Sunday afternoon in Berlin. It becomes a social dead zone the minute the weather turns chilly. You wake up after a Saturday night out, and know that your friends are probably just crawling out of bed as well, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. The shops are all closed. Without nice weather, there’s really [...]
The weather here has suddenly turned cold and wintery, and I, in turn, have started cooking as if my life depended on it. In the last week I’ve made roasted corn salad, corn bread, and brownies in mass quantities, all now stocked away in my freezer. Except for the corn salad. That only lasted a [...]
I stumbled upon this recipe for flax bread in a low-carb forum, and I’ve been addicted to it ever since. It’s as simple to make as an omelet (in fact, maybe simpler), absolutely delicious, and endlessly variable. I’ve made it into a sweet “nut-bread” style snack with the addition of some sweetner and cinnamon. I’ve [...]
Yesterday, as if mandated by some sort of genetic coding, I found myself unconsciously mimicking my grandmother, frying sliced eggplant in an olive-oil filled pan. It must be genetics, because I never fry eggplant in olive oil. I steam it, cube it, bake it – but I can never bring myself to add oil to [...]
Every time I tell someone that I can’t eat gluten, I get a similar response: “Oh my god! What DO you eat?”
Once, this conversation occurred while I was grocery shopping with a friend. I’d just told him that I’d have to skip the breakfast roll he was about to grab for me. Feeling guilty, he [...]
It’s becoming tradition that every year I make my flatmate a cheesecake for his birthday. This makes me happy for a number of reasons. First of all, because it gives me an excuse to bake. But more importantly, it made me realize that I’ve been here long enough to start establishing traditions. I have less [...]
I’ve been totally addicted to the combination of honey and sesame lately. The bitter-sweet combination of tahini paste and honey with apples, or on toast – or straight out of the jar. Crunchy almonds drizzled with honey and sprinkled with sesame seeds. The nutty-sweet sesame candies they sell in the Turkish supermarket. I can’t get [...]
Last week, two friends of mine came to visit Berlin. They’ve both been living out of the US, for over a year, which means they haven’t had decent Mexican food in at least that long. And I’d been dying for an excuse to cook for a bunch of people.
The Menu:Shredded pork, refried beans, mild salsa, [...]
Last week I found a recipe on 101 Cookbooks that piqued my curiosity. It was a gluten-free brownie recipe, using pureed black beans as the base. Always willing to experiment, I made a batch for a friend’s birthday party.
They were delicious. As promised, no one detected the slightest hint of bean-flavor. The combination of sweet [...]
This was supposed to be an Easter post. I was even going to make a cute reference to the egg-like shape of the celery root (celeriac) that I picked up the other day… but then life intervened, and the Easter-egg reference is now all-but-useless.
I had a giant celery root (celeriac) forcibly gifted to me [...]
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