August 2011
6 posts
A Last Bittersweet Taste of Summer. Or, More...
The time passes. In the sky … in the trees. Around our tables. And soon, it will be labor day — a reminder of what labor, what work, can do. A pause before returning to efforts and turning to fall.
Summer will be over. As Buffalo Tom said, “you’ve wasted every day.”
But you squander entire summers to have one afternoon of food with friends, in the best way. A dear...
'Why Cookie Rocket?'
Because Cookies are freaking awesome.
I don’t know about you, but, wow, it’s been one hell of a summer. And one of the highlights was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which contains a scene set in a primate jailhouse in a third-world hellhole (aka San Bruno) where a simian demonstrates the classic meaning of fascism with a bundle of sticks, inspired by the tactically and...
Five Ingredients
So a new taqueria opened in my neighborhood — Escuela, which means ‘School’ — at Beverly and Stanley, and it is good. So good — so simple and real, $6 for two tacos, made with love, cash only — that it set me to cooking. i had a few people over last weekend, and I wanted a savory, fast hot app perfect for a summer day — easy to serve, easy to handle...
Failure is an Orphan; Good Crumb Crust has a...
Cooking is, for me, primarily social. Not just in that egomanical ‘good host’ way where you get to unveil each dish with the turning step of a Matador working the cape — although there is that — but also in the way people connect over food and its rituals. I spent more of my youth in the kitchen than in any other room, and life at our home not only had flavor in every sense...
EL TORTE DEL DIABLO!!!!!
Now and then, you want a cake — and not some layer cake made of frou-frou icing and piped flowers and such, but, rather, a substantive cake of slices and richness, pulled from a Bundt pan steaming and luscious. Hence this go-to crowd pleaser cake for me, which is a) taken from the first volume of the San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook (the only worthwhile enterprise that squalling ruin of a...
Thirteen Cherries, Two Ways.
Originally, the whole idea of this was to write for a half-hour every day about food as a head-clearing exercise, and then I got all intense and thought I have to offer something, something empirical each time, like a recipe.
But that’s kinda not good, either, because I wanted to start this, really start this, to change how I think about of food. I wanted to get back in touch with certain...