Yesterday was just one of those days. Mid afternoon I found myself staring out the window into the gray-ish sky, considering the kind of week it had been, the kind of frazzle I felt, the fact that it couldn't be just Wednesday, really?! -- the weekend seemed too far away. I deserved a [...]
It can be pretty easy today to buy quite good commercial ice creams, whether one of the many regional small-scale producers -- like Snoqualmie from my back yard -- or premium national brands (I don't really love regular Häagen-Dazs, but am a fan of the Five line). I even sampled at the [...]
There are so many reasons that it's been as long as it has since I last sat down to write a post here. I won't bore you with details, aside from the more recent reason that I was out of town for most of December. It was a trip my [...]
I can't say how many times a food story I've written, or recipe I've developed, has come with a story of my mother. My favorite is this one, which ended up getting picked up by Saveur's online offerings and has, in the long run, become one of the most popular [...]
All work and no play has been making Cynthia somewhat dingbatty. Honestly. It's that kind of brain-frizz that makes me turn in circles in the kitchen 3 or 4 times before I remember that all I needed to do was grab a knife out of the drawer to spread peanut [...]
I know weather was pretty dismal this past spring in many parts of the U.S., not the least up here in the Northwest where we brokethe kinds of records you're never too excited to hear about: the coldest April; the next-to-wettest March. So now that the last week or so [...]
I realize this looks more like potato salad than cauliflower, which is clearly an indication that I should have spent more time trying to capture my subject. But I was hungry..... Last week was indulgent to say the least, me and my culinary colleagues who attended the IACP [...]
I don't have much of a sweet tooth at all. In fact I often joke that if there's such a thing as a salty tooth, that's what I've got. But on one sweet subject I can get rather giddy: caramel. Though only really amazing, buttery, rich caramel need apply. I cringe [...]
Yeah, I know. Though technically it was less than two months ago, Thanksgiving already feels like a faint memory from months gone by. So I won't dwell on details of that day's feast that we enjoyed here at my house. The ginger-and-orange brined turkey that I grilled over mesquite-enhanced charcoal out [...]
The unexpected White Thanksgiving we experienced here in Seattle certainly threw us all some curve balls. The end result at my house was that--for the first time in many years--my Thanksgiving dinner table didn't include any of my blood relations. Brother sick, niece working, sister stuck on Queen Anne hill, [...]