• How To Prep A Dinner Party A Day Ahead

    How To Prep A Dinner Party A Day Ahead

    When I first started cooking, I resented the idea of making food ahead for a dinner party. I wanted my food to be fresh! Cooked in the moment! Assembled minutes before the guests arrive! It’s only recently, though, that I’ve started to see the virtue in prepping the food ahead. One: if you’re making a…

  • Musso & Frank

    Musso & Frank

    Some restaurants are like living museums. Musso and Frank is one of those restaurants: it’s a memorial to and a celebration of Hollywood’s rich cultural history. The Musso & Frank website explains it best: “In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the golden years in Hollywood, almost everyone in the entertainment business dined or drank at…

  • Things To Stir Into Your Oatmeal

    Things To Stir Into Your Oatmeal

    It’s hard to follow up a post about pushing the genre of food blogging forward without feeling self-conscious. So let’s talk about oatmeal. Do you like oatmeal? I love it. On Sunday mornings, sometimes I’ll make my Sunday Morning Oatmeal where I cook the oatmeal in milk, stir in butter, and top it with nuts,…

  • Are Food Blogs Over?

    Are Food Blogs Over?

    [Image from Roboppy’s Flickr via Slashfood.] In this week’s New York Magazine, there’s a story about a 27-year old who spends most of her life and her money eating out at trendy, of-the-moment restaurants. To be honest, I didn’t read the article—that’s the side of the food world I have zero interest in (fad-following)—but one…

  • Lemon Butter Chicken with White Beans

    Lemon Butter Chicken with White Beans

    What you see above is one of my favorite meals I’ve ever made at home. It came about rather organically: after raving about Rancho Gordo beans in this post from last week, I went back to Cookbook (the store where I bought that first bag) and stocked up on more.

  • 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.”…

  • My Mom’s Five Tips For Scoring A Table At An Impossible-To-Get-Into Restaurant

    My Mom’s Five Tips For Scoring A Table At An Impossible-To-Get-Into Restaurant

    My mom may not cook, but she’s an absolute authority when it comes to eating out at restaurants. She and my dad eat out almost every night of the week and they do so with a real zest for excitement and experience; they love to patronize busy restaurants, especially ones that are hard to get…

  • White Plates

    White Plates

    My favorite food blog, of late, is Canal House Cooks Lunch. It’s deceptively simple: every day, the women of The Canal House (that’d be famed cookbook photographer Christopher Hirsheimer and former Saveur test kitchen director Melissa Hamilton (who also happens to be Gabrielle Hamilton’s sister and a prominent figure in “Blood, Bones & Butter”)) take…

  • 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…

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