I like the idea of a new “New Year” beginning in the spring. It’s another chance to revisit those resolutions you might have made in January and never got around to fulfilling, a good time to clear away clutter and must, both literal and figurative.

While I never celebrated Nowruz while I was living in the Caucasus, I did eat plenty of baklava. It’s a requisite dish at weddings, birthdays, and other holiday feasts throughout the region. There were the long, skinny diamonds dripping with syrup at my host sister’s wedding in Georgia and tiny squares of cardamom-spiced baqlava at the corner bakery in Azerbaijan, both exquisite. But my favorite was the cookie-like pakhlava that Inna Grigoryan, an Armenian friend of mine in Krasnodar (Russia), baked for her son’s 13^th birthday party.

Inna making pakhlava in her mother-in-law’s kitchen

Instead of the countless paper-thin sheets of phyllo pastry that most Americans associate with the dessert, this recipe calls for just four layers of a simple sour cream dough, with a sweet paste of ground walnuts, sugar, and egg whites slathered generously between each one. It’s elegant yet entirely unostentatious, satisfyingly rich but not cloyingly sweet. I came across it again at a New Year’s meal at another friend’s home in North Ossetia, hundreds of miles away.

Inna made her pakhlava “by the eye,” as Russians say, not measuring anything precisely and working from an old family recipe long since committed to memory. I’ve done my best to recreate it in my own kitchen, but I’m still tinkering with it. (I think there might be too much dough for the filling.) Please let me know how it turns out if you try it!

Pakhlava
Makes 1 9×13 in. pan

Dough:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. kosher salt
1 cup (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, chopped into ½-inch chunks
¾ cup sour cream
2 egg yolks

Filling:
2 ½ cups walnuts (or a mixture of walnuts and other nuts), toasted
1 cup sugar
3 egg whites

3 Tbsp. honey
1 egg yolk and 1 tsp. water, beaten together with a fork
¼ cup toasted hazelnuts, almonds, pistachios, walnuts or other nuts for topping

1. To toast the nuts: Preheat the oven to 350 F. Spread the nuts in a single layer on a large baking sheet (or two if necessary). Toast them for 10 minutes in the oven. Allow them to cool. Set aside the ¼ cup of nuts you’ll be using to top the pakhlava—don’t chop them.
2. In a food processor or food mill, grind 1½ cups of toasted nuts to a sand-like powder (not a paste!). Finely chop the remaining 1 cup of nuts. (This can also be accomplished by sealing the nuts inside a large Ziploc bag and running a rolling pin over them repeatedly.)
3. In a large bowl, combine the flour, soda, and salt. Mix in the butter with a pastry cutter, two forks, or your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse sand.
4. Lightly beat the egg yolks into the sour cream and fold into the flour mixture. Turn the dough onto a cool, well-floured surface and knead it just until a sticky dough comes together, about 30 seconds. Separate dough into four equal balls, place them on a buttered plate, cover, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
5. Just before rolling out the dough, prepare the filling: beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until they become white and foamy, about 30-45 seconds. Stir in the walnuts and sugar. Set aside.
6. When dough has chilled, butter and flour the bottom and sides of a 13×9-inch baking pan. On a cool, well-floured surface, roll one ball of dough into a 13×9-inch rectangle (or larger and cut it to fit) and place in the greased pan. Spread half of the walnut filling onto this layer, being careful to spread it all the way to the sides.
7. Roll out the next ball and place on top of the walnut filling. Spread the honey on top of this layer. Roll out the third ball and spread the remaining walnut filling on top of it. Roll out the final ball and place on top. Brush the top layer thoroughly with beaten egg and milk mixture. Cover the pan and chill for at least 30 minutes in the refrigerator.
8. Preheat the oven to 375 F. Cut the pakhlava diagonally at a steep angle into 2-inch-wide stripes, then cut them crosswise in the same manner to form diamond-shaped pieces. Press a toasted hazelnut, almond, pistachio, or walnut in the center of each piece.
9. Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 30 minutes, then uncover and bake approximately 10 minutes longer, until top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool before removing from pan.

