Another day, another need to use radishes from the backyard ‘winter garden’. I’ve pickled so often I was looking for something new (and not everyone wants a acidic, fiery pickle as often as I do…), and browsed a few articles about braised daikon like this one on Serious Eats. My very similar adaptation was pleasantly successful– a tender texture with some radish flavor but without the normal bite, and a ready vehicle for a rich miso+butter sauce: ...

I’ve made quick pickles many times– usually just soaking thinly-sliced vegetables in vinegar, but this simple variant turned out especially well so I’m jotting it down. I started with a daikon and some sort of purple Japanese radish from the winter garden: I sliced them thinly and tossed them with a few tsp of salt, massaging/mixing them with the salt again after 5 minutes. After about 10 minutes the salt had drawn a large amount of moisture out of the radish slices, and I quickly rinsed them and patted them dry. ...

For a less traditional savory breakfast, I enjoy the polenta-like, 100%-cornmeal, ‘Johnnycakes’ style of pancake with greens and eggs. But for eating with maple syrup or a special occasion, I like a fluffy cornmeal-and-wheat-flour mix: From a little bit of experimentation, my current favorite recipe goes heavier on the cornmeal (50/50 mix with flour) for flavor and texture, and includes either buttermilk or some yogurt. For a small batch of 8 pancakes (2 people): ...

My go-to quick breakfast is eggs + whatever’s in the fridge, but this particular version turned out especially well and I may do it again. I cooked minced shallots and garlic in olive oil for several minutes, then added finely diced cauliflower and some turmeric for another maybe 5 minutes until the cauliflower was very soft. I pushed it to the side of the pan and scrambled the eggs next to it, then mixed it all together (plus some hot paprika powder from pepper I grew this summer, and of course, salt and pepper). ...

This year I grew garlic in the back yard. It started with just three heads of an heirloom hardneck garlic variety ‘Music’ grown and seed-saved year after year by my parents. I stored the cloves in the fridge for a week before planting (in case that helps with vernalization in our mild winter climate– unclear), then planted them in a raised bed in January (about an inch down, 4" apart): ...

Back in mid-February I started some mouse melon seeds indoors under a grow light. Within a few weeks: Six weeks later, they were reaching out to grab onto anything nearby: Finally in mid-April I was able to plant them out (after “hardening them off” for a week by setting the seedlings outdoors under an awning in partial shade, to acclimate them to the outdoor weather). A makeshift trellis made from wire mesh and pieces of bamboo, at the end of a raised bed with compost and some drip irrigation along the roots: ...

For years, I’ve been thinking back to the strawberry ice cream of my youth– made from strawberries picked down the road that day and painstaking hand-cranked by kids and adults on the front porch in a wood bucket leaking salty ice. I finally had a chance to try to recreate it, at a 4th of July BBQ we threw for a few dozen friends and their kids, and it was all I remembered and more: ...

My Platonic ideal of a fish taco is fresh fish, simply grilled (not breaded or fried), with some salad and lime juice and maybe salsa, but no crema or other dairy-based sauce. When visiting Tulum (a few times 10 years ago, and again in 2017), my favorite fish tacos were at the cheap beach hotel Los Arrecifes: The setting is decidedly low-key– it often feels almost abandoned, without much signage and with one employee (if you’re lucky) working in a kitchen, and a patch of sand covered in campers’ tents… but the tacos were fresh and simple– very different from any number of bars along the Tulum beach that advertise “Tulum’s best fish taco” (but whose focuses are just as much the bar, music, and a place to hang out). ...

One highlight of a spring trip to the Yucatan peninsula was spending a post-cenote-snorkeling afternoon at Chamico’s, a small restaurant on a beach about a 25-minute drive from Tulum: They had great ceviche doused in lime juice and served with vinegar and hot peppers. We sat around a table and ate fish and drank beer and talked… and when at one point I moved to a nearby hammock to doze for a bit, a passing waiter moved a plastic chair next to the hammock to put my michelada within arm’s reach. ...

Still working on getting a pizza stone hot enough and where exactly in the grill it and the fire should go, but these were good… Using my father’s some-whole-wheat-flour high-moisture-content long-rising dough recipe: Butternut squash, red onion, buffalo mozzarella, gremolata: Tomato sauce, anchovies, bitter greens, salted olives, chili flakes: Pesto, ricotta, asparagus:

From the back yard garden, kale and radicchio that’s finally forming heads (planted last fall). With fermented Jimmy Nardello pepper paste…

A excellent, relatively quick dinner– Grilled steak, onions, and peppers. A fiery, fruity salsa made from grilled/blistered rocoto peppers, olive oil, lime juice, and salt. And tortillas also cooked on the grill as an experiment…. Starting each tortilla on a cast iron skillet for a minute gave it a skin on the bottom that prevented the soft masa from drooping down through the grating– then I transferred each tortilla to the grill, making it easy to quickly cook 4-6 in parallel. ...

Another winter weekend, another bout of citrus preserving. First, citrus peels rubbed in sugar to extract oils and make an oleo saccharum, my favorite way to get flavor out of citrus. I tried both bergamot from Monterey Market and a mystery pomelo/citron hybrid(?) citrus from someone in our neighborhood. I was lazy about my usual careful cutting out of all pith inside the rind of the pomelo/citron since it didn’t taste especially bitter. ...

This batch of sauerkraut turned out especially good: I cut two heads each of savoy and red cabbage into long narrow strips, then sprinkled them generously with sea salt, let them rest, then kneaded them until juice was coming out and they were turning translucent. I added a decent amount of caraway seed and a handful of dried juniper berries, covered it with a few spare cabbage leaves, and weight them down with some ceramic weights– pushing the cabbage down into its own liquids. Then I just let it lacto-ferment in a crock on the counter for 3 or 4 weeks, tasting periodically. ...

My third, fourth, and fifth batches of fermented hot sauce: Two of them started as ways to preserve two bushes worth of green cayennes and Thai chiles (chilis? chilies?) from a back yard raised bed that got a later start in the season so didn’t turn red before the weather turned cool: I packed a jar full of green chiles with some mustard seed and garlic cloves in a 4% salt brine and let ferment for about a month at 60 degrees, then skimming off mold or anything floating on the surface, straining, tasting, and pureeing with some of the reserved probiotic brine to make a tangy, slightly umami hot sauce (no vinegar added). The cayenne in particular has more going on than just “hot”. ...