Vegetarian chili, aside from being the perfect meal for a cold winter day, is also one of my favorites because it happens magically when I’m nowhere near the kitchen. Yesterday evening I was on the floor of the writing room, re-arranging paragraphs of my latest essay that I’d cut into…
“Salt in hot chocolate?” I wondered aloud, reading from the can of unsweetened Hershey’s cocoa. It was my first time making hot chocolate not from a mix. “Leave it out,” my husband Wayne yelled from the other room, with the conviction of one who happily omits any ingredients he deems…
Even though I have great admiration for traditional miso soup, I don’t make it at home. The soup that I make has miso paste in it, but is a whole meal with noodles and various vegetables, and is much more suited to my attention-deficit-style of cooking. In Japanese restaurants, miso…
Technically, you can turn anything into pizza. That’s what I used to believe, anyway. When I was in middle school, I used to pride myself on being able to make pizza out of any starch we had around the house. I don’t know exactly how this began, but when I…
It’s not true that a watched pot never boils. What happens is it hovers on the edge of almost-boiling for so long that after a long stretch contemplating the quiet liquid and floating vegetables you sigh and turn away and get involved in something else so that by the time…
“Vegetarian French onion soup? How do you do that?” everyone wanted to know. I wasn’t exactly sure, but I had a plan: use Julia Child’s method for the onion part of the soup and for the “French” part, that is, the browned, melted cheese suspended on toasted bread, which then…
My husband, Wayne, and I disagree on broth. He claims that the key to excellent broth is long simmered chicken bones and parts. Or those of beef or pork. I’ll admit that plenty of world culinary history backs up his contention. Still, because I don’t eat chicken, beef or pork,…
