In the Shandong Province of Northern China you’ll find street vendors with shao bing breads piled high. Women buy their daily supply to bring home to feed their families. In this wheat dependent area, rice is not the common carb, this bread is. And it’s these flaky and chewy flatbreads that define the comfort foods at home. Filled with long-stewed meats, pickled radishes and cucumbers, fresh herbs...
Walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn the other day, I heard a rustling in the bushes by the boathouse. A woman with a spade in one hand and a handful of plants with dirt still clinging to their roots was showing her two companions how to identify mugwort. Fascinated, I tried to eavesdrop but my dogs were less interested, though they are avid park foragers themselves and adamant about gulping grass...
As an apartment dweller, I don’t have a scrap of land to plant things in. I do have easy access to farmer’s markets and a CSA share which will keep me eating lots of fresh, locally grown veggies this summer. Still, I won’t forgo the pleasure of harvesting from right outside my back door. It doesn’t take a lot of work or materials to plant a container herb garden that you can harvest from all...
As a child, parsley was the ubiquitous green leaf on my plate in restaurants. As I grew older, it was the ingredient that every recipe could do without. If I did choose to include parsley in one of my pasta dishes, it was the dried variety that I shook out of a spice jar to add some color to a dish. It wasn’t until I was introduced to Middle Eastern cuisine that I began to realize there might...
As far as herbs are concerned, thyme usually gets the short end of the stick. Simon & Garfunkel’s song sums it up pretty well: parsley, sage, rosemary, and (finally) thyme. Few home cooks utilize thyme in their meals on a regular basis, and even fewer actually know how to use it in their recipes–unless they’re boning up on French culinary technique. But it’s still winter in much of...
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