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If my friends who are cooking Thanksgiving this year have one dilemma it’s the issue of beloved vegetarians. Do you relegate them to side dishes while everyone else eats turkey? Do you make the main event vegetarian so that everyone feels included? Is it even Thanksgiving if there isn’t a dead animal on the table?…

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Some day I’ll write a book about dinner parties, assuming books still exist and AI hasn’t cast writers into outer space like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that book, I’ll talk about balancing out a meal; how if you have a heavy main course, you’ll want a lighter first course, and a refreshing…

When celebrated food writer David Lebovitz is coming to dinner, you have a lot of planning to do. Do you make something fancy? Something casual? Something French? American? After lots of cookbook perusing and soul-searching, I remembered a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe I saw in The Guardian for Swiss Chard lasagna with Gruyère and hazelnuts. And…

When Craig and I first started dating back in 2006, my friend Patty asked what sign he was and when he said Aquarius she weighed that against the fact that I was an Aquarius and concluded: “It’ll never work. Two Aquariuses? I don’t see it.” Seventeen years later, we’re still two Aquariuses battling it out.…

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Back in the before time, in November of 2018 to be exact, the chef Nancy Silverton hosted a grilled cheese night at Republique here in L.A. Republique — one of the best restaurants in L.A., if not the best (see here) — is the site of Nancy Silverton’s iconic restaurant of yore, Campanile. There, with…

I’m very suspicious of tomatoes. Even in July, I raise an eyebrow when I see a beautiful heirloom: “Nice try,” I’ll say. “But we all know you’re not at your best until August at the earliest, most likely September.” But yesterday I journeyed to Cookbook in Echo Park (you’ll be hearing about that place a…

Confession: I’ve made ricotta at home before and found the experience underwhelming. True, the process couldn’t be easier, but after dumping a gallon of milk into a pot, adding some lemon juice, turning up the heat, waiting for everything to separate, and straining out the solid stuff in a colander, I wound up with the…

Enchiladas have come into my life in a big way. It started when Craig talked about his mom’s enchiladas in the first episode of The Clean Plate Club. That inspired his mom, a week later, to make her famous enchiladas for dinner when we were all up in Bellingham. Her recipe is hand-written on an…

Funny, I was running on a treadmill when this wonderful gut-bomb of a recipe came into my life. Naturally, I was watching The Barefoot Contessa and she was planning a romantic weekend with Jeffrey, prepping the meal ahead so they could spend the day at Sag Harbor and have a montage of Ina laughing (what…

When I was in Birmingham for Food Blog South, I met a nice guy named Mat Willey who works for a company called Sweet Grass Dairy. “We make cheese,” he explained, “in Georgia.” Cheese from Georgia? Even though I lived in Georgia for 7 years (Atlanta, to be exact), I wasn’t particularly excited about eating…