Right now I’m waiting to hear from the publisher of the current DCCC pick about whether my request to post a few Thai food recipes on the DCCC blog will be granted. I don’t post recipes from cookbooks without receiving permission first, unless I’ve adapted a recipe considerably. And there has to be a good reason for me to change something; I won’t just change something for the sake of changing it so that I can say a recipe’s been adapted, thereby skirting the permission issue. If something is perfect as is, why touch it?

I’m especially hesitant to tinker with a recipe when the subject of a cookbook is a foreign cuisine, from a land I’ve never visited, and the cookbook is written by an expert, someone who’s spent years learning that cuisine and steeping themselves in the culture—in this case, chef and cookbook writer David Thompson.

But permission requests are one of the more tedious aspects of publishing. Drinking a cocktail is a lot more fun. So, while you’re waiting for the main course (hey, maybe you could supplicate Random House on my behalf, telling them to speedily process my request because you’re waiting for some delicious Thai recipes to appear on the blog.), I thought I’d offer you a cocktail.

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This is galangal.

It is not the same as mandrake, the root that Ofelia, the protagonist in Pan’s Labyrinth, placed under her sick mother’s bed.

But it’s nearly as

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To DCCC readers:

Every so often I post something about life at Dowdy Corners—the garden, the bees, and now the chickens. The following story about the death of one of our chickens may seem completely unrelated to the club’s main business of reading cookbooks and preparing recipes, but it’s not: Many of Ginger’s eggs have been used in the preparation of food posted on the DCCC blog (click here, here, and here), and have even made it into print as one of the star ingredients in Udon Noodles with Everything, included in my friend Debra Samuel’s newest cookbook My Japanese Table. On the blog I don’t explicitly talk about where food comes, how it’s grown, and how it gets onto our tables, yet it’s something I think about a lot. Keeping chickens at Dowdy Corners has been one significant part of an on-going experience learning about food. If you don’t keep chickens, you may find this story maudlin; if you do keep them, you will know how easy it is to get attached to these domesticated fowl. This story is one of several I’m working on about our chickens, many of which are not sad at all, but are very happy chicken stories.

-Holly

Ginger’s egg. Page from My Japanese Table (photography by Heath Robbins; styling by Catrine Kelty)

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The morning started out innocently. After receiving a handfed breakfast of leftover dinner roll, Ginger, in the newspaper-lined pet carrier she’d been placed in the night before, was ready to be taken to her 8:40 a.m. appointment with Dr. Barcelow to see what could be done, should be done about her “pouch.”

Though not as large and bulbous as it had been before the surgery, when we had mistakenly identified it as an abscess, her abdomen was sagging more, it seemed, every day. Without the aid of muscle, Ginger’s skin was stretching and thinning under the weight of her intestines. When she was tucked in for the night, sitting on the perch, the pouch dangled in mid-air at an impossible distance from her body, like a reluctant teardrop of water suspended from the end of a faucet.

There were other alarming signs: Featherless and exposed to cold January air, the

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At the moment of transition from one DCCC pick to the next, new exciting cookbook, I always want to linger a bit more with the old one. After several weeks of cooking and reading, I develop a relationship with the author, the book, and the recipes, and, in the case of 70 Traditional African Recipes, a newfound taste for the food. Each book becomes a familiar

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70 TRADITIONAL AFRICAN RECIPES
Authentic Classic Dishes from all over Africa Adapted for the Western Kitchen
By Rosamund Grant
Southwater Books
96 pp.

In melting-pot America with a choice of restaurants reflecting our global world, it can be difficult for adventurous and seasoned eaters to find entire cuisines, flavor profiles, or ingredients that are wholly new to them. Yet, beyond Ethiopian and Moroccan, most Americans, including DCCC members, surely have little idea of what comprises African cooking. So it is with nearly blank palates, that we approached the most recent DCCC pick.

The flavor, ingredients, and techniques of African cooking took us out of familiar territory, pushing

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Below are questions for individual pondering or group discussion, and for anyone or any club that’s been cooking and reading the Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club’s most recent pick, 70 Traditional African Recipes by Rosamund Grant.

If you have read and/or cooked from 70 Traditional African Recipes, I’d love to hear what you think of the book.

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This book takes a wide view of African cooking, jumping from

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A cookbook devoted to all of the great rice dishes of the world. Now that would be a dream project: Traveling from country to country researching the most authentic versions along with the myriad regional variations, traditional and contemporary, that would surely exist. Such rice dishes, where every biteful

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Last evening, less than an hour after posting a story about Joloff Rice, I wound my way slowly home on the 3-mile stretch of dirt road, snow covered and windblown, that connects us to asphalt.

Parked directly in front of our garage was a

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The Indians have turmeric, the Europeans, beets, and the Africans, palm oil—an intensely colored oil extracted from the fruits of the oil palm that adds a shot of deep orange-red color to whatever food it touches, including this

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Retro is good when it comes to ice cubes. And retro ice cubes are good when it comes to cocktails.

This is the discovery I made with my vintage “Quickube” ice cube tray, something I picked up last week at a second hand shop just days before our Dowdy Corners holiday cocktail party, which was attended by DCCC members as well as friends from other parts of our lives.

I consider myself a passionate connoisseur of

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