Writing about food since 2004.
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Chocolate Guinness Cake
Here’s how you know I’m the real deal: whereas most food publications will cram an upcoming holiday down your throat in hopes that you’ll link to their page as you plan your holiday meal, I’m not so clever or strategic. I wait until the holiday’s over, when the post will no longer be relevant, and…
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Rancho Gordo’s Good Mother Stallard Beans with Lamb Sausage (By Way of Echo Park)
The best dinners are the ones that have a story. This is one such dinner. It started on a typical day: I was driving to Silverlake to eat lunch at Forage (one of my favorite places to grab a bite here in L.A.) and to have coffee and do work at Intelligentsia. Only, it was…
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Bacon For A Crowd
You have people coming over for breakfast. You want to serve those people bacon. You want the bacon to be hot. You don’t want to fry it because that would require several pans, it would make a mess and it would be hard to manage while entertaining guests. You may think to yourself, “Maybe bacon’s…
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Knowing What To Eat
It’s funny: the smarter I get about the food, the harder it is to figure out what to eat. Eating didn’t used to be this hard. If I wanted a chicken club sandwich for lunch, I’d eat a chicken club sandwich for lunch. I didn’t worry about whether the bacon came from an industrial pig,…
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How To Turn Leftover Chicken Into A Tasty Soup
One benefit of making a complicated, classic dish like bouillabaisse, as I did last week, is that the process of making it becomes its own version of cooking school. You follow the steps but as you do so, you learn things. For example: making a fumet (or fish stock) may be labor-intensive but your efforts…
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The Salted Caramel Latte
At the new bakery Short Cake, I encountered a drink that’s so absolutely brilliant it deserves fireworks or a parade but that’s simply presented without any fanfare or fuss. If it were a Starbucks, you’d see signs all over the place advertising the Salted Caramel Latte. As it stands, you sort of have to discover…
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An Imaginative Feast By Food Prodigy Andy Windak (Mac ‘n’ Cheese Stuffed Ravioli! Coq au Vin Chilaquiles!) & A Roasted Feast By Cookbook Hero Molly Stevens
I don’t follow sports, but I know that there are these people called scouts who go around to minor league events and look for future stars to recruit to the majors. Well, I never considered myself much of a chef scout, but that all changed on Sunday when food blogger Andy Windak–of the food blog…
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Lindsey Shere’s Legendary Almond Tart
I suppose I must really like a challenge because, on the night that I made the bouillabaisse, I also attempted a famously difficult dessert: Lindsey Shere’s Almond Tart. Lindsey Shere, in case you don’t know, helped open Chez Panisse in 1971 and stayed there as pastry chef until 1998. I first heard about her famous…
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A Dickensian Banner
Did you know that I was in “Oliver” twice in my life? First as Oliver in my 5th grade production and then as Fagan in 7th grade. It wasn’t until after college, though, that I read my first Dickens novel (“Bleak House,” for the record) and became an instant fan. This month I said to…