This swath of Earth Is my gastronomic home. 90% of my most-used cookbooks (including Silk Road Cooking (also by Batmanglij), Plenty, Please to the Table, Classical Turkish Cooking) focus on cuisines in this group. I love tracing how the names for foods made subtle shifts as they made their way across it. For example, eggplant in Hindi is baingan or brinjal, in Farsi bademjan, in Georgian badrijani, in Russian baklazhan, in Turkish patlican, all the way to the (British) English aubergine.

While I already had most of the spices required to make Persian dishes in my pantry and could get most of the ingredients I needed at my local grocery store, there were a few gaps that necessitated a field trip to the Persian store in the ‘burbs. (Sure, I could have filled them online, but that wouldn’t be half the fun!) With a list of items I never knew existed (e.g. verjus (unripe grape juice), dried limes, grape molasses), my intrepid culinary adventure partner Wendy and I set out for Yekta Market, reputedly the best-stocked Persian store in the DC area.

Nuts and dried fruits at a market in Kyrgyzstan, part of the same culinary continuum

It took a few U turns and more than a few curses at the GPS Digital Dolt, but we made it half an hour before close. I walked in and wanted everything: the hummocks of raw nuts—almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios, walnuts. Heaping mounds of fresh herbs and bulging bags of dried ones: tarragon, mint, lovage, fenugreek. Pomegranate and sour cherry juice. Flatbreads other than pita. The most interesting jams: mulberry, fig, quince, walnut. Huge blocks of feta bathing in brine, waiting to be cut on the spot. Barrels of olives. Pickled turnips. Dried dates, figs, apricots, cherries, prunes, persimmons. The spidery script over everything. The same dusty clutter I remember from the Russian store in Minneapolis. People come here to taste home.

Georgian pomegranate

We could have easily stayed another hour to peruse everything on the shelves, but the shop was closing and our stomachs growling. We went to the restaurant next door for dinner, where the star dish of our meal was fesenjan, chicken braised slowly in a thick stew of pomegranate, ground walnuts and spices until it falls off the bone. It was the kind of meal I was tempted to prolong by running my finger along the inside of the bowl when all the flatbread was gone and there were still traces of sauce leftover.

I managed to restrain myself at the restaurant, but made a similar dish from Batmanglij’s cookbook for a potluck dinner party with friends the next week. I’m not the only one who couldn’t get enough of it. I promised to share the recipe and haven’t yet, so here it is:

Pomegranate Khoresh with Chicken (Khoresh-e fesenjan ba jujeh)

From Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies, by Najmieh Batmanglij
Makes 4 servings

½ lb. (2 cups) shelled walnuts
5 Tbsp. oil, butter, or ghee
2 large onions, peeled and thinly sliced
2 lbs. chicken legs, cut up (I used a package of chicken thighs and didn’t bother cutting them up)
1lb. butternut squash, peeled and cut into 2-in. cubes
4 cups pure pomegranate juice
2 Tbsp. pomegranate molasses
1 tsp. sea salt
¼ tsp. freshly ground black pepper
¼ tsp. turmeric
½ tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. ground cardamom
¼ tsp. ground saffron dissolved in 1 Tbsp. rose water (I skipped this)
2 Tbsp. grape molasses or sugar (optional)

Garnish:
Arils of 1 fresh pomegranate
2 Tbsp. toasted walnuts

1. To toast the walnuts: Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C). Spread the walnuts in a sheet pan and bake for 10 minutes. Set aside.
2. In a Dutch oven, heat 3 Tbsp. oil over medium heat until very hot, and sauté the onions. Remove from pot with a slotted spoon and set aside. Add 2 Tbsp. oil and brown the chicken. Add the butternut squash and sauté for a few minutes.
3. In a food processor, finely grind the sautéd onions with the toasted walnuts, add 1 cup pomegranate juice, the pomegranate molasses, salt, pepper, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom, saffron-rose water (if using), and grape molasses or sugar,  and mix well to create a creamy paste.
4. Add the creamy walnut paste and remaining pomegranate juice to the chicken in a Dutch oven, stirring gently. Cover and simmer over low heat for 1 ½ hours, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon to prevent walnuts from burning.
5. The khoresh should be sweet and sour and have the consistency of heavy cream. Adjust to taste by adding pomegranate molasses for sourness or grape molasses (or sugar) for sweetness. If the sauce is too thick, thin it with more pomegranate juice.
6. Transfer the khoresh from the Dutch oven to a deep, ovenproof casserole. Cover and place in a warm oven until ready to serve with chelow (saffron-steamed rice). Just prior to serving, sprinkle with fresh pomegranate arils and walnuts.

