allspice – The Kitchen Illiterate

Chicken and Chard Burritos

Sometimes on Sundays I peruse cookbooks and I start getting excited. I start making up grocery lists and weekly menu plans, and I have it all figured out. I know that Thursday, I’m going to make Chicken Escabeche with Carrots and Jalapenos, and wild rice. Then things happen. The market doesn’t have any acceptable carrots, though the shelves are overflowing with beautiful leafy greens. Thursday, which seemed like a perfectly lovely day earlier in the week, turns out to be kind of exhausting, and when work is over and I’m standing in the kitchen, I know I don’t have the patience for wild rice. I have to re-think my plans, so that I can get back on the couch for a little restorative bad television. Sometimes when this happens, I turn to pizza, or bread and cheese. But sometimes when this happens, I get lucky, and something wonderful manages to happen in my own kitchen anyway. This was one of those times.
Continue reading Chicken and Chard Burritos

Persian Chicken Stew

It is no secret that I’ve been at a real standstill in the kitchen lately. It isn’t just culinary inspiration that’s been lacking, but the writerly inspiration, too. Even when I do cook something fantastic, I can’t seem to find anything interesting to say about it. For example, this stew. It’s great. It’s full of unique flavors, and I got to use some new ingredients, and I found all kinds of delicious things to do with the leftovers. And I’ve been trying now for weeks to sit down and say something that would make you all want to rush into your kitchens to get cooking. How am I doing?
Continue reading Persian Chicken Stew

Grandpa’s Favorite Spice Cake

My Grandparents both passed away this last April. Their deaths were unexpected: Both were pretty healthy for being 80 years old, and had just returned from spending the winter with my parents in San Diego, which they’ve been doing every year for the last 15 years. My Grandma had a stroke one spring afternoon while out tending her garden, and a week later, my Grandpa passed away of a heart attack. It’s a blessing that neither of them suffered, that they didn’t have to endure years of failing health and illness, that they lived together in their home until the end, and that they were surrounded by family in the days and weeks before they passed. But these blessings come with the sadnesses of unanticipated loss: There are so many things I never got to ask them, never got to learn, never got to understand about their histories, and their lives together.

Like most people, a lot of my family memories revolve around shared meals and food: beer cheese soup and summer sausage sandwiches every Christmas Eve; baking pies with Grandma in the summer and anticipating the scraps of dough, baked with cinnamon and sugar, as a treat; watching Grandpa grind potatoes with his old hand-cranked grinder for his famous potato pancakes; dusting Grandma’s funnel cakes, fresh out of the fryer, with powdered sugar; spreading peanut butter and honey over fried bread dough and calling it dinner. And even though I have countless kitchen memories shared with them, when I came across my Grandma’s ring of faded and smudged recipe cards in her kitchen last spring, I realized how many more family stories there were to share that I am never going to know about. Grandma’s recipes were the only thing I really wanted when my aunts and uncles started cleaning out their house.
Continue reading Grandpa’s Favorite Spice Cake