Every year around Christmas I make spiced nuts. LOTS of spiced nuts. Everyone gets a jar — family, friends, co-workers, third cousins three times removed… For about a week in December every flat surface in my apartment is covered with cooling spiced nuts. I make lots of different varieties — some sweet, some fiery hot, […]
I have a list about five miles long of recipes I have marked as ‘to-make’. It’s not a strict and systematic first-in-first-out queue, but more or less I try to start at the beginning and end at the end. I add to it fairly often, and try to consult it at least every month or […]
I lack self control when it comes to buying vegetables from Mariquita Farms. In no way, shape, or form did I need twelve pounds of early girl tomatoes. But something — my vision of delicious ripe tomatoes paired with a lack of
My favorite type of radish is — hands-down — the french breakfast radish. Oblong, fading from white to pink, mostly mild with a slight peppery bite, I can eat pounds of them if they are slathered with high-quality butter…
Picking wild blackberries is something I truly miss about living in the Pacific Northwest. Blackberry bushes hang heavy with ripe fruit in late August and early September all over the state of Washington. After I finished my year of traveling and before I left for California, I spent an August and a September living in […]
Poor chard. People seem to get it in their CSA boxes week after week after week (after week). This abundance (some might say excess) can cause a proclaimed chard lover to mutter, “chard… again…” and can lead even those with the deepest vegetable love to develop a mild disdain, an overwhelmed antipathy, or even an […]
Ricotta, ricotta, ricotta. So versatile, so simple, so delicious when done well, and so awful when done wrong. For most of my life I hated ricotta, thinking it too rubbery and tasteless. That is, until I tried (quote unquote) REAL ricotta. Not the stuff from the grocery store, but the artisan cheese that is traditionally […]
The first time I saw tumbleweed rolling down the street was in rural eastern Washington. We were in some small town near the Idaho border whose name escapes me now. It was early, 7AM or so, and my dad and I pulled the truck up to the only place in town that was open, a […]
It’s not that often that I get fluttery thinking about cookies. Most of the time cookies are cookies, and I could take or leave them (well, to be honest I’ll usually take them). These cookies, however, are certainly an exception. I think I could eat them everyday for the rest of my life. They are […]
Steven’s grandmother Faela is a woman I wish I could have met. She passed away long before Steven and I knew each other, so anything I know about her is gathered from old photographs, recipe cards