A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
At the 2016 International Food Blogger Conference, a sample from the California Fig Advisory Board reminded me of an X File. Not the famous X-Files TV show, but something far less mysterious and far more delicious. The X file that I remembered is about an X-shaped cookie for which I have a file on my computer. […]
A few months back, I read a post from the Nerds with Knives blog about Yotam Ottolenghi’s Chermoula Roasted Eggplant. The recipe looked great — roasted eggplant drenched with a piquant spice paste (the chermoula) — and since it was eggplant season, I tried it a few times. Finding the right eggplant proved challenging, but when I found […]
A great stew is a balance between flavors and textures, and ideally the end result is greater than the sum of the parts. One of my favorites is a French-influenced vegetable stew that I have been tinkering with for a few months. It has sweet squash, mellow potatoes, piney rosemary, and sharp green olives, with a […]
Summer produce won’t be around much longer, so I’ve been eating summer specialties as much as possible. Last Sunday, my focus was zucchini, tomatillos and sweet corn, which I combined in a “pseudo stew.” I’m calling it a “pseudo stew” because it was too liquid to eat on a plate, not thin enough to be […]
Almost exactly one year ago, there was some commotion in my tiny corner of the Twitterverse about a New York Times recipe from Julia Moskin for macaroni and cheese. There are a zillion mac and cheese recipes, so what caused the commotion? Uncooked macaroni. The recipe calls for uncooked macaroni to be mixed with milk, […]
One of my favorite things to cook is also one of the most unphotogenic dishes I know: the savory baked tofu from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. Although it has a monotone and bland brown hue, its taste is much more exciting: tofu’s subtle flavor in the background, and a foreground of soy sauce, ginger, garlic, […]
(Updated 10/15/16 with new photo, 10/23/16 with new archival art) Back in February, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Food+Home section had a feature article about using seeds in the kitchen. Written by Amanda Gold, the article recommends looking at seeds as a healthy and tasty addition to your diet, in savory and sweet applications. Always looking […]
Bowl of peppers from Thomas Campone Photography (via Flickr). CC BY-NC 2.0. When a bowl of beans or a bowl of soup needs some zing, or if I’m making a quesadilla in the middle of winter and don’t have any decent salsa, I open my freezer and reach for a jar labeled “Spicy Toltec BBQ […]
I have been baking bread for a long time, but never with a great amount of intensity (though during one period in the 90s I was baking frequently and had a personal “bread museum” that chronicled my efforts). In the early years, general cookbooks like The New Laurel’s Kitchen were my teacher, but their basic […]
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been baking a “war bread” for quite a while. My long-time favorite one-day bread is the oat bread in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. The original recipe is simple, delicious and nutritious, being a single-day bread that is enriched with rolled oats and oat bran. By […]