A Guilty Pleasure: The Mid-Century Menu

...ery thrift store would have a collection of post-war, space-age cookbooks. Recipes, in this period, are a kind of recombinatory matrix of industrial ingredients. You take some cocktail wieners, a dollop of mayonnaise, some ketchup and a surprise ingredient, say dried prunes and roll them all up into a ball that roughly resembles a low earth orbit satellite and you’ve got dinner. This is the culinary territory explored by “Retro Ruth,” the genius b...

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Ghee for the skin

...m going to experiment with making body butter and lip balm with it. Do any of you use ghee for medicine or skin care? (Also, I’ll be making my own ghee soon, and will post on that, but in the meantime, there are loads of recipes for it out there. It’s basically just boiled butter–anybody can make it. You can also find it ghee in many “regular” super markets these days, as well as in health food stores and of course, Indian markets.)...

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Pizza Dough in a Pan Recipe

...tup group I co-founded, the Los Angeles Bread Bakers. I’m going to put the recipes on the blog starting with this pizza dough, which is based on Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread recipe. If you try this recipe, please send me some feedback. A note on flours My favorite flour for pizza is the Italian 00. This will give you a Neapolitan style thin and crispy crust. If you want a Chicago style pizza with a bread-like texture, go with a high gluten bread...

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Kimchi Class with Hae Jung Cho November 15

...ugi) – and one quick pickle. We then share a light meal of rice, kimchi, soup and other side dishes. You leave the class with three containers of kimchi and pickles that you have made, printed recipes and the know-how to replicate the kimchi at home. Fee: $75. Anyone interested in this class should email Hae Jung at [email protected]. More info here....

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George Rector: M.F.K. Fisher’s Dirty Old Uncle

...tensibly a cookbook–I don’t know what else it would be–but it doesn’t have recipes per se. Instead, he just mentions how to cook things as he’s steaming along. I’m in love with the hardboiled yet strangely comforting prose (though I do have to ignore the casual sexism and racism of the period). Seems most cookbooks these days range from bland to, at best, passionately sincere. Old George is just in it for the fun. The pleasure of reading him is fi...

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