Books for foodies
Cook The Books Club Winner!
Last week Deb from Kahakai Kitchen contacted me asking if I'd guest judge their Cook The Books Club contest for the book "Baking Cakes in Kigali." Well - yes! The Cook The Books Club is a bimonthly book club and blog event in which the hosts, along with any other...
Desserts inspired by modern art
I can't tell you how much I love this. Caitlin Freeman, pastry chef at SFMOMA's Blue Bottle Cafe (update: there's no longer a location in the SFMOMA) creates these edible masterpieces inspired by the museum's works of art. I have complete admiration for those who make...
Agent Colt Shore: Domino 29
True story: I once had a gig in espionage. Honestly. I can't really share any details - statute of limitations and all that - but money and information did change hands, and I operated under a code name. A not-very-cool-sounding code name, but still. Once I let it...
This is the Best Cookie Ever and it’s named after compost
A single bite of this cookie transports you into a taste-fueled rabbit hole, a complex tunnel of sweet and salty from which there's no turning back ... it's Christina Tosi's Compost Cookie. Tosi is the chef and owner of New York's Momofuku Milk Bar, the sweet spot in...
Fiction for foodies: Baking Cakes in Kigali
Every now and then I read a book that just perfectly illustrates how food as a theme unites all the people of the world. Baking Cakes in Kigali is one of those books. It's most likely not a novel you've heard of; at least I hadn't, although author Gaile Parkin made...
Book spine poetry: the food edition
This morning I decided to play Book Spine Poetry but handicap myself by choosing only food fiction or food fact books. There’s a collection spilling around the kitchen; I thought it would be easy. But turns out a shelf of titles starting with “The” and ending in “Cookbook” is a bit limiting, and try as I might I couldn’t figure out how to put “The Widow Cliquot” together with “A Goose In Toulouse” and “The Nasty Bits” without cheating. Check it out – here’s what I came up with.
Meatless Monday: potato filled tacos
Luscious, rustic steamed tacos with a potato filling from the kitchen of Señora Elvira and the pen of the renowned Diana Kennedy. Quick, easy, and delicious. Here you go:
A tale of two sausages
It wasn't unusual that LL and I were each reading last weekend. It was unusual, though, that at the exact same moment each of us reached a page in our respective books that contained a recipe. Recipes written by people famous for something other than cooking. Plus,...
Urban farming
Novella Carpenter is my newest heroine. I've just finished reading her book Farm City: Confessions of an Urban Farmer, in which she moves into a ramshackle apartment on a dead-end street in a dead-end Oakland, CA neighborhood and hesitantly plants a garden in the...
Judging a book by its cover
Anthony Bourdain, Padma Lakshmi, and Susan Orlean all agree that “The Hundred-Foot Journey” is an excellent novel, and they’re right, I might have missed it, though, keep reading to find out why.
A Big Sur Thanksgiving, 1939
Knowing how to brine a perfect turkey is not as important as the ability to remember what, exactly, to give thanks for. Here is novelist Lillian Bos Ross’ description of her 1939 Big Sur Thanksgiving meal. Lillian Bos is one of my heroes; read on to find out more about her.
Tomato artichoke soup recipe
Somewhere along the line I picked up an excellent cookbook called Soups of Italy: Cooking over 130 Soups the Italian Way by Norma Wasserman-Miller. Her short history of Italian soup in the first chapter is really interesting; she writes that zuppa, the Italian word...