Actually…

Well, this year’s ham is done. It’s the first one we’ve prepared in California, so there was whole new crop of friends to scandalize. I owe my dad a huge thanks for getting the 40lb carcass here (in addition to the boiler). I doubt such as thing has been seen in these parts in recorded [...]

I don’t want to like carefully crafted rough interiors. I don’t want to hang out with the too-hip-for-words post-college twenty-something crowd. I don’t want to wait a hour for a table standing in cold doorways inches away from the pouring rain. I do all of these things, however, at Mas Tapas, the ultra-popular restaurant bar [...]

When I got on the plane headed to Disneyland last Friday, having a fantastic dining experience was at the bottom of the list of my expectations for the weekend. I would have put securing a starring role in a major Hollywood motion picture above finding a great restaurant. True to my anticipations, the food at [...]

One of the culinary debates I seem to have repeatedly is over the proper way to roast winter squashes, including pumpkins. To roast a winter squash, typically you split them in half, seed them, and pop them in a medium hot oven for an hour. There is little contention over these steps. However a war [...]

Tonight as I was sitting with close friends dining on a spectacular meal of our own endeavors, the subject of our last suppers came up. A pall fell over the table as we gave due reverence to the topic at hand.
We started with those that would be at our dinner, and with this we [...]

Biryani is comfort food. On cool evenings, its sweet aroma mills through the house promising a warm hearty dinner. But I don’t know what biryani is. Many have prepared it for me; restaurants, foodies, Indians, and Bangladeshis. Rice cooked with herbs and masala spices seems to be the baseline of the dish. From there, diversity [...]

Cumin seeds appear frequently in my kitchen. They are essential to much Indian cuisine as well as Hispanic foods, likely a cultural remnant from the Arab rule of Iberia. Black bean soup benefits from a healthy dose of the ground seeds and chili is positively insipid without them.
I am a proponent of using toasted [...]

Very little of what I cook is purely of my own invention. The following recipe sprang forth from my kitchen several years ago with no external direction (to my knowledge). Being at the time almost completely ignorant of Mexican cuisine, I named the concoction “Mole Poblano” meaning Poblano Chile Sauce, not knowing that the proper [...]

Any discussion of barbecue sauce is dangerous territory. My natural inclination is to launch into the historical background by asserting that it was likely an evolution of combining native American roasting techniques with the English practice of basting meat with vinegar in seventeenth century Virginia. Unfortunately there is little historical documentation of barbecue sauce, thus [...]

Anthony Bourdain once wrote that the stink of failure will hang over a location long after a restaurant closes, tainting the chances of any subsequent establishment trying to operate there. I don’t know if 210 West Water Street in Charlottesville suffers from this curse, but Cassis seems to be having trouble airing out the scent [...]