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If my friends who are cooking Thanksgiving this year have one dilemma it’s the issue of beloved vegetarians. Do you relegate them to side dishes while everyone else eats turkey? Do you make the main event vegetarian so that everyone feels included? Is it even Thanksgiving if there isn’t a dead animal on the table?…

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There are certain ingredients that food people adore that make normal people cringe. Take cabbage, for example. Last week, I told Craig I was going to cook a cabbage for dinner and it was as if I’d said, “Instead of going out for cocktails, let’s get our flu shots!”

Can you channel a spirit with a recipe? That’s how it feels every time I open Gina DePalma’s Dolce Italiano, the authoritative Italian dessert cookbook that my friend Gina wrote before she died of ovarian cancer in 2016. For a dinner party this weekend, I made her Obsessive Ricotta Cheesecake. It’s funny because I convinced…

I love that thing where all cultures have a different version of the same dish. Like meatballs: kofta in the middle east, Polpette in Italy, Swedish meatballs at IKEA. And though I can’t cite as many examples when it comes to migas, that genius combination of tortilla chips and eggs, it immediately brings to mind…

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Some day I’ll write a book about dinner parties, assuming books still exist and AI hasn’t cast writers into outer space like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that book, I’ll talk about balancing out a meal; how if you have a heavy main course, you’ll want a lighter first course, and a refreshing…

Remember the end of The Goonies, when the Goonies reunite with their parents and they’re rattling off all of the things that happened to them on their adventure? And Data says, “The octopus was very scary,” even though there wasn’t an octopus, though technically there was an octopus, it was just cut from the movie?…

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Back in the before time, in November of 2018 to be exact, the chef Nancy Silverton hosted a grilled cheese night at Republique here in L.A. Republique — one of the best restaurants in L.A., if not the best (see here) — is the site of Nancy Silverton’s iconic restaurant of yore, Campanile. There, with…

I’m very suspicious of tomatoes. Even in July, I raise an eyebrow when I see a beautiful heirloom: “Nice try,” I’ll say. “But we all know you’re not at your best until August at the earliest, most likely September.” But yesterday I journeyed to Cookbook in Echo Park (you’ll be hearing about that place a…

Hi, so we’re going to Provincetown next week and I’ll be off the grid and I wanted to leave you with one more post before I go. Here’s one about two lasagnas. Our friend and neighbor Kyle had a birthday last week and I offered to cook him a dinner. I could tell he was…

[One of my favorite people in the food world–actually, in the world period–is the brilliant writer/chef/pastry chef Gina DePalma, author of Dolce Italiano and former pastry chef at Babbo. If you’re not following her on Twitter or reading her blog, you really should; it’s excellent. And here she is with a sauce that’ll make all…