eccentric musings on food, drink, fun and life
From the category archives:
I can’t believe that we’re coming up on almost a year of weirdcombinations postings, that I love Mediterranean style food and have yet to write about hummus. That’s truly weird!
I make hummus all the time including with many variations. Usually I’ll fry the garlic in a bit of olive oil to reduce the heat (and [...]
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I like artichoke dips but don’t care for the premade kind. To me these always taste off. Perhaps it’s the preservatives used to keep the color? Anyway, I “invented” this recipe by looking at the list of ingredients on the packages of industrial type artichoke dips and improvised. Really this is [...]
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For ages I’ve been relying on a recipe for cranberry quick bread that I got on the back of a bag of fresh cranberries from Ocean Spray about twenty years ago. It calls for a lot of orange juice, which I find too intense. Since I don’t make the bread that often as [...]
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This is an ultra simple, yet elegant appetizer or garnish. You can literally throw it together in about thirty seconds. It goes well with Napa cabbage tabouli or most any Greek, Middle Eastern or Mediterranean style dishes. If you cut a large slab of feta and place it in an attractive [...]
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This is a very simple dip you can eat with pita bread, pita chips and crudités, like: raw carrot, celery and jicama sticks, as well as, cherry tomatoes, and broccoli and cauliflower florets or anything else that appeals to you. It’s essentially the same recipe you might use for hummus, but chickpeas get [...]
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This dipping sauce is very common in Vietnamese cooking where it’s used to flavor noodles, meat, spring rolls, rice or as a condiment at table. This time I used it to complement scallion pancakes. It’s sweet, sour, tart, salty, pungent and spicy. I love it to the point I can just drink it right [...]
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This recipe is a variation from Williams-Sonoma’s Savoring Mexico. It’s made about the same way as spicy chipotle salsa. However, ancho and pasilla chiles are both very mild (at least if you discard the seeds and inner ribs). So the final salsa is smoky and earthy flavored with just the faintest touch [...]
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This is a quick and easy recipe that always tastes better than store-bought. I think that I got it from the Williams Sonoma Savoring Mexicocookbook. It’s our second most popular Mexican sauce after tomatillo.
Spicy Chipotle Sauce
3 dried chipotle chiles
2 roma tomatoes
3 cloves garlic with peels
½ tsp. sea salt
Start by boiling some water in [...]
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The farmer’s market at the San Francisco Ferry Building plaza happens on Tuesdays as well as Saturdays! Lucky for me, I work nearby so I can make going on Tuesdays during my lunch time a regular thing. I like strolling there not only because of the market itself but also because I can [...]
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Our friend Aleksandar joined us last Saturday for a Macedonian style dinner and prepared a couple of great dishes from his native homeland: pindzur and stuffed cabbage. I’d had these before when he made them on a couple of other occasions. I devoured them with gusto those times! It was really exciting to [...]
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