French toast. I didn’t have any eggs so it was really just milk toast, and I should probably call it Swedish, but that isn’t the main point I want to make here. My point is that I have no idea where to find maple syrup around here that’s as good as it is in Minnesota…

In the aftermath of the snowstorm, walking to the Irish pub required overcoming a series of obstacles, or I’ll call them levels. Passing the first level meant figuring out how to walk up our street, which was buried in snow and doesn’t have sidewalks. We opted for the detour up a hill to the main…

Hamburgers with kimchi. We got the kimchi from Seoul Food and unlike grocery store kimchi, it gives you cucumbers that taste fresh even though they’re pickled. (Photo: Rocklands “Global Warming” tamarind chipotle hot sauce.) >> January 25 << January 23  

When we moved to our neighborhood a few years ago, one of the first local businesses I walked into was a cake decorating store. “Wow,” I remember saying out loud, “So interesting that you have an entire store about cake decorating!” They pressed me to buy some of their products (like sprinkles, Valentine’s Day heart…

Tuscan roast pork, with a rosemary and garlic mixture stuffed inside. I tried to follow the Cook’s Illustrated instructions and “double butterfly” the pork loin, and then I gave up partway through when my skills with a knife clearly weren’t up to the task. There may be a part of me that’s an artist but…

We decided to get takeout so we would have enough food saved at home for the upcoming snowstorm, or at least that’s what seemed like a good idea at the time. I was waiting in line at Seoul Food, the Korean restaurant in our neighborhood gas station, and I picked up a copy of a…

Crema catalana. It’s one of Catalonia’s signature desserts and made an appearance in a 14th-century cookbook, the Llibre de Sent Soví. Similar to crème brûlée, it’s made using milk instead of cream and flavored with cinnamon and orange or lemon peel, and you stir the custard on the stove rather than baking ramekins in a…

Corn bread. I made the “Southern” version, which according to Joy of Cooking means you bake it in a cast-iron skillet and use only cornmeal and no flour. I had inadvertently left a lot of olive oil in the skillet and it changed the texture of the bottom third of the loaf, which ended up…

Roasted butternut squash with tahini sauce. This, from the Jerusalem cookbook by Ottolenghi and Tamimi, has the colors and texture to make it a good choice for a Thanksgiving dinner. It reminds me of peanut butter and it’s just as delicious, except the squash ends up a bit smushed together and shapeless. To make the…

Catalan fish soup (suquet de peix). It starts with a base of tomatoes and garlic cooked in olive oil. In Catalan that’s a sofregit (pronounced so-fruh-geet, or a sofrito in Spanish; Wikipedia has a good list of the different ways to make a sofrito by country and region.) The more distinctively Catalan part of it…

Tomato soup with too much cheese cooked inside it, reminding me of a mozzarella stick. We had it at a bar on the way to see The Big Short, a movie about the Wall Street traders who made money betting against the housing market. These ruthless individuals liked to eat at Nobu (both in NYC…

Sloppy joes. I ate them as fast as I could so I could finish reading the second volume of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. The other night I fell asleep reading it and ended up half-awake convinced that everything in the book was real — and who’s to say it isn’t? I don’t think…