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I rewrote and revised the first sentence of my novel Food Person so many times, I know the finished one by heart: “Isabella Pasternak baked treats to bring to work every day; not as a way to endear herself to her co-workers, but as a way to avoid them.”

I have a vivid memory of being in Venice with my parents in the early 2000s (it’s documented here) when my brother and I decided to freak out our mother by drinking espresso after dinner. We were actually always a coffee-after-dinner family but the coffee was always decaf. To this day, my parents still order…

Do my friends read my food blog? We’re about to find out. See, I had this idea of buying cookie tins and making a whole assortment of holiday cookies to bring to friends around L.A. a la Melissa Clark’s latest NYT piece. But then I thought: it’s Covid, am I really going to drive all…

I own a dangerous book called By The Book. It’s a collection of the By The Book column from the New York Times; a column where artists, musicians, and writers talk about their favorite books and what’s currently on their nightstand. It’s dangerous because any time someone sings the praises of a book, I immediately…

I don’t know about you, but my head started to crack a bit like an egg last night thirty minutes into the debate. And instead of throwing that egg into a skillet by continuing to watch (“this is your brain on Trump”), I decided to turn off the TV and crack a few eggs for…

The internet can be an overwhelming place when it comes to finding a chocolate chip cookie recipe. You type “chocolate chip cookie” into a Google search and suddenly you’re bombarded with thousands of recipes featuring various techniques, many of which ask more of you than you’re willing to give right now. There are recipes that…

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Remember that time that I was a full-time food blogger? And I had the nerve to say things like: “You can cook after work! It’s easy.” Well I’d like to take that person, pin him against a wall, and say: “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Because now that I have a full-time…

Cookies, cookies everywhere and not a chocolate chip cookie in sight. Look, let’s be honest about Christmas cookies: they’re fun to look at but are they really fun to eat? Most of them taste like cardboard with over-sweetened frosting slathered on. While everyone tries to reproduce the cover of Bon Appetit (which is, admittedly, pretty…

This is a week of recipes where the finished dish doesn’t look good, but tastes really good, so I lead with a picture of something else. Yesterday it was Kachin Chicken Curry with a picture of a mortar and pestle, today it’s No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies from Baked Explorations with an image of peanut…

How many cookies does the average person eat over the course of a lifetime? 500? 5,000? 5 MILLION? I’m not sure but since life is short, I believe it’s important to make your cookies count. Cracking open a box of Chips Ahoy might scratch an itch much like sleeping with a prostitute probably scratches a…


