When I left for La Varenne cooking school back in the summer of 1989, I thought I had a tidy 9 months ahead of me. But what already was clearly going to be a fascinating adventure became even more so when the excursion got extended a few different times and [...]
Fresh herbs are the norm in so many recipes today, a very happy change from those days when all our herbs were from little tin cans in the kitchen cupboard. That comes thanks both to the availability of fresh herb bundles in grocery stores and more of us home cooks growing chives, thyme [...]
Some day I'm going to actually get around to this, checking on the earlier history of my Seattle neighborhood to see if cherry trees figured prominently back when. Our house is nearly surrounded by them. To one side an ancient, sprawling Rainier tree packed with cherries that I can spy [...]
This is an old friend I hadn't visited with for some time. The subject of caramel corn came up in a recent conversation and it set me on a nostalgic trip back to when I used to cook up batches of the stuff at home. So I dug out this [...]
Not long ago, a friend emailed asking for some input on knives for his kitchen. He wasn't happy with the last set that he'd bought and wanted to know what brand I might recommend for replacements. I suddenly felt that my "serious foodie" façade might crumble around me. I didn't have [...]
This post proves that one person's culinary curiosity is another person's comfort food. Yesterday I was shopping for lamb shanks at the combo meat/seafood counter my (very) friendly neighborhood grocery store. (I'd tell you what I did with the shanks, but afraid it's for a magazine article later this year, along with [...]