• Quick Queso with Chorizo (and Other Tex-Mex Delights)

    Quick Queso with Chorizo (and Other Tex-Mex Delights)

    Sometimes it’s nice to cook for friends who favor a particular cuisine because it steers you in a new direction. Normally, I default to European/Mediterranean things like pastas and chicken with couscous and preserved lemon and stuff like that. My friends Jim and Todd (you know them!) are Tex-Mex fans and so, when I cooked…

  • Let’s Go To A Chinese Supermarket!

    Let’s Go To A Chinese Supermarket!

    Recently I became friends with an Amateur Gourmet reader named Peggy who works in T.V. out here in L.A. and who comes from a Taiwanese family. Over the course of our first lunch at Pizzeria Mozza, she casually mentioned that her family frequents the San Gabriel Valley (home of some of America’s best and most…

  • Rice Gone Wild, Salmon Adventures & The Night I Served A Pork Chop To A Vegetarian

    Rice Gone Wild, Salmon Adventures & The Night I Served A Pork Chop To A Vegetarian

    Necessity is the mother of invention (its Baby Mama, if you will) and so it was that a few weeks ago I had carrots, onions, celery, and some Arborio rice on hand and because I didn’t feel like food shopping that evening, I set out to make a risotto with just water. I’ve told you…

  • Raspberry Ricotta Cake

    Raspberry Ricotta Cake

    You’ve heard of one-pot meals, but have you heard of one-cake desserts? That’s not a thing, but it should be. Here’s the idea: instead of an elaborate cake that you have to frost or decorate or slice in half, a one-cake dessert is one where a batter goes into a cake pan, the pan goes…

  • Artichokes: Just Boil Them

    Artichokes: Just Boil Them

    Ugh, artichokes. At some point, I espoused my philosophy–“Artichokes: Not Worth It”–and then slightly changed my tune when I stuffed them with breadcrumbs and cheese and baked them. That was in 2013. Now it’s 2015, and here I am in the kitchen with four artichokes that I bought at the West Hollywood Farmer’s market (sadly…

  • The Night That Lolita, My 16 Year-Old Female Cat, Became A Man

    The Night That Lolita, My 16 Year-Old Female Cat, Became A Man

    When I first adopted Lolita from the Atlanta Humane Society in 2001, her name was Princess. She was in a room full of mangy cats, but she seemed very ladylike and elegant; she held herself differently, a Christine Baranski type, who wanted out of this dump. I took her home and gave her the name…

  • Wham-Bam Cauliflower Gratin

    Wham-Bam Cauliflower Gratin

    Nothing sets me off like sanctimoniousness; that holier-than-thou, self-righteous, sermon-on-the-mount style of food writing. Often the sentiments are well-intentioned but everything is done so humorlessly, it’s hard for the average person to connect. And so it goes with vegetables. The general take, these days, seems to be that we should eat less dead bodies and…

  • Chicken Under A Brick (Or A Cast Iron Skillet)

    Chicken Under A Brick (Or A Cast Iron Skillet)

    Scared you, didn’t I? Well I didn’t mean to. It’s funny how many people read my last post and assumed I was ending my blog. That’s not what I said! I just said that my blog was no longer my primary source of income; in many ways, it’s a liberating state of affairs. It means…

  • What’s Going On With Food Blogging?

    What’s Going On With Food Blogging?

    For as long as I’ve been a food blogger (more than a decade), I’ve been an open book; sharing major life events as they’ve happened–moving to California, getting engaged–and pretty much treating you, my faithful audience, like a close friend I could trust. Then, sometime around October, something happened that I didn’t feel comfortable putting…

  • Craig’s Birthday Dinner at Mori Sushi

    Craig’s Birthday Dinner at Mori Sushi

    It’s a bit of a struggle for me to spend a fortune on sushi. Don’t get me wrong; I really like sushi, but I’m perfectly happy eating the $12 sushi sampler at Jinpachi for lunch in West Hollywood. Craig, on the other hand, is a major sushi enthusiast. He loves the stuff and, if given…