Food, Photography and Bons Mots
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…
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…
I often look to David Tanis’ food column for inspired food ideas. He was a lead chef for more than thirty years at Berkeley’s legendary Chez Panisse. That credential alone positions him in the pantheon of culinary immortals. Since leaving Chez Panisse in 2011, Tanis has written a…
You know how, when you aren’t exactly sure you want to do something, you put it off—turning instead to “must do” projects like sorting the dog’s toys by size and color? This week I’ve been nagged by the feeling that I needed to make…
Joseph Campbell famously wrote: “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” Good advice but not always easy to do. The bliss I’ve been following at the moment happens to be a cake, and it is a wonderful cake…
Certain things in American life are understood. You don’t mess with Old Glory, for example, or Texas. You don’t cut off a phalanx of Hells Angels on PCH. You don’t open wrapped candy during a performance at The South Coast Repertory Theatre. You argue with…
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…
What’s not to love about broccoli? First, it is not kale. (I rest my case.) Second…no wait! Gimme a moment. I can think of something. Really. Love it or hate it, nobody, it seems, takes a neutral position about broccoli. In fact, there are…
I love curry. Fragrant and spicy, every time I have a bowl of curry it brings back wonderful food memories. I’ve been fortunate to travel a good deal in my life–a lot of it in India. I’ve eaten curries in Mumbai, Delhi, Agra, Srinagar,…
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.…
