Category

Recipes

  • A Thin Mint Milkshake Recipe

    A Thin Mint Milkshake Recipe

    When I heard that Doug and Bryan of The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck and The Big Gay Ice Cream Shop were making a Thin Mint Milkshake, a part of me thought: “Whoah, I wonder how they make that?” I also thought: “I wish I lived in New York still so I could taste that.”…

  • Chocolate Guinness Cake

    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…

  • Rancho Gordo’s Good Mother Stallard Beans with Lamb Sausage (By Way of Echo Park)

    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…

  • How To Turn Leftover Chicken Into A Tasty Soup

    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…

  • Lindsey Shere’s Legendary Almond Tart

    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…

  • Bouillabaisse! A French Seafood Odyssey At Home

    Bouillabaisse! A French Seafood Odyssey At Home

    Certain recipes are so complicated, so expensive, and so high-stakes that they become, for adventurous home cooks, the equivalent of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or sailing a boat around the world. Bouillabaisse is that sort of recipe. Originating from Marseille (in France), bouillabaisse–at least, the authentic kind–asks you to make your own fish stock (with fish…

  • Glenn Cous Cous Salad with Albert Knobs of Feta (PLUS: Other 2011 Oscar Dishes)

    Glenn Cous Cous Salad with Albert Knobs of Feta (PLUS: Other 2011 Oscar Dishes)

    You may have thought Oscar’s biggest upset last night was Meryl Streep stealing Viola Davis’s Oscar, but then clearly you weren’t at the Oscar party I attended. Our friends John and Michael invited us a week earlier and asked us to bring a dish that was a pun or play on words based on title…

  • Chickpea Curry

    Chickpea Curry

    One of my favorite things to make on a weeknight, these days, is a kitchen cupboard chickpea curry. It goes like this: I open my kitchen cupboard, pull out a can of chickpeas, a bag of rice, a tube of tomato paste, a can of coconut milk, and as many spices as I feel like…

  • Yellow Cake with Chocolate Frosting

    Yellow Cake with Chocolate Frosting

    What’s a birthday dinner without birthday cake? There has to be cake. And after polling Craig on his preferred dinner option (the aforementioned birthday lasagna), I queried him about cake. His response: “Yellow cake with chocolate frosting, please.” That’s when a hyperlink appeared in my brain sending me to this cake recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

  • Birthday Lasagna

    Birthday Lasagna

    For Craig’s birthday this year, I didn’t take him to a fancy dinner as I’ve done in years past (see here, here and here). This year his birthday had two components: (1) a dinner at home with his favorite foods; and (2) a weekend trip to Palm Springs. You’ll hear about Palm Springs later this…

  1. For years, I struggled with both Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS), two conditions that severely affected…

  2. For years, I struggled with both Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS), two conditions that severely affected…

  3. For years, I struggled with both Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS), two conditions that severely affected…