Skip to content

Category Archives: Kook Cooks

Thoughts on food. More tips at Pooh-bah Rules, over yonder.

The Last Irish Soda Bread Recipe

In Food Section World, this long-evolved Irish Soda Bread recipe would be published before St. Patrick’s Day. But in Brick World, I bake a loaf on St. Paddy’s, relying on collected recipes and sometimes a new one that pops up. Brick could schedule the recipe for March 16, 2013, but why wait? Every newspaper every [...]

Economical Greek Yogurt, No Way? Whey.

Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock Though we who note the news have known about the Greek economic crisis for quite some time, it seems to have come to a head here in the first week of November. Maybe if Greece exported more of that sunny yogurt, the budget would teeter back a bit. But in [...]

Mom’s Chili, If She Was Vegan

Here is Mom’s Spaghetti Sauce, circa 1970s (my sister kept the index card): Brown 1 pound ground beef, drain. Add 1 Tablespoon salt, half an onion chopped, half a stick of butter, 1 (large) can tomatoes cut up, and 1 large can (2 small cans) tomato paste. Cook covered in 275-degree oven 1 1/2 to [...]

Savor Schnecken Like a Snail

My Reform Jewish family in Fort Smith, Arkansas, had schnecken for breakfast every Christmas. There was no recipe so every December in adulthood I’ve tried to recreate the childhood memory, with cookbooks, recollections of family and improvising. That was starting in my 20s. In my 30s, I also began cooking healthier. These cannot honestly be [...]

Fried Soup

Copyright 2010 Ben S. Pollock “Fried soup” was what I announced when I brought these to the table, what otherwise are called veggie croquettes, pancakes or burgers. When I try to make veggie burgers they fall apart. These held together and are as good or better than grocery store veggie burgers. The name stems from [...]

Ratatouille Not Twee

The Fourth of July calls for red, white and blue. But if it’s independence we’re celebrating, why not red, green, yellow and purple? Ratatouille is a southern European, mid-summer, vegetarian casserole, ideal for when you return from the farmers market with way too much. The chickpeas make this a one-pot meal; bread crumbs are to [...]

Gazpacho Summer Soup

Every summer growing up in Fort Smith, Mom would make Summer Soup a few times. The recipe was from her best friend Isabel, and when we ate at her house, she’d also have Summer Soup. (Isabel also served her own dill pickles, the world’s best.) That recipe, at bottom, will take you back to the [...]

You Say Ganouj, I Say Ghanouj

Or baba ganoush or baba ghanoush. Baba ganouj is a first cousin to hummus dip (mashed spicy chickpeas), but with eggplant as the base. For shmearing on pita wedges or vegetable sticks. Mollie Katzen in Still Life With Menu likes it as a pasta sauce. Any kind of eggplant works; the common jumbo globe has [...]

Granola, Better Homemade

Using two cookbooks for one oft-used recipe, mainly the penciled notes in each, finally got old. It’s time to write it out. Is it mine, or theirs (see footnote)? A now-retired newspaper food editor once told me not to worry: “At conferences, we all agree, if you change more than the amounts of salt and [...]

Irish-style Soda Bread

Traditional Irish soda bread consists just of flour, buttermilk, salt and baking soda. Americans added sugar, raisins and sometimes caraway seed. Soda bread gets stale in a day and crumbles when you try to slice it. The New York Times in March 2007 discussed this here , with an improved recipe here, which makes a [...]