Photo: http://www.thecooksnextdoor.com

Like most us, I eat not only when I’m hungry, but also when I’m bored, when I’m sad or lonely or drunk, when I’m angry or anxious or feel like I deserve a reward. In almost all of these cases, what I want most is dark, dense, not-too-sweet cake. For that very reason, I almost never make such a cake. One must wear pants, after all, and I am not in a position to buy new ones every other month.

Still, there are times. I recently forgot about a bunch of black lentils I had left boiling away on the stove. All the water evaporated and they had burnt to a crisp by the time the biting stench reached my room. I started over with new lentils and managed to salvage the pot I’d been using, but no matter how many fans I turned on and how many windows I opened, I couldn’t get the bitter, charred smell out of the house. I had a friend coming over for dinner whom I didn’t want to repulse. Acrid lentil fumes begone: I would shoo them out, or at least mask them, with the warm and spicy aroma of fresh gingerbread, the ultimate snacking cake.

I found this recipe, which sounded exactly like what I was looking for–almost. I didn’t have the applesauce it called for, but I figured plain yogurt would do. I also didn’t have whole wheat flour but wanted the same dense, nutty quality it imparts, so I replaced it with a mixture of white and rye flour. I misread the recipe and thought it said only ¼ cup each molasses and maple syrup. That seemed like very little sweetener for a whole batch of muffins, so I dumped in some brown sugar. The other gingerbread recipes I had looked at all called for eggs, but this one didn’t—I cracked one in. I was in too much of a hurry to measure spices, so I tossed in a bit of this and a bit of that and hoped it would taste good.

When I pulled the muffins out of the oven twenty-odd minutes later, no trace of the lentil debacle remained. The muffins were a deep caramel brown, bounced back at the touch, and smelled like Christmas. Unfortunately it turned out that my guest doesn’t like ginger, but I devoured mine with fervor enough for two.

Gingerbread (for the Hungry, the Sad, and the Smelly)
Makes about 16 muffins or 1 8×8 pan

*Note: if you don’t have rye flour, you can use whole wheat flour, buckwheat flour, or another whole-grain flour.

¼ cup molasses (not blackstrap)
¼ cup real maple syrup
½ cup plain yogurt
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1 egg, lightly beaten
¼ cup brown sugar, packed down
1 ½ cup rye flour
1 cup all-purpose white flour
1 ½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. kosher salt
2 tsp. ground ginger
2 tsp. cinnamon
¼ tsp. allspice
¼ tsp. cardamom
¼ tsp. nutmeg
1 cup hot water
1 tsp. powdered sugar for dusting, if desired

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line muffin cups with paper liners or butter and flour an 8×8 in. baking dish.
2. In a large bowl, combine the molasses, maple syrup, yogurt, butter, egg, and brown sugar. Mix until well blended.
3. In another bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, salt, and spices. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ones, stirring until just combined. Stir in the hot water. Pour into prepared muffin cups or pan.
4. Bake 20-25 minutes for muffins or 35-50 minutes for cake, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Sift powdered sugar over the top if desired. (Jiggling the sugar through a fine-mesh sieve works well for this.) Allow to cool before serving.

Thanksgiving dinner with my family in Minnesota has always been strictly regulated by Midwestern, midcentury tradition: there must be turkey, sausage and sage stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup and French fried onions, Jell-o fruit salad, cranberry sauce from the can, and Grandma’s homemade lefse and rolls. For dessert there is pie: pumpkin, apple, and Mom’s banana cream (three of those). Every dish has a champion, and without any of them, something just seems off.

Don’t get me wrong, I love watching the cranberry sauce jiggle as much as anyone else, and missing out on lefse and banana cream pie (with homemade custard, always) made me especially nostalgic. But as I began thinking about my own menu, it dawned on me that I was no longer bound by these rules. For the first time, I was free to bring my own Thanksgiving fantasy to the table.

