It's morning at Fleur de Lys restaurant in San Francisco and Hubert Keller stands at the stove with a pan of potatoes sizzling happily in front of him. I had written the recipe for this dish, pommes paillasson--shredded potatoes cooked in oil and butter until they are crispy outside and meltingly soft within. Easy right? [...]

Are you ready for the bake sale of the year? Yesterday I refreshed my sourdough starter. After some (who's counting) weeks of negligence it looked pretty sad. But this morning it was awake, puffy, full of life, ready for work. So I took the very few minutes needed to mix up batches of no-knead bread destined [...]

Oh boy, this is going to be a good one. (Whoops, I think that's a line from the movie Don Juan de Marco but true nonetheless.) Last year's SF Food Bloggers bake sale earned over $1500 to support Share Our Strength's efforts to end childhood hunger in America. The items for sale rivaled any fantasy [...]

You cannot predict where researching and writing a recipe will lead. Last week the path led to Anchor Brewing in San Francisco. A recipe for Hubert Keller’s upcoming cookbook called for pale malt. Pale malt??!! I knew malt was made from barley and that brewers use malt in great quantities. Wikipedia, while helpful to an [...]

The little dough that could. Alison Ashton of Nourish Network and I were talking about a favorite subject---no-knead bread---and soon enough found ourselves wondering whether the dough would work as a pizza crust. I was sure it would but had not specifically tried it. Naturally, that meant I had yet another reason to stir up [...]

Goldilocks knew a good thing when she tasted it. Whenever a bout of “gastrointestinal distress” causes Kit (the dog) to go off his feed, I cook him a pot of chicken porridge—chicken, white rice, carrots, garlic, thyme, a little salt, and lots of water. Once I thought it would be healthier to use brown rice. [...]

"You look so much happier since you started cutting those marshmallows," said G. Making marshmallows amuses me. They seem magic: gelatin and sugar syrup combine to make fluffy, silly confections. They have no redeeming food value--well, maybe the gelatin offers some protein--but they make up for their lack in fun value. I make marshmallows maybe [...]

Bees are in the news: The New York Times reported yesterday, 28 September, the awarding of the MacArthur Foundation genius grants, one of which is to an entomologist at the University of Minnesota: Marla Spivak studies honeybees. And in my favorite section of the paper, the Tuesday supplement, “Science Times”, is an article about the [...]

It hit 90 degrees F in San Francisco today. And it wasn't just people who got hot. The bees, the garden, the people, none of us were ready for this sudden heat. I doubt it's been above the low 60s in 8 weeks. In the afternoon heat, the bees nearly stopped flying and the squash [...]

When you first sit down at San Francisco's wonderful Mexican restaurant, Nopalito, you are given a small bowl of spicy, roasted chickpeas. I find them addictive. Thank goodness G eats only a few and lets me finish them. I'd not thought of making them myself though I see plenty of recipes online. I suppose I [...]