Food, Photography and Bon Mots
Portobellos are gourmet mushrooms. Right? Actually…no. Portobellos are poseurs. They are just your common Agaricus bisporus (button) mushroom with good PR. Who knew? It turns out that until the 1980s, those big beefy mushrooms we now call portobellos were the overly-mature culls that more often…
Happy Year of the Pig. I’m a bit late cooking for Chinese New Year. Life got in the way. Here is a wonderful stir fry served with noodles that I’m pretty sure you will enjoy. No pigs here, though, just a great melange of…
Do Asian vegetables confuse you? Don’t know your bok choy from your choy sum? Neither do I, but when David Tanis, one of my favorite food writers, published this recipe for Glazed Shiitakes With Bok Choy in his New York Times column City Kitchen, I soon found…
It is the Christmas season here in Huntington Beach. I know that because my local Costco has Christmas trees for sale. Seems a tad early to me, but there is some research that holds that people who decorate early for the holidays lead happier…
“When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother.” –Rodney Dangerfield Close your eyes and this soup is absolutely delicious. Stare at it in your bowl…not so much. How do you write about (let alone photograph) a…
What do a Pavlova, a bowl of cherry Garcia and a Margarita have in common? You got that one right! They are all foods named after a famous person. (The Pavlova meringue confection is named after the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. Cherry Garcia is…
Today, April 3rd, is National Find a Rainbow Day. Woo-hoo! Let’s party! I’ll bring the hors d’oeuvres. National Find a Rainbow Day is a day to either follow your whimsy and go looking for a rainbow, or, failing that, to look for beauty and hope…
It has been chilly here in southern California for the last couple of days. I found a thick coat of frost on my car this morning and my thermostat registered 55 degrees in my house. Even my pup Juliet was reluctant to leave the warmth…
When I can’t sleep (which is often), I read recipes or watch You Tube cooking videos with Juliet snoring contentedly by my side. I usually select a cooking theme and then I’m good for hours. During one recent insomnia-stained night, I came across this recipe…
The vocabulary word for today is umami. Now don’t go getting all “low energy” on me. I really don’t want to see any of you putting your heads down on your desks and hyperventilating like this is just too hard. …
