Russian Tea Party

Made a lovely selection of zakuski for afternoon tea with @onstad and @lifeandmarmalade yesterday — from the top: roasted peppers in adjika and krestianskaya sausage (both store-bought from Roman Russian Market), white cheddar, mustard, turmeric pickled eggs, pickled beets, homegrown cornichons, dark rye, tomato-cucumber salad, 

Cocoa-Banana Breakfast Bread

Why should breakfast bars and protein cookies get all the glory? These mini-loaves have all the joyful decadence of a chocolaty banana bread while packing 14 grams of protein and nearly a quarter of a day’s recommended calcium. Plus it’s fiber-rich and high in iron. 

Fast Caramel Corn

Caramel corn: not just for the holidays anymore! Fun fact: as long as you have a paper bag, all popcorn is microwave popcorn. I made dead-simple caramel corn by drizzling and tossing hot popcorn with warm @almachocolate habanero caramel and @jacobsensaltco flake salt, and it’s 

Holiday Cheer

Food blogging has sort of jumped the shark, hasn’t it? Has anyone else noticed this? The concept that “when things I like become popular, they are ruined” has never felt truer to me than it does lately, and I think it was therapeutic (and honest?) 

Japadog meets K-pop

A nice couple weeks, it’s been. Lovely weather, lots of delicious cooking, but nothing really noteworthy that I can think of. I guess I could show you the nettle risotto I made, but I’ve already blogged that (though this time I made it with ham 

Pork-Shiitake Niku Dango

Niku dango are Japanese meatballs, and are the perfect accompaniment to beer and noodles (two of my favorite things). Meatballs, in general are huge right now – Bon Appetit magazine recently had a whole issue devoted to them. Shit, 20% of all my (granted, now 

Yaki gyoza

I wanted to make gyoza with some of the ground pork from the quarter hog we bought, but having never made them before, had to thumb through my (only) two Japanese cookbooks for help. One of my books is just a pretty sushi book, but 

Misoyaki Maki

We’d been invited to a champagne-tasting party, to which we were instructed to bring an appie or somesuch. Easy, right? Except that I totally procrastinated, and it started snowing. Hard. I didn’t want to press my luck and brave a drive to the store for 

Curry okra and green tomato pickle

A couple months ago, before the tomatoes were really getting good, I accidentally knocked a few off the vine trying to get to my beans or something. These were my first tomatoes, so I valued each one like my firstborn and I brought them in, 

Curry popcorn with dried cranberries

Yes, I’m posting popcorn. On a Friday morning. After the harried 5-times-a-week Foodbuzz challenge, I decided to take a wee break after the 10th. I’m still trying to figure out if I can/want to keep up the pace indefinitely. So for today, I show you