Admit it. As good as you might try to be, eating three square meals a day, there are times, usually around four o’clock on a lazy weekend afternoon, when your stomach starts a-churning. (At least if you’re anything like me it does.) You get that hollow, hungry feeling, and you know that a bag of […]

My friend, who lives in San Francisco, forwarded me this link about the new ‘Wichcraft which just opened there. For those of you who don’t know, ‘Wichcraft is a popular sandwich kiosk in Bryant Park, NYC, serving bourgie sandwiches to hungry lunchtime crowds. Chef Tom Colicchio (of Bravo’s Top Chef fame), has just opened a […]

I have always had a rather tumultuous relationship with chorizo sausage. It is not that I don’t love the spicy flavor, the gentle kick you get from cooking it in any dish. Because I do. What I don’t love is the grease, that slick of orange oil that seeps out of the chorizo and onto, […]

How much do I love imported, canned tuna in olive oil? I will tell you, it’s a lot. No single, other food that I can think of brings a meal to glowing, bourgie status with just a can opener and a little bit of creativity. But what do you do when confronted with the aforementioned […]

Sunday morning, polenta and roasted cherries, what could be finer? I’ve said it before, I love polenta. It’s versatility cannot be matched: served soft and flavored with mascarpone or parmesan cheese, made with chicken broth and a bit of fresh sage, or served firm and fried. The possibilities are both endless and delicious. One of […]

Each summer in Oakland there is a large carnival that comes to town a few times during the season. Driving along the freeway you will see it in the distance; the outline of the rickety Ferris wheel, neon lights a-glow; the tilt-a-whirl spinning around at breakneck speeds. Each year I squeal with joy at its […]

I live around the corner from a pretty amazing market. A place where six different varieties of eggplant happily cohabitate with mounds of garlic chives, where buckets of freshly made tofu sit chilling not far away from briny, sea-water oysters. This time of year, with such a bounty of produce, is a superb season to […]

Every Saturday morning my local PBS station plays cooking shows. Jacques Pepin has been a long time mainstay in the line-up. So I guess you could say that I have grown up with Jacques Pepin over the course of many a Saturday morning. I love the man. But maybe in his old age, he has […]

With all of the different types of cucumbers at the market these days, you never know what you are truly getting. Watery and insipid, or crunchy and crisp, the adjectives vary as much as the cucumbers themselves. But I do like a good cucumber, and watery as they may be, they also taste of summer: […]

Simple can mean many things: stripped down, easy, commonplace, or everyday. Today it has become a bit of a catch phrase when referring to those typical 30-minute meal options. But simple can also mean pure, unadulterated…delicious. This is the type of simple I mean when talking about Vanilla Bean Cream Cake. Pure unadulterated vanilla, a […]