I have eaten this multiple times over the past week, and am still not sick of it. It works beautifully on its own as a side dish. For an easy lunch I stir in some chickpeas sauteed with curry powder and cumin seeds. For a dinner party, it is great under Asian-marinated meat or chicken skewers.

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Note: I am finally shutting down the old, ugly, 1.0 version of this site so I am re-posting some of my favorite recipes over here. This is a keeper!

I rarely make lemon desserts, because lemon isn’t my favorite dessert flavor, even though I love it in savory applications. But when one of my best friends asks for lemon birthday cake, by all means, I will make him lemon birthday cake.

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I love eating at Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen here in San Francisco. (Their location in the Jewish Museum downtown is a great pit stop for tourists, and I often recommend it.) So I was super excited to see that they had shared their secret chocolate cinnamon babka recipe publicly!

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Since tonight I officially returned to my Italian lessons after a 6 month hiatus, I was inspired to share my Rome travel guide. I have emailed this list of recommendations to so many people, but somehow it has never made it onto the blog. I’m excited to report all of my favorite things to do and eat in Rome, organized by neighborhood. I can’t wait to go back so I can expand this list even further!

Centro Storico [Read more →]

I had really high hopes for this Fourth of July flag cake, but it did not turn out as well as I’d hoped. I would not rate it a total fail, but it’s definitely on the fail side of winning. A semi-fail, if you will.

The thing is, America is far from perfect so perhaps a highly imperfect cake is a great way to celebrate the 4th of July (especially this year.)

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When my son turned one, I made him a cake in the shape of the number one. But lately he’s been pretty obsessed with cats of all kinds, so for his 2nd birthday, I wanted to make a cat-shaped cake. It was pretty easy to do, and came out great! He absolutely loved it.

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I thought I had seen and tasted most of Maui by now, since we keep going back again and again – but on our most recent trip, I found even more fantastic things to eat. I was especially wowed by the new-ish Star Noodle, which we went back to multiple times. I wish I could go there right now. It’s in a weird warehouse-y area and seems an unlikely spot for the best food in Maui, but I definitely think it’s a contender. The Filipino “Bacon and Eggs” was one of my favorite dishes.

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I am almost always disappointed by a crouton. It is too big, too hard, too crumbly, too dry. It is not good. It should get out of my salad already.

And even in a fancy store, you think: OK, these are like 7 bucks a bag, and I’m in a fancy store, so they’ve got to be good.

And then they are not good.

But there is so much potential there! I mean it’s basically bread, oil, and herbs – so why is that not working out better? And is this the best we can do? Stale tasting, tooth-shattering, dust bombs adorning our salads?

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The first thing you might notice when you read this recipe is that there is no actual barbecuing involved. The “barbecue” is really a flavor element here – not a methodology. Why? I don’t know. It just is. Ask Paul Prudhomme or something. I’m from San Francisco, for Pete’s sake. What the hell do I know about it?

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My last post was all about eating and drinking in the North Vietnamese city of Hanoi. One of the dishes I mentioned was the famous Cha Ca – a catfish dish served in sizzling oil and flavored with turmeric and dill, an odd-sounding combination. It comes with lots of cooked scallions and fresh dill, and is accompanied by roasted peanuts, rice noodles, and fresh leaves of basil, lettuce, cilantro, and mint.

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