use real butter

Recipe: sigara boregi

We saw off our fifth visitor in the past two weeks today. Hey, we planned the visits a while ago – no one figured I’d be having an appendectomy right around the arrival of the first visitor. Well, now that we have the house back to ourselves, we’re relishing it. Actually I’m resting and Jeremy is catching up on work. My healing is slow going and I’m not caring a whole heck of a lot about blogging at the moment as there are other pressing things to worry about. Looks like September will be a slim month on Use Real Butter.

suzanne and kaweah on the deck

I’ve only picked the camera up again in the last couple of days. Our weather was rainy and cool over the weekend. And that meant I had one thing on the brain: snow in the mountains.

start my base, baby

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Recipe: crawfish phyllo triangles

I’ve had this recipe in the back of my head for well over ten years. Jeremy and I were driving from Ithaca, New York down to Virginia to visit with my parents way back in the late 90s when we stopped by my friend’s house in Washington DC along the way. I lived in northern Virginia for one year during high school and became close friends with Emily. It was nice to see her parents again (I love them, they are the sweetest people) and introduce them to Jeremy for the first time. While we chatted, Emily’s mom – the consummate hostess – presented us with a platter of hot, crispy phyllo triangles filled with… crawdads. Crawdads (crayfish) are these delicious freshwater critters that look like small lobsters and are practically religion on the Gulf. Mmmmm, mmmm, good.

crawdads, onions, celery, and spices, parsley and green onions

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Recipe: chinese dumplings and potstickers

[warning: a long post]

Do you know what that one recipe was that started you on your cooking passion? I have cooked since I was a kid, but I didn’t get serious until I was a sophomore in college and I felt this cultural obligation to make dumplings from scratch to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Dumplings have lodged themselves in my head as my link to Chinese cooking and culture, but even better than that – mastering dumplings gave me the confidence to go forward and try other recipes and techniques.

for the pork filling

I posted Making Chinese Dumplings with Jen on my website several years ago (it now lives here). People have written asking about fillings, thanking me for my recipe, asking me to post more versions… The endeavor to make Chinese dumplings isn’t like pouring a can of soda – it’s quite involved and taking the photos adds considerably more time. Seeing as my days of free time may be near an end, I decided Making Chinese Dumplings with Jen could use an upgrade and an added variation. Besides, that old version was created in graduate school, a time of simultaneously happy and extremely bad, miserable, loathsome, angry, depressing, unhappy associations for me.

there is an ungodly amount of chopping involved

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