I live around the corner from a pretty amazing market. A place where six different varieties of eggplant happily cohabitate with mounds of garlic chives, where buckets of freshly made tofu sit chilling not far away from briny, sea-water oysters. This time of year, with such a bounty of produce, is a superb season to experiment, experience new flavors. Whenever I see something at the market I have yet to try, something that peaks my interest, I have to give it (or them in this case) a shot.

I had read a lot about Fiddlehead Ferns in cooking books and magazines, but here in California, these beauties, scavenged in the wild by foragers, were only culinary lore. I never had seen them at any grocer’s or farmer’s market. So when I saw them at the market, curled up tightly like a porcine tail, I just had to buy a passel to [...]

Every Saturday morning my local PBS station plays cooking shows. Jacques Pepin has been a long time mainstay in the line-up. So I guess you could say that I have grown up with Jacques Pepin over the course of many a Saturday morning. I love the man. But maybe in his old age, he has gotten health conscious, perhaps a little too health conscious if you ask me. On numerous occasions he expounds on the virtues of fruit for dessert– just fruit.
Now Jacques is not talking about pies, cakes adorned with fruit, or even baked fruit of some sort. He is speaking about good ol’ sliced fruit, with maybe some booze spilled over top for good measure. I love fruit as much as the next girl; there is nothing better than the perfect peach, juice dripping onto your chin in those warm summer months. But if I were to dine [...]

With all of the different types of cucumbers at the market these days, you never know what you are truly getting. Watery and insipid, or crunchy and crisp, the adjectives vary as much as the cucumbers themselves. But I do like a good cucumber, and watery as they may be, they also taste of summer: light, refreshing, and cool.
You have your regular, garden variety sort, with the tough green skin almost pimply, and overflowing with seeds waiting to be discarded before consumed. Then there is the English cucumber, virtually seedless with a tender, edible skin. A pickling cucumber that is diminutive, and just yearning to be brought home and soaked in some briny solution, is next on the list. And finally, you have the slightly more difficult to find, Persian or Japanese cucumber. This is the baby of them all, no larger than your hand, virtually seedless, supple skin, and [...]

Simple can mean many things: stripped down, easy, commonplace, or everyday. Today it has become a bit of a catch phrase when referring to those typical 30-minute meal options. But simple can also mean pure, unadulterated…delicious. This is the type of simple I mean when talking about Vanilla Bean Cream Cake.
Pure unadulterated vanilla, a tender, pound cake-like crumb, perfect for dessert, or even with a cup of coffee for breakfast (cake being the breakfast of champions, of course), the cake was simple, but it was also complex. This cake is definitely ingredient-heavy. With 5 eggs, butter counted not by sticks but pound measurements, and flecked with real vanilla bean seeds, this cake was not necessarily simple in its composition, but rather simple in its taste.
So I went to the library again, this time to scour the shelves for a good baking book. And I found one; Lisa Yockelson’s book Baking [...]

I love a good sandwich; but I am also picky about them. The bread has to be excellent, toppings carefully selected, and any of my long-time readers know how finicky I am about ratios. But when the sandwich has each of those things going for it, it can be a thing of beauty. And I am not alone in thinking this, Nancy Silverton in her fabulous book, Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book echoes these sentiments, and gave me an outstanding midday meal.
A sandwich to be savored, with care placed in both the ingredients, and the composition, this sandwich of Soft-Scrambled Eggs, Long-Cooked Broccoli, and Feta Cheese was perfect. Nestled on grilled sourdough bread, the crowning achievement to this lunchtime meal was of course, the long cooked broccoli. Now I have eaten plenty of broccoli in my day. In fact, it was my favorite vegetable as a child. But I had never [...]

I admit it, there is nothing I like more than a good Red Velvet Cupcake with Cream Cheese Icing. I also admit that all that red food coloring, the very coloring that gives the cake its charming name, kind of gives me the heebies. The way that it colors your fingers when you pick the cupcake apart, the way it leaves an incriminating red mark on your tongue long after you have consumed the sugary goodness, and really, just the idea of eating all of that food coloring, despite the delightful sweetness of the cupcake– puts a bad taste in my mouth. And so, when faced with the stunning problem of what do when faced with desire to have the cupcake, without all of the mess, I decided to make Brown Suede Cupcakes.
The Red Velvet Cupcake minus the red food coloring, proved to be just the thing to cure my [...]

I am a miserable shaver. Perhaps I am not as diligent as I should be; or maybe it is that I am always in too much of a hurry, whisking a sharp razor up and down my peaked legs; but whatever it is I just can’t do it well. Each time I step into the bath, steam curling calmly at the surface of the water, I lather up my legs with shaving cream, and begin the process, the cream is zipped off with every course of my bright pink razor. The job is done, all looks well, and I emerge from the bath, and begin to dry off. Then the minute cuts turn into gushing, sanguine rivers of blood. I dab with a tissue, try putting on lotion to stop the hemorrhages. The bathroom looks like a crime scene. I cannot shave my legs. But what I can shave, are [...]

I can’t really take credit for this idea. I’ll give credit where credit is due– Jamie Oliver did it again. While watching an old episode of Oliver’s Twist, Jamie made a fresh pasta dish: rolled manicotti resting in a dish of raw tomato sauce. Clean, light, and vegetarian, this dish looked delightfully simple to prepare, and was a delicious change from the standard, heavy manicotti.
It’s spring now, I am awoken each morning to the cheery cacophony of birds singing their dawn chorus. Monday, I even spotted the first California grown stone fruit at the market. So manicotti, you may be asking yourself, doesn’t that sound a bit heavy? A bubbly pasta dish can be a bit much to contend with, but this manicotti, is made with fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes. Baked in the oven, the tomatoes only intensify while the rest of the pasta is melting and getting gooshy.
The manicotti [...]

I know that it may look like a hockey puck, squat and gently rounded, but I assure you that is where the similarities end. What I have instead is a light, eggless Italian custard– a panna cotta. Wobbly, chilled, resting calmly and waiting to be gobbled up, this panna cotta was enriched with buttermilk, giving it a subtle tang.
What to do with leftover buttermilk setting in the fridge? Make a delicious dessert that highlights the buttermilk of course. I love the simplicity of panna cotta. Vanilla, pure and unadulterated was the main flavor in this dessert. A little milk, some sugar, a bit of gelatin, and plenty of buttermilk– it doesn’t sound like much, and it’s not. But when mixed together, the vanilla playing off of the richness of the buttermilk, the gentle jiggle of the gelatin, the cooling presence of the custard, all of the ingredients make for one [...]