• 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…

  • Banana Nut Waffles

    Banana Nut Waffles

    Greetings from Seattle! I’m at a coffee shop staring at Molly Orangette’s back (this is true: after seeing her yesterday, I randomly ran into her again today). I’m here, though, for a very important reason. I’m here to tell you about these banana nut waffles that will be perfect for a holiday breakfast this weekend.…

  • Raw Kale Salad with Walnuts, Pecorino, and Lemon

    Raw Kale Salad with Walnuts, Pecorino, and Lemon

    Say “raw kale salad” before serving dinner and you may not get the round of applause you were hoping for. That’s unfortunate, though, because raw kale–which, I should say here, is incredibly good for you–is so easy to dress up. I’ve had raw kale salads before, mostly at hip Italian joints like Franny’s in New…

  • The Apple Pan, Gjelina Take Away & The Lazy Ox Canteen

    The Apple Pan, Gjelina Take Away & The Lazy Ox Canteen

    I’m terrible at geography (please don’t ask me to find Iowa on a map) but I’m wonderful at food geography, especially when I know a city really well. In New York, friends would call me on a regular basis with queries like: “I’m going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and need a place for…

  • The Mole Negro at Guelaguetza

    The Mole Negro at Guelaguetza

    According to Jonathan Gold, when the mayor of Oaxaca comes to Los Angeles, he eats at Guelaguetza. It’s listed on Gold’s 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants 2011 and in his original review he calls it “one of the best Oaxacan restaurants in the country.” Clearly, then, I knew I had to go there; and I knew…

  • Oh, Ottolenghi: Fennel and Feta with Pomegranate Seeds and Sumac / Couscous with Apricots and Butternut Squash

    Oh, Ottolenghi: Fennel and Feta with Pomegranate Seeds and Sumac / Couscous with Apricots and Butternut Squash

    A year or two ago, my friends Lauren and Amy gifted me with a cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi called “Ottolenghi: The Cookbook.” And even though it’s a beautiful, tall book with colorful pictures and herb-flecked recipes from Israel by way of London, I hardly ever used it. I made mental notes to cook from it–the…

  • How To Make a Manhattan

    How To Make a Manhattan

    Cocktail-wise, Craig–who’s now our official bartender–has two drinks up his sleeve. The first, a Sidecar, I wrote about a few weeks ago. Now he has a new one, perfect for these chilly-weather months: a Manhattan.

  • Stuffed Cabbage

    Stuffed Cabbage

    At that same Jewish dinner where I made the chopped liver, I decided to try my hand at stuffed cabbage. Over Thanksgiving, my brother’s wife’s sister’s boyfriend’s grandmother (did you follow all that?), a Holocaust survivor named Anka, told me her recipe for stuffed cabbage. “The secret,” she let me know, “is raisins in the…