Asian cashew salad out of a bag from Costco, with chopped lettuce, carrots, almonds, and cashews, and with sesame dressing that took on the sweetness and consistency of jelly. I would eat it again. (Photo: Los Angeles Cloud Forest, Costa Rica.) >> February 25 << February 23

Fried chicken from Pollo Campero, the closest thing to Pollos Hermanos we have in the neighborhood. This is not to cast aspersions upon the owners, whom I do not know. What really stood out to me was the side of beans; they tasted like they were cooked in a bath of salt and herbs. (Photo:…

Sugar cookies with lemon and nutmeg. The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion calls this an easy recipe that’s fun for the kids to make, and well, if that’s the case then I can’t wait to see what they have in store for adults. These cookies are made with shortening instead of oil or butter, and…

Cranberry scones. The Joy of Cooking recipe says to brush the scones with either sugar or salt. Those are two very different things, and I would think the character of the scones is going to be determined in large part by whichever decision you make. But the basic recipe works well: cut ¼ cup butter…

Home-cooked Ethiopian food. I don’t have a cookbook and I don’t know of any definitive website, but at a basic level, Ethiopian is very simple. I learned a lot of it from chatting with the sales clerk while she rang me up. There are three essential ingredients: berbere spice powder, a jar of kibbeh (a…

I don’t know why I’ve always been so against eating Campbell’s soup, which was probably the first thing I ever cooked as an adult. (The cookies I helped my mom make when I was a kid are a different, and far more delicious story.) Unless I’m sick, I will willingly eat almost anything else in…

I spent the day arguing with people on the phone and then I had ground beef with harissa (“Tunisia’s main condiment” according to the Internet, but I only had it in a powder form rather than a paste like sriracha), blended with tomato paste to create a red sauce for the beef. (Photo: The Army Fun…

Chicken in almond sauce, from the Castile-La Mancha region of Spain. This is a good example of a dish that takes on the subdued tones of winter but isn’t boring, in which the flavor is more complex than a conventional roast or a stew, but you don’t take the easy way out by drowning everything…

When I can, I like to use ingredients that make sense for the time of year and the mood outdoors. Perhaps it’s more sustainable this way, but it’s certainly tastier and it just seems to make sense. (I know very little about Japanese cuisine, but they seem to have an obsession with seasonal cooking that’s…

Vietnamese beef fondue. For the sauce, it calls for mắm nêm, which is anchovy-based, and it smells fishy (there is no better word for it) when you open the bottle. The sauce becomes a lot more pleasant when you add mashed pineapples, sugar, lemon juice, and garlic. For the fondue, you prepare a broth: The…

I wanted to make a strawberry cake, but I didn’t have strawberries. I tried using frozen cherries, but we know full well that substitutes will not work. Strawberries and cherries and raspberries and blueberries are all very different even if the words sound almost the same. If you want a strawberry cake, however, there’s a…

We had just heard about Scalia when we went out for my birthday at a Belgian restaurant called B Too, and as a result we kept wanting to look at our phones to figure out what it all meant. We ordered little waffles baked with smoked salmon in the center: basically, an interfaith blend of…