With a general shift of online interaction to social media, group chats, and forums (reddit, etc), and the death of Google Reader (R.I.P.), I and many folks I know drifted away from personal blogs or websites over the past decade. Yet– of all the little web/blog hobby projects I’ve had over the years, this is one I still refer back to. Just last week I decided to cook some tandoori-style chicken and Googled ‘robotmusteat tandoor chicken’ to jog my memory on the yogurt marinade I’d used five years ago, since this is the only place I wrote it down. ...

This one-pan baked polenta with greens and eggs from the NY Times Coronavirus Cooking series was easy and satisfying and took about an hour. I started with half an ear of corn and a whole large shallot (minced) sautéed in butter, and baked them with polenta, water, and about three cups of chard greens from the garden. Near the end I made divots and added in eggs to bake in place, and I finished it with various green herbs and a little grated parmesan. ...

An excellent and relatively easy dinner. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Salt trout, let it rest 15 minutes, drizzle good olive oil over it, and wrap it tightly in fig leaves (it took about eight big leaves from the tree in our yard, overlapped, to fully enclose two packets without holes). Bake it for about 20 minutes until flaky and done. The fig leaves gave off an pleasant, fruity aroma as they roasted and when we tore them open, and the trout itself was moist, soft, and delicious (with almost a hint of coconut flavor from the leaves? is that crazy?) ...

I’ve made these Vietnamese-inspired meatballs three times, and they’ve been satisfying in a lettuce wrap with piles of fresh herbs, on a bowl of brown rice with a spicy cucumber salad and steamed vegetables, or simmered in poultry stock from the freezer (a good way to use leftover cooked meatballs the next day…): I was inspired by this NYTimes Cooking recipe but have tweaked it each time I make them, my current version is: ...

Another quick pasta meal incorporating some vegetables from the garden (roughly a pasta alla norma): Fry small eggplants in a little olive oil for 10-15 minutes until soft (should have peeled them first), season and set aside. Saute some onions and garlic and chili flake– then add diced tomatoes and cook down (maybe 15 minutes). Add the eggplant back in, combine with pasta, pistachios, grated parmesan, and lots of chopped fresh basil… ...

This summer I grew a small plot of fava beans– not enough for a main dish, but I improvised a sauce for pasta combining fresh favas, green garlic, a few anchovy filets, pecorino, parsley, and mint (plus more cheese at the end):

Earlier this fall I made some delicious tandoori-style chicken for an Indian-themed dinner party. This may be the best-tasting chicken I’ve cooked in a long time. I figured, I have a kamado-style ceramic-walled charcoal grill / smoker that can easily get up to 700 degrees F (which I’ve used to make pizza in the past)– there must be some way to use this as an approximation of a tandoor. I did some reading, and as often seems to be the case, there was an article by Kenji on Serious Eats on this very idea. ...

For an Indian-themed dinner party that included tandoori chicken cooked in the charcoal grill / smoker, I also wanted to make fresh naan. As usual, there’s a Serious Eats article about it. I made a few test batches the previous weekend with both white and whole wheat flour, cooked under either the broiler or in a cast iron skillet: While I liked the taste of a 50% white-whole-wheat-flour naan and it cooked fairly well, white bread flour combined with a preheated oven + pizza steel + broiler on during cooking led to a really fluffy, puffy naan, which I used for a larger dinner party. If I tried it again, I’d use whole wheat flour but add some vital wheat gluten powder as I’ve done with bagel-making. ...

I’ve made pakora-inspired fried vegetable fritters a number of times in different contexts. After some experimentation, here’s the approach I like best: Coarsely shred a range of root vegetables, alliums, and brassicas. My favorite mix: carrots, onions, broccoli, cauliflower An alternate winter mix: Brussels sprouts, onions, carrots, cabbage For a large batch of pakoras as appetizers for a 12-person dinner party, I combined: 6 cups coarsely shredded vegetables (squeeze in a colander to get as much liquid out of them as possible) 6 small green chiles, chopped 1 tsp crushed garlic (or more) 1 tsp grated ginger (or more) 1 T garam masala I let them sit for another 30 minutes in the colander to drain, then squeezed the liquid out of them one more time. Then added: ...

Another simple meal pattern: legumes, roasted vegetables, yogurt, and optionally meat. In this case, fresh shelling beans ( simmered on medium-low 30-40 minutes with aromatics + herbs), winter squash from the garden and broccoli (both chopped, tossed with olive oil and salt, and roasted in a 400F oven for 20-30 minutes), and a pan-fried sausage and some yogurt (optional: fermented hot sauce). It does take three pots/pans, but only 45 minutes (depending on how long the beans take to cook), so it’s on our roster as a common weeknight or weekend meal with endless variants… ...

An easy weeknight two-pot meal combining a range of fall ingredients I like. Wash, trim, and chop two leeks (keeping most of the green part as well) Put them in a skillet with a pat of butter on low heat, salt, cover, and let slowly cook for about 30 minutes as they give off water and reduce, until creamy-soft and sweet (stir once every 5 minutes or so) While they’re cooking, skin and dice eggplants (I used 6 tiny eggplants from the garden, could also use one medium eggplant). Add them to the leeks for the last 15 minutes or so of the cooking time. Clean and roughly break up chanterelle mushrooms, add them for the last 3-4 minutes. Boil salty water for pasta, cook the pasta, throw diced green beans in for the last minute. Drain the pasta, add to the skillet, and cook another minute. Serve. ...

Every year I grow a few varieties of fresh shelling beans, and when I’m lucky I find them at the local markets as well. A common even weeknight-fast way of cooking them is to combine beans, salty water, a splash of olive oil, some aromatic (half an onion, a shallot, a clove of garlic), a whole dried hot pepper pod (without seeds if I want it to be less spicy), and a bay leaf. ...

Cooking dry beans? How boring and simple a concept is that? I just cooked some great dried-but-not-old beans (Good Mother Stallard beans from this summer’s back yard garden, picked once the pods got papery and brittle and just stored in a mason jar), so I’m jotting down a few notes. I didn’t soak them overnight. I covered them with a few inches of water, fairly heavily salted (a palmful of salt, such that it actually tastes like salty water, though not seawater), added a spoonful of olive oil, a peeled shallot, and maybe 1/2 tsp each of mustard seed and fennel seed. ...

(quick notes, mostly jotted down to remember what worked well) My third try in three years, and the most successful (I got the grill up to 700 degrees, which I’m sure helped): Grill setup: plenty of charcoal below, all air passages cleared of ash, and a pizza stone (porous side up for my glazed/porous stone) raised on two bricks to bring the pizza close to the hot lid of the ceramic grill. I let the charcoal burn for 90 minutes with the lid closed to get the entire grill up to 650-700 degrees (when I tried making a pizza earlier, it burned on the bottom before it fully cooked on the top– I think because the ceramic grill lid wasn’t hot enough– I could also try further raising the stone next time). ...