11 Mar 2011 8 Comments
in Cookbooks, Cooking Tips, Observations, Recipes Tags: A Day at El Bulli, Adam Perry Lang, Coco, cold cucumber soup, Ferran Adria, Joy of Cooking, mom, Ratio, Saveur, Scandia, Serious Barbecue, Treasury of Great Recipes, Vincent Price, Wine Spectator
The coffee table at our house
I have a Master’s degree in creative writing. But I’ve always said, the way I learned the most was by reading the great writers. Same with cooking.
I didn’t go to school for cooking. Most chefs didn’t. (Nor did William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf have Master’s degrees in writing.) I cooked in restaurants when I was a younger man. But I learned the most by reading, observing, studying what the great chefs were doing and doing that too, and by trial and error. More
08 Mar 2011 2 Comments
in Cooking Tips, Video Tags: cheese, frico, fried, Italian, parmesan
Mini-Caesar salad in a frico cone
It’s one of life’s best things. That little bit of melted cheese that escapes from the edge of the grilled cheese sandwich or quesadilla, and sizzles into the pan, becoming crisp and lacy. More
04 Mar 2011 3 Comments
in Pork, Recipes Tags: bacon, bloody mary, Malibu, pancake breakfast, Steve McQueen
I wasn’t going to drink New Year’s Day. Coming off our annual New Year’s Eve dinner, several bottles of wine and 4-ish hours of sleep, I felt a bit wracked. But we arrived at a friends’ afternoon party, the girls were drinking proseco, the boys were preparing sausages for the grill… and my wife, a woman of rare insight and remarkable timing, commented on how good a bloody mary would taste.
the Ultimate Bloody Mary with Niman Ranch bacon stir stick
01 Mar 2011 4 Comments
in On the Road Tags: Andalucia, Coachella, dates, grapefruit, Hula Pie, javelina, Palm Springs, Robert Wagner, Sinatra, surf n' turf, the Thompsons, Tommy Bahama
We like living near the desert. Within a couple hours, we can be amongst the roadrunners, big horn sheep, ocotillo and old folks in golf carts. We enjoy navigating the endless tract housing subdivisions with romantic aspirational geographic names like Andalucia, Piedmont, Monticello and Puerta Azul (not a blue port for counties, by the way), set behind impressive walls and hedges on long stretches of grapefruit-tree-lined desert road. And always, looming majestically behind, the gorgeous spindly peaks of the San Jacinto Mountains.
skinny girls & mayonnaise 