Food, Photography and Bons Mots
Summer! Here is a bit of mood music to set the tone: Joe Hisaishi’s One Summer’s Day. How pretty is that? This is my favorite time of the year for cooking. Summer fruits and vegetables are ripe and plentiful in the farmer’s markets. I just…
Salad Days! No. Not the Shakespearean kind of salad days full of reminiscences and regrets. You remember— Cleopatra lamenting her youthful indiscretions. “My salad days, When I was green in judgment: cold in blood, To say as I said then! ” Instead, these salad…
Happy summer! Too hot to spend much time at the stove? These Thai Corn Fritters may be just what you need. A short cook on the griddle and you have a tasty appetizer, entree or side. (OK. I’ll fess up. I eat these for breakfast,…
Oh, how I wish I had a vegetable garden! I would try my hand at growing everything. Gene, my good friend and neighbor, has a flourishing vegetable garden this year. On occasion, he lets me come down and dig around to get my fix.…
Need a little spice in your life? (Who doesn’t?) This spicy pozole soup should do the trick. Pozole is the Spanish word for hominy. Hominy is a traditional ingredient in Mexican cooking. It’s use, in fact, dates back to the kitchens of the Aztecs when…
This is a very good vinaigrette. Glorious, in fact. The hot new chef, Samin Nosrat, featured this salad dressing recipe in a recent New York Times Magazine food piece titled “Best Green Salad in the World.” That kind of high praise made me think this…
Cooking brings people together. Right? Apparently that is not is the case if the food is hummus. The chickpeas themselves don’t seem to be the subject of much debate. It is generally believed that they have been harvested as food since antiquity. Harold McGee, in…
I’ve been making (and enjoying) this soup for a very long time. This corn chowder recipe first ran in the Los Angeles Times on September 30, 1998–21 years ago. The Times food section had a “Quick Fix” column at the time and this recipe was…
This one’s a keeper. On my first taste, I knew that this cauliflower cake would be a party dish on my table. I’m pretty picky about what I serve my guests but this beautiful dish is that good. Love at first bite, I guess. This…