The trouble is, it worked. Thanksgiving may never be the same again.

Photo: SimplyRecipes.com

The first and easiest decision was nixing the turkey. It is an unwieldy bird that’s hard to prepare well and is almost no one’s favorite part of the meal. I opted for duck instead: over the phone, a chef friend guided me through the process of cutting up the bird, brining the breast and curing the legs in salt overnight in the fridge, then slow-roasting the legs in duck fat and searing the breast in a dry pan just before dinner.

Next, the stuffing. I’d always wanted to try a cornbread stuffing, and Martha’s with bacon and pecans hit the spot. Next time, I’d substitute lard for some of the butter and add a little additional stock or cream to moisten it, but I’ve been happily eating the leftovers for the past week. (The recipe makes enough for 8 people.) It was especially good with Joy the Baker’s cranberry sauce: I cut down the sugar a bit, skipped the orange zest, substituted vanilla extract for the vanilla bean, added a hint of powdered ginger, and simmered it with two cinnamon sticks.

Last year I remembered wishing for something green and crunchy on the Thanksgiving table, so I tossed together a bunch of raw kale and some briefly blanched, crisp-tender green beans, drizzled them with sesame seed oil, and mixed in a clove or two of minced garlic, kosher salt, and black pepper.

Photo: Smitten Kitchen

Instead of marshmallows, we topped our sweet potatoes with a “salad” of finely chopped celery, flat-leaf parsley, and goat cheese (among a few other things), based on a recipe from smitten Kitchen. The crunch of the vegetables and creaminess of the cheese set off the richness of the sweet potatoes elegantly. Next time I might add in hint of crushed red pepper flakes. These would make a unique passable appetizer, if you do that kind of thing on Thanksgiving.

A friend brought over a warm quinoa salad with butternut squash, dried cranberries, and pecans, based on a recipe from the New York Times. It calls for both regular and black\ quinoa, which she couldn’t find, so she substituted a box of “rainbow” quinoa instead. Most mentions of quinoa make me roll my eyes, not because I don’t like it but because the idea of a “hip” grain seems inherently absurd to me. (And here I don’t intend to imply that said friend chose to make it for its trend value.) In spite of myself, I will absolutely make this dish again. Out of everything on the table, this is what had me coming back for seconds.

Photo: Food and Wine

She also made this recipe for roasted Brussels sprouts with pistachios and cipollini onions, which we gobbled up on the spot. It’s from a book entitled Crazy Sexy Kitchen, by a woman who adopted a plant-based diet after learning she had Stage 4 epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (yikes!) and has been fighting it publicly with exuberant, mouth-watering veganism.

For dessert, we settled on a pear and almond cream tart from Chef Elizabeth Prueitt of Tartine Bakery and Café in San Francisco. I wouldn’t change a thing here: it was exquisite.

I’m not sure where I’ll be for Thanksgiving next year, but watch out, traditionalists: I’m already planning the menu.

When I thought recently about how much our family life has come to revolve around food since I went off to college, it struck me as a bit of a surprise. I didn’t grow up in a “foodie” household. My mother, who did the lion’s share of the cooking, relied on tried and true recipes for heartland classics like ziti hotdish and beef stew. We rarely went out to eat and when we did, we generally went to the Indian restaurant in the strip mall or the Thai restaurant in a different strip mall (both of which, I might add, are excellent). When we went on a roadtrip to Washington, DC when I was 10, we packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a cooler in the back of the van and ate them for two days straight.

Photo: BecomingLola.blogspot.com

Yet looking back, I realize that our family rituals always centered around food, even if it wasn’t fancy or unusual. Evening mealtime together was something I could count on, like a stake anchoring the day. Sunday mornings I used to lie in bed pretending to be asleep until the last possible moment, hoping Mom and Dad would forget about me until it was too late to make it to church, but the smell of bacon or chocolate Malt-o-Meal eventually got me up every time. Every fall, when the Haralson apple trees in our front yard hung heavy with crisp, tart fruit, Dad would peel and chop them while Mom mixed up topping for apple crisp. We’d eat for dessert later that night while it was still warm, in shallow bowls puddled with cream.

