Food, Photography and Bon Mots
Which “vegetable” is actually a berry, has the highest nicotine content among all vegetables, and is 95% water? (Hint: Chinese ladies once used the dye extracted from this vegetable’s skin to polish their teeth to a then-fashionable gray hue.) It’s the eggplant. Who knew? (Don’t…
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…
Tender artichoke hearts. Lemon. Grape tomatoes. Herbs galore. Yum. A friend served this as the main course at a dinner party I was fortunate to attend a few years ago. She confided that the recipe came from a Jamie Oliver book, The Naked…
To my delight, I’ve realized that I have some holes in my cookbook collection. My Middle Eastern cookbook shelf, in particular, is a little thin. I say “to my delight” because, believe me, I welcome any excuse to buy new cookbooks. Picture me with a…
You know how you put stuff off? Me, too. I don’t usually sing my own praises but I’m not shy about saying that I excel (I mean really excel) as a procrastinator. In fact, I’m the Serena Williams of procrastination. So, today I decided…
These days many food sites exhort us to “eat the rainbow”–a colorful visual cue to remind us of the importance of incorporating a variety of nutrients into our daily diets. Good advice. I know I need the nudge. Here is a recipe for…
I love bread pudding. It is my idea of a soothing comfort food–right up there alongside refried beans and candy corn. That said, I guess it’s pretty clear that carbs whisper sweet nothings in my ear when the pressure’s on in my life . While…
My friend Sarah recently went to lunch at the new Farmhouse Restaurant at Roger’s Gardens in Newport Beach. She came home raving about the food. The cauliflower steaks with chimichuri sauce particularly impressed her. I decided to see if I could recreate the dish…
Brussels sprouts. Yuck! Over the years, bitter little brussels sprouts and I have not been close. Sure, we hung out together a few times. Sure, I oogled the little green brussels in the bins at Sprouts and picked out the most handsome ones to…
OK everyone. All together now. Say cowpeas. That’s what black-eyed peas are. They are a type of cowpeas, “one of the most ancient crops known to man” according to Purdue’s horticultural Jefferson Institute, and the real shocker is that they aren’t really peas at all.…
