Cooking in my Kitchen

In my kitchen in November, it's been very quiet. It's a new season, and the prolific fruit and vegetable harvests of the early autumn are over. I've been making salads with vegetables from far away, enjoying the colorful tomatoes, lettuce, avocados, and bell peppers that aren't growing around us, now that the cold has set in: we did have a real cold snap with deep snow in mid-November. The biggest November kitchen event is Thanksgiving, but we are spending this holiday with our family in Virginia, as very thoroughly reflected in a series of blog posts on Thursday!

Although no new kitchen items appeared this month, I still wanted to participate in Sherry's blog party, so I'm sharing some pictures of what we have eaten this month, beginning with some very plain salads -- one is shown at the top of this post. For more exciting kitchen news, check the blog

sherryspickings.blogspot.com 

where many bloggers post their kitchen news. Sherry herself lives in Australia, along with many of the other participants, so you'll find lots of wonderful spring foods, fresh berries, apricots coming into season, and more in their kitchen posts. Fun to read from here, so far and so cold! This post and all the photos are copyright © 2019 by this blog: maefood dot blogspot dot com. If you see this elsewhere, your are reading a pirated edition.

Oven-roasted potatoes and onions, a side dish with roast chicken.

Pork chops with braised red cabbage.
The leftovers were in the salad below.

Salad of lettuce, tomato, and the leftover pork and red cabbage.
I made sure that each bite-sized piece of meat had some good mustard on it.

Really good mustard!

Lettuce, tomato, red pepper, and tuna salad made with mayo, celery, and pickle relish.

Savory pancakes from sourdough starter discard.
Served with salsa, sour cream, and fried onions.

Smoked salmon and hard-boiled eggs with capers, lemon, mayo, and vegetables.

As I say, November was a very quiet month at home. Besides the books I reviewed on the blog, I also read two books that I didn't write anything about (at least not yet) --

• Amos Oz, Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land, first published a year ago at the time of the author's death.
• Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, which was published in 1931, but first made available on Kindle this month. It's been on my list for a very long time!

And we subscribed to HBO, for at least as long as we find things to watch. What we have watched but I haven't written about:

• The first episodes of "His Dark Materials," based on the Philip Pullman books, which is being released on a week-by-week basis. So far it's watchable but not fantastic, and I don't have much to say about it.
• Len watched the 10-episode series "Our Boys," a recently-released Israeli police drama about real events that took place in 2014. I listened to some of it.
• Finally -- we watched the film Crazy Rich Asians, which I've been wanting to see.  Its food scenes are wondrous, especially those in the markets of Singapore. I didn't write about this film because at the time of the release virtually every food magazine on- and off-line had detailed articles about how these scenes were staged and filmed and what they signified.

December will be busier, but like November, maybe will not involve my kitchen very much.