It’s pronounced [skōn] because there’s an o in it.

I’ve been getting bored with having fried eggs and hrechka for breakfast every morning, and now that I know that I’m keeping my apartment, I decided to make some breakfast that would be worthy of a post. I like oatmeal, but it too has been getting boring. I started digging around on the internet and decided to bake something crispy and rich, and I stumbled upon a recipe for oat scones on Epicurious. Scone sounds really fancy, reminiscent of some foggy harbor in Ireland or Scotland. (For the record I do have a memory of eating scones in Ireland when I was 9.) However, they are actually extremely easy and fast to make. I had to do some adapting for Ukraine because we have no cream of tartar here (McGee informed me that baking soda reacts with the acid in the cream of tartar so I just threw in a 1/4 teaspoon of vinegar at the end). I think it turned out well.

The Joy of Roasting

This Friday I woke up early and walked over to the market. I wandered around for a bit before a beautiful piece of meat caught my eye. I took it home and wondered what to do with it and eventually decided to continue my foray into roasting. There seems to be a love of roasting among my peers; who doesn’t salivate at the thought of hot, slightly crispy meat? Vegetarians. But one would be hard-pressed to find a vegetarian whose eyes don’t widen at the mention of roasted squash or eggplant. On the other hand, there also seems to be a fear of roasting. We seem to associate the term with the hassles of Thanksgiving dinner, endless basting and burnt hands or, worse, with the disappointment of dessicated beef slathered in some sort of sauce and served with watery mashed potatoes in cafeterias and mediocre restaurants. However, inspired by love of roasted meat and vegetables, armed with McGee, and emboldened by recent successes with roasting chicken bits, Jason and I set forth to make some dinner.

Lazy #1

I don’t understand people who can’t cook or who claim that they have no time or energy to make delicious meals. Making complex, labor-intensive dishes is a lot of fun, but I can’t find the motivation every day. So I, like most cooks, have a repertoire of things to make when I feel lazy. None of these are dishes that will shock or awe anybody, but lazy dishes often make for some great eating (and hopefully some decent photos). Everybody has a favorite lazy dinner: my mother likes to make clean-the-refrigerator stir-fry. Some people throw together macaroni and cheese, some make omelets, some just grilled cheese, but this time I made my go-to lazy dinner.

Liver Redux

The mere mention of the word liver causes most people born after 1980 to balk. Perhaps they were overexposed to their grandmothers’ tough, overcooked version of it. Cartoons and kids’ shows depicting liver as the ultimate in adult misunderstanding of what kids want (pizza) served to deepen this distaste until it became the instinctual retch that it is now. However, I’d like to think that the rise of chefs like Fergus Henderson signal a willingness to reconsider. I have always loved liver (except during my vegetarian years) because I always had it cooked to the point that the outside was brown and crisp and the inside hot and creamy. It was always accompanied by fried onions that complimented the richness of the liver and, a little surprisingly given their own sulfur content, mollified somewhat the unpleasant flavors of the sulfur compounds that give liver its sometimes overstated flavor. So, this week I set out to find a way to make chicken liver, my favorite kind, more palatable to my peers. Only the cayenne and the grapes are actually my ideas; the rest of the recipe I cobbled together from bastardized Epicurious recipes. After some experimenting during the week, I recruited Colleen, whose generation regards chicken liver as a delicacy, to give me a hand and we got to work.