The Trusty Egg Salad Sandwich

Chickens are mercurial creatures. Sometimes they lay like crazy, and other times they appear spooked and go barren. Then they like to play little tricks on you. One of our hens hadn’t seemed to be laying in weeks. But then I saw her emerging nervously from within a shrub. I looked beneath the leaves and found 11 eggs.

Chicken behaving suspiciously.

When they’re laying like gangbusters, I’m always looking for interesting ways of using our eggs. I massage them into flour and make homemade pasta, I boil them for Nicoise and Cobb salads, I crack them into congee and over the top of chilaquiles, I fry them and plop them onto a pile of spaghetti. I even do a groovy Spanish-style deviled egg with chorizo, pimenton and lots of olive oil (let me know if you wanna know how to make that one!) More

The American Series, Pt. III — The Crab Feed

On the east coast, you have clam bakes. I’m jealous of you. In Alaska, you have salmon bakes. And I’m jealous of you, too. But on the West Coast, we have crab feeds. And you are jealous of us.

Sure, our friends around Baltimore will point out that they, too, have a crab tradition — spending frustrating hours picking and sucking miniscule bits of meat out of piles of Old Bay-seasoned blue crabs. But to those of us in the West, used to big mountains and wide open spaces, that’s the equivalent of eating a meatball when you could have a rib-eye. I’m talking about beautiful, abundant Dungeness crab, pulled from the Pacific bursting with snow white meat. Up where my mom lives in Sonoma County — where some of the best crabbing waters are — you’ll see signs during crab season inviting you to local crab feed fundraisers. $15 for all you can eat. That’s my kind of community event.

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In the Name of the Father

My wife, a woman of astute intuition when it comes to gift giving, bestowed me with a new book for Father’s Day: “Pork & Sons,” by French chef Stéphane Reynaud.

Published in 2007, it was at the fore of an entire genre of pig-focused cookbooks such as “The Whole Beast”, “The Complete Book of Pork”, “Pig Perfect” and “Pig”, a trend which culminated in a glut of restaurants with names like Cochon and The Spotted Pig and our own Animal here in Los Angeles. More

Top o’ the Mornin’

Around a decade or so ago, my friend Dan and I were tooling about Ireland in a little Spanish compact. We stayed mostly in bed-and-breakfasts, and it didn’t take long before we were waking with a craving for the Irish breakfast.

Irish breakfast

What was not to like? A couple of eggs, some Irish sausage, black and white puddings (i.e. more sausage), Canadian bacon, a roasted tomato, a couple cooked mushrooms and plenty of Irish brown bread spread with fresh Irish butter. Of course, you can have too much of a good thing — as we discovered was the case with both Guinness and the Irish breakfast. More

Salvaging the Most Boring Pepper on Earth

People have found all sorts of creative uses for green bell pepper across an array of pan-cultural preparations. You’ll find large chunks of it dominating entrees in cheap Chinese restaurants; lengthy slivers in pasta primavera at Olive Garden and Buca di Beppo; long-simmered squares floating in albondigas soup at your favorite Mexican dive. Among the world’s varied peppers, ranging from the tiny fiery pequins of Mexico to big sweet Hungarian peppers to vibrantly hot thai chilies, green peppers are not my favorite.

From this...

But even the most pedestrian vegetables can have their moment to shine. And so I humbly present the green bell pepper, re-introduced and all dressed up for its ascension to glory. More

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