In these times, having something under your control is essential to one’s sanity. Even better if it doesn’t require potential pathogen exposure. Julian and I have been cooking and baking up a storm with ingredients we have on hand.
Last week I got some burger out of the freezer. I didn’t have any buns in the house. No worries, I made my own. I found a recipe for Turkish breakfast buns in a little book I bought at 75% off several years ago. The dough included crumbled feta cheese, which I had in the fridge. I topped half of the buns with za’atar (Middle Eastern spice and sesame seed mixture). Julian approved.
On Tuesday I made an adaptation of an Egyptian lentil and rice recipe that Melissa Clark published in the New York Times. This is part of a series she’s running of adaptable recipes that utilize pantry ingredients. The critical part of the recipe is caramelizing the onions. Given that my commute these days is one flight of stairs down from the kitchen, this was fine by me. The results were very tasty. It would have been a more Instagram-worthy dish if I’d used red lentils, but I had French green ones. Clark just published a pound cake recipe that I may try later this week.
On Sunday I made some meat sauce for pasta, along with focaccia from Jim Lahey’s My Bread. Lahey is the originator of the no-knead bread that’s the most downloaded recipe in the history of The New York Times. The dough was nice and springy, and spread into the half sheet pan easily. Yesterday we both had focaccia poor man’s pizzas with the leftover sauce for lunch. A riff on nostalgia food.
Recent Comments