There were the simple snacks we used to make, things I haven’t had in years and am old enough to be nostalgic for now: thick slices of tomato pulled fresh from the garden and sprinkled with sugar; graham crackers spread generously with chocolate frosting and eaten like a sandwich; the popcorn Dad popped in the Whirly-Pop on the stove every Wednesday and Thursday just before we sat down to watch Law and Order or ER.

Photo: Kristin Rosenau at PastryAffair.com

If we were connoisseurs of anything, it was bread. That was the one item my mother refused to buy at the grocery store, instead driving across town to the bakery that made boules and baguettes and babkas the way she liked them. I hardly buy bread anymore (The carbs! The freezer space! There’s no good bakeries nearby, and the good stuff at the farmers’ market doesn’t come sliced!), but as a family we used to go through several loaves of it each week. In the mornings, or as an afternoon snack, there was peanut butter toast, onto which Mom would slather butter underneath the peanut butter. (The peanut butter doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth this way, and contrary to what you might think, the taste of the butter still comes through.) Sometimes there was cinnamon toast (buttered toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar), which is one of the most comforting foods I know. In the winter, when we came in from ice skating on the pond across the street, there was cocoa and toast, which is just what it sounds like, except the toast would be—surprise!—buttered, then cut vertically into four strips for dipping.

Little things have changed about meals at home over the years: there are fewer highly processed foods (almost none, in fact), more alcohol, and vegetables that never showed up before, like kale and chard. It’s often my brother and I who do the cooking these days when we’re at home. What hasn’t changed is the way the kitchen serves as the magnet that pulls us together, whether from different corners of the house or halfway across the country.

Photo: Saveur.com, Issue #140

I have long daydreamed about the delectable concoctions I would create if I had an ice cream maker, but had never actually used one until last weekend. A friend of mine happened to have one (“The beauty of wedding registries!”), so we made a date to try out one of the recipes from a book we’d both been salivating over, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer.

With flavors like Roasted Strawberry and Buttermilk, Rum with Toasted Coconut, and Plum Pudding, we could have chosen any recipe at random and been dazzled. We ended up settling on Beet Ice Cream with Mascarpone, Orange Zest, and Poppy Seeds: I couldn’t think of anyone else who would let beets near their ice cream, much less choose them over chocolate, and she wanted to prove her skeptic husband wrong.

Beets are so naturally sweet and such a gorgeous, rich color that I’m surprised we don’t see them in desserts more often. Other vegetables long ago became mainstays on dessert menus: sweet potatoes, rhubarb, carrots… (not to mention pumpkin and zucchini, which are technically fruits since they are born of flowers).

Britton Bauer’s ice creams all begin from essentially the same basic recipe (heavy cream, milk, corn starch, sugar, light corn syrup, kosher salt, and cream cheese), and then incorporate various other ingredients to create a multitude of unexpected flavors. In an article in Saveur last year (where I first learned about the book), Molly O’Neill explained the chemistry that makes Britton Bauer’s recipes work:

“Ice cream is basically a frozen emulsion, in which components that do not naturally meld—fat, water, and air—are encouraged to marry by adding such things as heat, proteins, sugars, and starches. The stronger the marriage, the more supple the ice cream will be. If water is not bound well with the other ingredients, it becomes nasty little ice shards that disrupt the smooth sensation on the tongue. Rather than using the traditional egg yolk to bind water and fat in the frozen emulsion, Bauer relies on the proteins in milk—casein and whey. She boils the liquid to reduce its water content, concentrating and denaturing the proteins, rendering them more likely to bind the water and fat. Bauer’s other tricks include adding cream cheese, which is high in casein proteins, and using thickeners, such as cornstarch, which absorb water and prevent crystallization, for added insurance. Her use of natural corn syrup in addition to granulated sugar is also key: Its glucose is not as sweet in flavor as sugar’s sucrose, and it binds with water, which helps prevent icing, too.”

Katie had put the metal bowl in which the churning magic happens in the freezer the night before, and I had roasted and pureed a couple of beets beforehand, so all that remained to do was throw together the sweet and creamy base, boil it with orange peel to infuse it with a light citrus flavor, stir in the beet puree, and press “On.’

