our long weekend together around the Fourth.

The Fourth is on Tuesday this year, and I have paid holiday from my wonderful job where they actually respect workers; I also requested, months ago, to take Monday off as well.
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Ulysses held up a toy T-Rex -- a dark purple, realistically styled, suede-ish critter about 4" high, once merchandise from my street vendor days in Philly -- and said, all throaty and gutteral,   more »

I don't how long I've been wanting to make sausage. Here it is! I'm doin' it! Homemade kielbasa! Loaded with paprika and spicy goodness. Delicious roasted in a cast iron skillet or boiled in a big pot with a head of cabbage and a load of potatoes and carrots.
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I've made it by feel in the past, but I looked for methods for Turska Kava preparation on the Net anyway. The best was this extensive "tutorial" -- also the top "Turkish coffee" hit on Google.
http://www.ineedcoffee.com/04/turkishcoffee/

The worst was this Food Network entry, unattributed to any show:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_1852,00.html
One foaming only, medium roast instead of dark, and no mention of the coffee being anything other than an ordinary grind!

Ulysses discovered that the bottom canister of the Turkish coffee grinder was the perfect storage case for bows from Christmas present wrapping. Up to two bows fit inside, if you push really hard. If you have very small fingers and hands, it's convenient to reach all the way into the bottom of the canister to retrieve   more »

Merry Christmas! Donald got me a Turkish coffee grinder. I've been wanting one for years. This one is brass and made in India. You turn the crank and pulverize whole beans into a fine dust. Finally, we can have freshly ground Turkish/Serbian coffee at home, like I remember from Yugoslavia and from so many Serbian households in America.  Why not just use an electric coffee grinder?

It doesn't work. You can run that thing all day, and once the coffee is chopped (it's not truly ground in those little whirling-blade devices) down to a certain size, it won't get any ...   more »

Today I brought a platter of these cookies to the James Reeb Unitatian Universalist Congregation's Holiday Bake Sale. I wrote up the recipe, and the story of how I came to the recipe, and took it along. I sold the cookies for 50 cents -- 3 for a dollar -- and the recipes for a buck!

The cookies sold out. Selling the recipes made it so I could raise more $$ for the church than with just the cookies alone!

One parishoner is part Croatian. She remembered vanilice as her favorite cookies, that her grandmother used to make. She said ...   more »

OK, as promised, here it is: the best stuffing I've ever eaten!

This was influenced by some stuffing recipes in Joy of Cooking, 1975 edition. (Not the nasty, upscale-designer-y New Joy, updated, tamed and eviscerated for the new, "lighter," modern lifestyle!) No fear-mongering about the dangers of food poisoning from stuffing cooked in the bird that wasn't cooked to a high enough temperature. You just make sure to cook it long enough - duh!

The other influence was the recipe on the bag of Brownberry stuffing bread cubes, unseasoned.

In Joy, I learned that oysters were once a staple feature in   more »

This was our first Thanksgiving at home together as a family. (It was Ulysses's second TG; last year we went to a dinner at James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Congregation.)

Don and I have cooked Thanksgiving dinner at home together plenty of times, and even had people over. But somehow, because of Ulysses, it was a family thing.

Even though all he ate was a ring of canned cranberry jelly at dinner and some of my homemade pumpkin pie later, at dessert.

The food was incredible! The roast turkey with olive oil and fresh marjoram and laurel was the best turkey ...   more »

More fashion direction: I was wearing a nice skirt and top while we were out, for the first time in maybe a couple of months. But I peeled them off on coming home. I was planning on heating and eating some of that beef and pork biryani I made the other day -- delicious, and loaded with Indian spices of high stain potential. In anticipation of the possibility that U might join me in a bowl of stew -- literally -- I got down to underwear.

Ulysses found the clothes in their pile on the floor and picked them up, ...   more »

Don has been on vacation from Union Cab this week. One project he's been looking forward to is getting the tools and learning the method for making
a New York style pizza: thin, chewy crust with a good, firm body, not too much sauce, not too fancy on the toppings. Just good tomato pizza sauce made from scratch, natch, with mozzerella and pepperoni. He got a pizza stone for baking on. Must have a very high temperature, around 500F. And, to build the pizza on, and to slide it in and out of the overn, a wooden peel -- one of ...   more »

Overheard at Woodman's East grocery store. I'm shopping for canned tomatos. Whole, because I heard enough people on the Food Network saying they're closer to the goodness of fresh because they're the least processed. That makes enough sense to me. Lately that's the only kind of canned tomato I get, and I pour the can into a bowl and crush it with my fingers, rustica, for those nice naturalistic tomato chunks, a la Mario Batali. And unseasoned, natch.

Anyhoo.

Teenage girl is talking on cell phone, trailing behind her mother, who is pushing a cart. "I'm still not done ...   more »

This is Ulysses's favorite picture. It came from Ocean Meir at James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Congregation in May, along with a thank-you card she sent me for making baklava for the month's International Lunch, Greek theme. You can see where he's affectionately sucked on the edge of it. He carries it around in the seat compartment of his Sesame Street rider. Every now and then he takes it out and holds it up to admire, looking at the faces of the three animals and saying his word that means "animal": a baby-pitched "Woof, woof!"   more »

Michelle Godwin and I have been trying to get together for weeks. Make that months.  Finally, we got together for a Serbian Christmas celebration. ...   more »

To celebrate Don's birthday, we went to Poppa's Gyro's on ...   more »

Happy 8-month birthday, Ulysses!

Today I went to a Kefir and Kombucha workshop at the Willy St. Coop. Finally, I got kefir grains! We put them in pasteurized, organic milk soon after I got home.

Another coup: Finally, I am very close to ongoing sources of raw milk! One of the workshop participants has a neighbor who is in a raw milk coop. Three of us gave her our contact info, and she promised to pass it on to the neighbor. I hope she follows through! Even if not, I got the name of a farm in Rubicon that sells ...   more »

Today I've been cooking up a storm while Don is at work. Miraculously, Ulysses slept most of the morning. So I made some things to go for the week. A big pot of chili is in the oven, made with stir-fry beef, kidney beans, chili beans, pinto beans, Penzey's chili con carne blend, and extra cumin, hot pepper, and paprika. And of course my favorite secret chili ingredient, a big tablespoon of cocoa powder. Also a sack of dried chilis: pasillos negros.
Before that, I made a tray of Greek pastitsio, kind of like what I remember from when ...   more »

Ah, pot roast. Nothing like browing up a big hunk of beef and then stewing it for hours and hours in a not-too-hot stove. Today I put an Organic Valley arm roast in our fabulous enameled iron French casserole (a big, heavy, oval number) and let it go at 275 all day. Basically, I follow Alton Brown's technique.
Also present: sauteed onions, garlic, capers, raisins, a sack of dried Oriental mushnrooms (Shiitakes? Maybe.), daikon, carrots, Penzey's Fajita blend seasoning, eggplant, and a bundle of herbs from the garden: summer savory, basil, and lovage.
Also jicama. I ...   more »