Actually…

My twelve-year-old wanted a fondue birthday party, with both meat and cheese. The thought of a bevy of tween girls jostling around a pot of near smoking oil was pretty terrifying, but I was game to give it a try.
Fondue is meant to be a communal activity, but with fondue bourguignonne once you get more [...]

I can make bread. This isn’t bread in four easy steps or bread in under two hours. It is a bread which requires the careful cultivation of invisible organisms. It is a bread that demands incorporation into your daily routine. It is a bread that instills the knowledge, the feeling, when you bite off a [...]

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 [...]