We sipped our wine while the ice cream maker churned away, and 25 minutes later we stirred in the poppyseeds and dug into the pinkest, most exquisitely nuanced ice cream I’ve ever tasted. The tang of the orange undergirded the earthy sweetness of the beets, which complemented but didn’t overwhelm the nuttiness of the poppyseeds. I closed my eyes. I laughed. It was that good.

If I needed an excuse to indulge this daydream of mine, I just found it. Registry schmegistry!

Don’t believe me? Try it yourself.

Photo: passionforculinaria.wordpress.com

My coworker Djamilya and I had one mission when we set off for Almaty, Kazakhstan a few weeks ago: we were determined to seek out authentic beshbarmak, the country’s most revered ceremonial dish. My online research on the subject had turned up a surprising number of images of sheep’s heads keeping watch despondently over platters brimming with meat and noodles, and I was curious. Our intrepid local colleague Tanya took it upon herself to make sure we didn’t leave disappointed. “Just give me five hours’ notice,” she told us, “and I’ll make it happen.”

The following evening, Tanya flagged down several taxis before she was able to find one that was willing to make the trek across town to the restaurant whose beshbarmak she deemed best. We clambered out at an appropriately cavernous restaurant called Peshchera (Cave), its walls cut to resemble a rock face. (Incidentally, its owner has several other restaurants in town, all of them underground except this one.) We were seated at a table underneath a faux (I hope…) taxidermied bear in mid-roar, its teeth and claws cut to inspire fear. Wolverines and other ferocious woodland mammals prowled along nearby protrusions.

After a round of Belgian blonde ales and an appetizer platter of raw cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, green onions, and various fresh herbs (typical of the Caucasus region and popular throughout the former Soviet Union as a palate cleanser and accompaniment to heavier dishes), the main attraction arrived at our table in all its fleshy glory. Chunks of boiled mutton and horse meat reclined on a bed of broad, tender noodles, mixed and rolled by hand, with the flavorful broth ladled generously over the top. The ripe aroma of mutton rose from the platter—a foot and a half in diameter—as steam. (The sheep’s head was, thankfully, absent.)

Beshbarmak means “five fingers” in Kazakh, a reference to the traditional way to eat it—with your hands. I had a hard time picturing how this would work, especially given the broth still bubbling amidst the boodles. We opted for forks and knives.

Selling horse sausages called kazy at Osh Bazaar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Horse meat is enjoyed widely in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where horses played a central role in the people’s traditional nomadic lifestyle for centuries. Tribes used them to travel across the wide expanses of steppe, to carry their homes and food and goods from one place to another, to do battle, and yes, to eat.

Though the nomads have long since moved into apartment buildings and homes, their taste for horse meat has stuck around. It’s not the sort of thing trotted out at every meal, but is served at special occasions to honor guests and celebrate important milestones.

To me, eating horse is really no different from eating cow or pig or any other animal. It’s still a fairly common food in France, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, and Japan, in addition to Central Asia.

So why is it considered taboo in the US and other English-speaking countries? “Horses hold an important place in our nation’s history and culture, treasured by all for their beauty and majesty,” said Rep. Jim Moran, D-VA, in his justification for an amendment he introduced to the 2013 Farm Bill that prohibits funding for USDA inspections of horse slaughter facilities, effectively banning their slaughter on US soil. In other words, they have soulful eyes, and Black Beauty and My Little Pony still tug on our heartstrings. Religious prohibitions may play a role in reinforcing the aversion: The Roman Catholic Church forbade its consumption beginning in the 8^th century AD, supposedly to distinguish Christians from German pagans, among whom it was wildly popular. Horse is not kosher.

It is, however, delicious. It tastes similar to beef, though it is generally darker in color. In contrast to most meat served in Central Asia, it’s very lean. I’d eaten a horse burger once before, in Slovenia, and still consider it among the tastiest burgers I’ve ever had. (Granted, the mountain of condiments on top, the crisp fall weather, the cold beer, or the thrill of being alone for the first time in a foreign country where I didn’t know a soul might have heightened the experience).

