Dan raised a quizzical eyebrow when he heard me say “barley salad.” It’s tough to make barley sound sexy. It tends to sneak into our diets unnoticed, flavoring our beers and bagels and scotch whiskies and malted milk balls, lingering in the background but seldom taking center stage. Basho, the seventeenth century Japanese master of …

When I mentioned to a few people that I was planning to make Armenian tahini bread, the most common response was, “Where exactly is Armenia?” This landlocked country in Transcaucasia, bound by Georgia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran and Turkey to to the south and west, has had a rough go …

I’ve never really found my salad groove. I like salads well enough. I have the best of intentions. I dutifully buy greens, but I seldom have a clear plan of how I’ll use them. They tend to sit in the bottom of the vegetable drawer in the refrigerator waiting for me to find some inspiration, …

February 14th is a doubly momentous date on my calendar. Not only is it that best-loathed love holiday but also the infinitely less-odious day of my birth. I’ve never been much for Valentine’s Day, but I am very amenable to birthday treats. Not just any sort of treat though. Context demands that it to be …

One of my earliest kitchen memories is the smell of the warm, oaty, honeyed clumps of granola that my mother allowed my to stir–carefully, with a wooden spoon–as I stood on a chair to reach the golden mixture on a high rack in the upper part of her double oven. Though I no longer use …