I was introduced to this soup by my Russian-born husband and it has become one of our staple, deeply comforting foods. There are probably thousands of variations on the ingredients and techniques of making borscht, and having looked through a number of recipes, it seems as though the only thing they have in common with each other is the use of beets.

This version of borscht is more akin to a vegetable soup, unlike the classic Ukrainian borscht which uses beef stock, ham and other meats. There’s a fair bit of prep work required, as each vegetable will need to be peeled, diced, shredded, grated, and added to the pot in a particular order, but it’s well worth it to ensure proper cooking of the vegetables.

Note that this recipe calls for the beet to be grated, and I have since learned that raw beets spatter a lot when they are being shredded. I’d wear an apron, as your workspace will look like a crime scene from Dexter when you’re done.

This recipe comes to you inspired by the Alembic, a gem of a bar in our neck of the woods.  This is a a place that really cares about the craft of mixing a good drink, and making delicious, creative small plates alongside.  I’ve whiled away many hours here, happily perched on their suede bar stools, sipping lovingly prepared cocktails and eating handful after handful of the addictive fried shishito peppers they serve as an appetizer.

At a recent visit, one of the entrees we shared was a plate of miso marinated trumpet mushrooms, artichokes and brown rice topped with dollops of butternut squash and black garlic puree. It was a warm, earthy, utterly delicious dish – the nutty brown rice was a perfect vehicle for the juicy, savoury mushrooms and we were trying hard not to lick the plate clean.

Back home, I decided to make a homier version of the dish, leaving out the garnishes and focusing just on the mushrooms and the grains. I stirred some miso into a teriyaki-ish marinade, and poured it over a bowl of mushrooms, then let them marinate in the fridge. On finding I was out of brown rice, I made a pot of farro instead and, taking a cue from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc, stirred some butter into the farro after it had cooked to give it a luscious oomph. I did use a more modest amount of butter since Thomas Keller has you use an entire stick of butter per pound of farro. I love deriving inspiration from restaurant dishes but I have not mustered up the courage to use butter with abandon… yet.

We recently returned from two weeks in New Zealand, where we witnessed two of our dear friends get married.  They couldn’t have chosen a more scenic country – New Zealand is, quite simply, breathtaking in its beauty.  Everything around us seemed to have been saturated, magnified.

The blues were bluer.

The greens, lusher.

Even the mists seemed mistier, more mysterious (misterious?).

And on top of that, there were meat pies and sausage rolls aplenty. Give me a choice and I’ll pick a savoury pastry over a sweet one. I was in savoury pie mecca.

I found my favourite pie shop in Queenstown, a tiny place called the Ferg Bakery. During the six days we spent in the area, I must have made near daily pilgrimages there for mini feasts of sausage rolls and their numerous flavours of pie (it’s never too early in the morning for a venison/portobello or spiced lamb shank pie, washed down with a shot of espresso). And while my frozen store-bought puff pastry is nowhere near as buttery or flaky or shatteringly crisp, having one of these warm, porky rolls for breakfast will tide me over until New Zealand and I meet again.

The prawns were still alive. They lay on the baking sheet, glaring at me balefully with their beady black eyes and feebly waving their legs in an attempt to fend off my basting brush.

I painted them with melted butter, showered them in a mini hailstorm of salt and pepper and carried them over to the oven. I hesitated, then muttered, “I’m sorry. This should be quick.” before sliding the tray under the broiler.

Lesson learned: these little guys stay motile for quite some time after you bring them home from the live seafood tank! In San Francisco, I was able to find them at Sunset Supermarket, and they are easily recognizable from their red and white banded legs. They taste distinctly different from your average shrimp – their flesh is much sweeter and pleasantly chewy.

I decided to serve them with a risotto made with shrimp stock, for double the seafood oomph. The shrimp stock is quick to make, especially if you already have the shrimp shells lying around. (tip: whenever I make something that calls for peeled shrimp, I usually buy whole unpeeled shrimp and throw the heads and shells into a Ziploc bag in the freezer.) You can peel the spot prawns before broiling to make them easier to eat afterwards, but I do find they stay moister in the shell. Plus, I like getting my hands messy with cracking open their oversized heads, letting the juices run out and soak into the risotto. Enjoying everything the prawns have to offer is the least I can do for subjecting them to death by broiler.

Growing up in Malaysia, we rarely ate salads – most of our greens were stir-fried, steamed, or boiled in soups. I used to think that raw lettuce was a barbaric concept. Who would have chosen that over a plate of oil slicked, garlic scented fried lettuce? Certainly not me, at the time.

Fast forward some years later and I’ve come to truly appreciate the craft that goes into making a salad. Good salads have a range of textures and flavours that play off of each other – sweet to balance tart, crunch to balance softness, salt and pepper to bring it all together. I’m always on the hunt for interesting ways to put salads together to pull myself out of my standard spring mix/balsamic vinaigrette rut, and I found a great one to riff of on in Stephanie Izard’s Girl in the Kitchen.

This is a bright, acidic and crunchy salad, a perfect respite from the hearty, rich dishes that we tend to eat a lot of in the winter. It’s also flexible – I substituted fennel for apples, and cranberries for pomegranate seeds called for in the original recipe – feel free to experiment with different proportions of ingredients. I imagine that other crisp vegetables like shaved radishes and celery would work well here too. Salads are infinitely adaptable, so go forth and play!

Hello, world. I’ve written far too many inaugural entries over the years as part of the detritus of abandoned blogs I’ve left littered around the internet, so I’ll keep this one brief, to wit, yay food! I love to eat, cook, and feed my friends and family (a.k.a. my guinea pigs), and I plan to use this space to chronicle my various kitchen experiments.

So here we are!  And to kick things off, kale, the sturdy, reliable winter vegetable.  It happily takes to whatever cooking method you throw at it, and I’ve pretty much tried them all – I love it it sautéed, braised, boiled, baked – though I’ve never been particularly enamoured with raw kale.  I’d had raw kale salads with a basic olive oil/acid dressing, and felt that it didn’t stand up to the chewy bitterness of the kale.

It took a weekend trip to New York to change my mind.  After fighting our way through crowds of people at Eataly, we made our way to the restaurant on the rooftop.  Along with carafes of chicory stout, salami and cheese plates, we also had a kale salad – wispy ribbons of kale tossed with a creamy anchovy vinaigrette and grapefruit segments. It was a glorious mix of bold flavours that didn’t hold back any punches.  Salty, fishy, bitter, sweet and tart happily mingled in a bowl and I  couldn’t get enough of it.  I threw together my version of it for dinner AND lunch when I got back home, swapping in blood oranges for grapefruit as I had them on hand, and depleting my stash of anchovies.

It looks innocuous, but this is not a meek salad.