It seems that I can’t get through a summer without some kind of corn and tomato combination. This one wasn’t even on my rader. I’d been mulling over the idea of some kind of stone variation on caprese, maybe with peaches, maybe not. I’d gone so far as to buy a tub of fresh mozzarella…
We went and visited summer over the Fourth of July. It was deliciously hot. Shorts weather, ice cream weather, lake weather. And then we came back to San Francisco’s perpetual April and while I enjoyed the cool nights, I missed summer. It made me think of all the things to love about the hot weather. Things…
Sometime last year I stumbled across a list of hot dog toppings that are popular in various parts of the world and got the idea to throw a hot dog party. I envisioned a pile of hot dogs and buns, a grill, a park, and a table full of toppings options and I planned it…
On Christmas, Jeff and I cooked a Thai feast out of the Pok Pok cookbook. We put together a list of dishes to try and spent the week before the holiday scouring small Asian grocery stores for exotic and unfamiliar ingredients. On Christmas day we gobbled up stew and sticky rice and pad thai. The…
Indian food is a pretty common option when you’re a vegetarian. I ate a lot of it during high school and college, when I wasn’t eating meat. There was the buffet near my hometown, located in a strip mall off the highway, where I spent a number of weekend lunches because it was had some…
A few months ago my brother-in-law visited and I made dinner for him. I don’t remember exactly what I made, but I do remember he was impressed that I’d made a meal with multiple parts on a weeknight. The meals he makes at home for his family, he noted, are generally one-pan affairs. I kind…
I love peas. Like, a lot. So much that it’s a problem. The problem is that I don’t often measure when I add frozen peas to a recipe. I just pour until I think there’s enough, and often my definition of enough is too many peas for Jeff. It’s not that he doesn’t like peas….
If you open any freezer in America, chances are good that you will find a frozen pizza. Or maybe that was just a 90s thing. The one you would find in my parents’ freezer circa 1996-2004 was Celeste. It’s a single-serving bar style pizza with a crust that’s not thick or thin, and the cheese goes out…
I have a really hard time following recipes. Not that the recipes turn out wrong, but that I am almost incapable of following all the steps as written to get to the end result. I skim through the list of ingredients, making mental notes about substitutions for the things I don’t have or don’t want…
A few weeks ago I was in Santa Monica and found myself with an excuse to visit Huckleberry for brunch. Their cookbook came out last year, complete with a showstopping picture of berry swirl bread on the cover, so there was really no decision to make – we were going. When we walked into Huckleberry the…