The most ubiquitous meat in Kazakhstan, and the other found in beshbarmak. is mutton (sheep), which tastes and smells like lamb that’s gone through puberty—stronger, muskier, more barnyard-y. It’s an acquired taste, but for me the effect seems to work backwards: I enjoyed it for the first 4-5 meals, but then its appeal began to fade. Beshbarmak was somewhere around Meal #2, so I wasn’t worn out on the meat’s animal funk yet. It complemented the slight bitterness of the beer nicely.

I fell asleep back at the hotel with a full stomach, dizzy with jet-lag but looking forward to confronting mutton and horse again, in the myriad shapes and forms they appear in this little corner of Earth.

Far from the onerous chore I once imagined, meal-planning turned out to be one of the highlights of my week. I look forward to the time I spend over coffee on Saturday or Sunday morning, poring over cookbooks and magazines to find inspiration for the week’s menu. Sometimes I follow recipes to the letter, but more often than not, I use them as a basic outline and fill in the details based on what’s in season, what I have on hand, or what I’m craving.

For me, that freedom to improvise, to riff on a theme in the kitchen, makes cooking both a creative outlet and a form of stress relief. It’s a skill I’ve been picking up slowly, through experiments with varying degrees of success, and is something I’ve wanted to share with others who might not yet feel comfortable striking out on their own at the stove.

The weekly recipe column I started writing last month for DCist online magazine is giving me the chance to influence, in some small way, how readers view food and cooking. “Season’s Eatings” highlights local, in-season ingredients available at DC-area farmers’ markets, especially those readers may rarely (if ever) find at the grocery store. My mission is threefold:

1)     Give readers a sense for locality and seasonality of food (what grows when in our region)

2)     Inspire people to taste more mindfully, more enthusiastically, more broadly. Indeed, to experience food through all five senses more fully.

3)     Help others learn to cook more intuitively, with less fear and more confidence in their own ability to create something delicious.

I’ve been dreaming up dishes for years, but have never written them down before. The process is making me pay attention to details I’ve never given much mind to: is “sauté until asparagus is crisp-tender” descriptive enough? How fine is “finely chopped”? I do my best to strike a balance between precise direction (for cooks who need more guidance) and encouragement of experimentation and modification (for everyone, to reinforce the idea that the recipes are, by and large, suggestions to give the cook somewhere to begin). Nearly all of them end with some variation of “adjust seasonings to taste.” The essence of intuitive cooking lies there, in that line.

Much as I depend on it, I realize how baffling this command can seem for novice cooks. A friend told me recently that seeing it at the end of a recipe has always left her feeling lost. “To taste what?” she wonders. If you have never tried an ingredient or a dish before, how are you to know what it should taste like?

The short answer is, it should taste good. When you come to the end of a recipe and sample the result, you should like what you taste and want to eat more of it. In most cases, that’s a perfectly adequate measure of the success of a dish. Part of the beauty of trying new recipes lies precisely in not feeling pressure to adhere to some kind of external standard. When you’re cooking, you decide. Learn to trust your tastebuds.

You can train your palate by tasting carefully, with attention. Over time and many meals, you’ll learn to look at a recipe you’ve never seen before and know what ingredients will be essential and which can be left out or replaced with something else. You’ll begin to understand which ingredients must be kept in proportion and where amounts can be tweaked to suit your own fancies. You’ll discover what to add in order to balance or bring out certain flavors; for instance, salt adds depth or “backbone,” acid creates brightness or “punch,” sugar lends “roundness” and calms excessively bitter or sharp flavors, and fat gives a dish fullness or “heft” and helps create a silkier texture.

Reading lots of recipes also helps, as does watching cooking shows and, more than anything, peering over the shoulder of a knowledgeable cook and asking lots of questions. And if, having “let go of the handlebars,” so to speak, you end up ruining a dish beyond all recognition, you may even be grateful for the excuse to eat cereal and ice cream for dinner.

“Cooking is both simpler and more necessary than we imagine,” she writes. “It has in recent years come to seem a complication to juggle against other complications, instead of what it can be—a clear path through them.” I’ve ruminated on this theme in a previous post, at the time when I was first coming to understand cooking as a source of deep relaxation rather just another item on my to-do list.

