• Reflections on Eight Years of Food Blogging

    Reflections on Eight Years of Food Blogging

    On Saturday, this blog turned eight. If you had a baby on the day that I started my blog that baby is now eight; in other words, your baby is not a baby. And neither is this blog. At the beginning, the blog seemed like a means to an end–a way to get noticed in…

  • Fried Eggs with Roasted Potatoes, Garlic, Rosemary and Pecorino

    Fried Eggs with Roasted Potatoes, Garlic, Rosemary and Pecorino

    If I do a post on Friday, it’s usually because I have a weekend breakfast that I want you to make. There was that time I told you how to make eggs, biscuits and bacon; and let’s not forget these banana walnut waffles. This weekend, all you’ll need are a few stray Yukon gold potatoes,…

  • I Declare War on Frisée!

    I Declare War on Frisée!

    No one looks at a coil of barbed wire and thinks, “I would like to eat that.” Yet there are eaters among us who see a plate of frisée and think that very thought. Psychologists have a word for these people: masochists. How else to explain the inexplicable desire to consume razor-like stalks of pale…

  • Easy Mac and Cheese

    Easy Mac and Cheese

    The easiest mac and cheese is the one from the box. The next one up, though, may be this one: instead of making a béchamel with butter, flour and milk–an easy enough process, but a process nonetheless–you heat three cups of cream and dump a bunch of grated cheese into it. You flavor the resulting…

  • Lunch at The Spice Table / Dinner at Animal

    Lunch at The Spice Table / Dinner at Animal

    Come along with me, we’re going for a drive. I just did an interview with L.A. Weekly’s food blog where they asked me what I’m most looking forward to about living in L.A., and one of my answers was: “Going on driving adventures.” Which is why we’re getting into the car… c’mon, we’re going downtown!

  • Pan-Fried Brussels Sprouts with Bacon, Garlic and Mustard

    Pan-Fried Brussels Sprouts with Bacon, Garlic and Mustard

    Every year, Craig’s dad, Steve, makes the most amazing prime rib for Christmas dinner (see here) and every year I help out the best I can, usually volunteering to make a side dish. Last year I made a gratin but this year, since mashed potatoes were already on the menu, I offered up a vegetable.…

  • Sitka & Spruce

    Sitka & Spruce

    Should good restaurant food challenge you? Or should it comfort you by reflecting what you already like to eat? Sitka and Spruce, a restaurant in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, is the first restaurant that I’ve visited in a long time that fully embraces the former strategy. The food, while very delicious, challenges you while you…

  • Eating Vancouver (In The Rain)

    Eating Vancouver (In The Rain)

    Bellingham, Washington is about 30 minutes away from Canada. And for as long as I’ve been visiting Craig and his family there, we almost always forget to bring our passports. “Let’s bring our passports this year,” Craig almost always says, “so we can go to Vancouver!” Then we get to Bellingham and hit ourselves in…

  • Gourmet Grilled Cheese Night

    Gourmet Grilled Cheese Night

    Here in L.A., there are restaurants that do a gourmet grilled cheese night. It’s a nice idea: you get to go to a fancy restaurant (like Campanile, for example) and spend far less money than you’d normally spend there for dinner. Only, I find it hard to justify spending ANY money on grilled cheese. It’s…

  • 2011 Highlights

    2011 Highlights

    It’s not every year that you finish a cookbook, move to a new city and find a used DVD of Doug Henning’s “The Magic Show” at Amoeba Music. But that’s what 2011 delivered, along with trips to Portland, Oregon, California (where I ate with many food bloggers), Atlanta and–a personal favorite–New Orleans, Louisiana. (We fell…

Food Person Book Cover