There are times when a lousy memory comes in handy. When watching a movie I've seen before, for instance, it can be like watching it for the first time again! I'm still moved-surprised-delighted-shocked by the action on the screen and twists in the plot because I've forgotten many of those details [...]
I don't know exactly what spurred the urge, but sometime early December I got a serious case of waffles-on-the-brain. And it suddenly became clear that waffles aren't on nearly as many menus as you might hope when suffering such an affliction. Not that I go out for breakfast all that [...]
This morning's breakfast was a particularly good eye-opener, a nice change of pace from my standard fare (english muffin with peanut butter, yogurt with Grape Nuts, bowl of cereal). Today, I slipped a piece of cornbread from the pan in which I'd baked it yesterday. I cut the piece in [...]
A few months ago a walking buddy mentioned that she'd just checked out my blog for the first time and enjoyed poking around it a bit. "You sure make cooking sound fun," she said. Thoroughly unconvinced. After a few minutes of chatting with her about cooking at home, it became [...]
Which would translate to "god jul" in Swedish, with a "gott nytt år" tossed in to wish you a happy new year as well! There are a couple of reasons that our Christmas day menu--usually a hearty but simple brunch, then a casual nosh later in the day--became a vaguely smörgåsbord-influenced [...]
As usual, I walked into the grocery store last night not sure what we'd end up having for dinner. I was thinking "pork tenderloin" but when I got to the meat & seafood department, those big, plump Dungeness crab really caught my attention. At under $5 per pound, they were [...]
'Tis the season. For a lot of things, actually. I hear talk of comfort food and big cozy sweaters, fires in the fire place and hunkering down to watch old movies and read a good book. And with all this rain, cooling temperatures, it's also the season of wild mushrooms. [...]
I hope you read that title with an appropriately thick French accent, as I'd intended. Lay am-behr-gehr. It makes a difference. Because this isn't about the all-American hamburger we all know and love, instead a Gallic take on our Yankee icon. It really had never crossed my radar in all the [...]
Sometimes I presume that everyone does all the same little tricks in the kitchen that help make our cooking lives easier and more efficient. Like laying down a dampened paper towel under a cutting board to keep it from slipping around on the counter (though my no-skid KitchenAid cutting board makes [...]
I was chatting with the butcher at my neighborhood grocery store about lamb on a recent visit. I wanted to do a simple braise-stew but time was short, didn't want to fiddle with trimming shoulder (blade) meat from the bone, nor rely on leaner leg steaks that are less unctuous for braising. He [...]