Adler’s work inspired another turning point for me, though, in her guidance on “picking up loose ends” in the kitchen and letting the ingredients of one meal lead naturally into the next. “Continuity is the heart and soul of cooking,” she reminds us. “If we decide our meals will be good, remanded kale stems, quickly pickled or cooked in olive oil and garlic, will be taken advantage of to garnish eggs, or tossed with pasta. Beet and turnip greens, so often discarded, will be washed well and sautéed in olive oil and filled into an omelet, or served on warm, garlicky crostini.” You can relish her words with your tastebuds as well as your mind.

After reading An Everlasting Meal, I started grinding chunks of stale baguette in the food processor to make breadcrumbs, which I toast in the oven and sprinkle atop quiche for a bit of crunch, or use to form a crust on pan-fried fish. I began taking note if fresh herbs were going to waste in the fridge, chopping them up finely and freezing them in ice cube trays to add later to soups, curries, or pots of beans. I realized that roasting seven sweet potatoes on Sunday need not mean I eat the same thing every day: one can be turned into crisp little fries to dip into garlic-yogurt sauce, another sliced thin and layered on salad with beets and feta cheese, a third simmered in coconut milk with green beans, basil and mint and served over rice.

If you are the type of cook who depends on recipes to guide your hands in the kitchen, this book will help develop your confidence to “let go of the handlebars” now and then, freeing you up to make the most of what you already have in the fridge. If you are already confident improvising in the kitchen, it will teach you to see fresh possibilities in ingredients so common we forget to notice that they, too, can be dinner on their own: eggs, onions, garlic, bread. And if you rarely venture beyond the bare minimum of cooking chicken and heating vegetables, it may at the very least inspire you to do the same thing more mindfully, noticing how oil takes on a sheen and skims faster across the bottom of a pan when it is hot, how quickly the aroma of garlic fills the kitchen when tossed into this oil, how sweet onions become as they soften and turn golden.

It is observations like these that make each meal a pleasure and bring us back to the kitchen time and again with renewed curiosity and anticipation.

Still, right up until the end, he was able to express his appreciation for the homemade cookies my grandmother brought to him in the nursing home on her daily visits: banana oatmeal cookies, ginger cookies, cornflake cookies, and others. He would eat them one after another, the way we always wanted to but were never allowed as kids. When you’re 88 years old, you enjoy certain privileges.

We knew death would not be far off when my mother came home from visiting him one afternoon and announced, “Well, this might be it. He wouldn’t even eat a gingersnap today.”

He slept away peacefully a couple of Saturdays ago, so I traveled back to Minnesota to join my family for celebrations of his life and memory. The funeral took place at the Lutheran church where he had sung tenor in the choir for decades. Afterwards, the church put out a classic Midwestern luncheon spread in its “Activity Room”—buckets of potato salad, pre-buttered rolls with ham, turkey and cheese, pickles, fruit salad, cake and coffee—then packed up the leftovers to send home with us. The pickle jar carried a large label with “Funerals” scrawled across it in permanent marker. Apparently nothing says “we feel your loss” like a bowl full of gherkins.

Milling about in the lobby after lunch, word traveled fast: “Grandma made funeral cookies, so I guess that that’s where we’re headed.”

“Funeral cookies” are what my mother’s side of the family has always called a particular type of oatmeal butter cookie, silver-dollar sized mounds dusted with a whitecap of powdered sugar. They contain only six ingredients: butter, sugar, flour, oats, vanilla and salt. You form them into balls, flatten each one with your hand, and bake them for 10 minutes at 350°. Then you sprinkle them with powdered sugar as soon as you pull them from the oven.

Grandma says they got their nickname because they’re simple to make and only use ingredients most people have on hand in the pantry (or would have, when she was growing up). You could whip up a batch in 20 minutes and bring them over to someone who had lost a loved one as soon as you heard the news. They’re so easy and delicious that my family makes them for all sorts of occasions, from Christmas to picnics, but we call them funeral cookies no matter when they show up.

We sat for several hours in Grandma’s living room that afternoon, munching sweets, sipping coffee, looking through cards, sharing memories and, from time to time, crunching on a funeral pickle. In hindsight, it seems like a natural combination with which to mark the end of a life well-lived: mostly sweet, with just a hint of bitter.