Alkahest

Cooking with the world’s most dangerous* additive; or
How I stopped worrying and learned to love MSG.
A few weeks ago, I heard Robert Krulwich on NPR talking about umami - the fifth taste. If you didn’t hear it, go to the link above. As always, Krulwich makes the story very engaging. He describes [...]

One of my favorite things is really good bread. Back when I was in school, I bought a book on making bread. It started from a home made sourdough starter that had no commercial yeast. It was basically water and flour with a few grapes tied in a bag to give it [...]

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July and if you had the day off, you enjoyed it.
I spent my day doing a little of this and a little of that. I picked up a low water use irrigation system that I’ve run to the flowers and the blueberry bushes. I’ll need [...]

I made a few things I’ve never made before for dinner last night, including lemon pizza and two kinds of ice cream.
The lemon pizza recipe is from the Wednesday Chef and was mentioned by someone on an IRC channel (etselec? I can’t remember - sorry).  K and I don’t eat salmon roe, so I substituted [...]

Technically, K and I are not vegetarians. We’re pesco-vegetarians: we’ll eat fish and I’ll eat shellfish (K just doesn’t like shellfish ). We didn’t become pesco-vegetarians overnight. We started by getting rid of red meat, so no pork, beef, lamb, etc. More recently, we stopped making chicken at home [...]