At the Table Archives - Karen Christensen

Cooking through a crisis with M F K Fisher (and ckbk.com)

After I published the post "To Cook A Wolf - Baking with M F K Fisher," the cookbook platform ckbk suggested we collaborate in promoting an idea we both clearly believe: that home cooking can help us get through the COVID-19 crisis. I had picked up How to Cook a Wolf because it’s about eating during an emergency era, dealing with strained budgets and scarce provisions. M. F. K. Fisher tackled the challenge of hearing the wolf at the door with panache. It is true that, when the wolf first [...]

May 26th, 2020|Categories: At the Table|

Foraging fiddleheads, hostas, and more

Long before lockdown began in Massachusetts, I’d been laying in supplies at the urging of my son in Beijing, who’d already been through it. I started planning a vegetable garden, but was a little concerned about getting enough fresh vegetables. It would be ages until there was anything from the garden, I thought, until I realized that the rather annoying ferns that are endlessly trying to dominate the beds around my house are in fact the variety that produce edible fiddleheads. Then I learned that hostas, another plant I have [...]

May 13th, 2020|Categories: At the Table, In the Garden|

To Cook A Wolf – Baking with M F K Fisher

I’m in a war-time, Victory Garden frame of mind. There is no actual food shortage and no prospect, it seems, of running out of food. But going to the shops has left us shaken: the crowds, the lack of awareness of what social distancing means (the guys standing close together in the produce department at Guido’s, chatting about how their kids’ schools have been closed - guess why, fellas?), and even the presence of sick people (the woman coughing in the checkout line at the Berkshire Coop - seriously?). Add [...]

March 22nd, 2020|Categories: At the Table|