Cardoons, or Cardoni, are one of those things that you've probably passed by in someone's garden or a city park, not realizing that a delectable treat was just at your fingertips (if you're willing to brave the prickly leaves, peel away the fibrous strings, chop them, and boil them for thirty minutes before you even get [...]
I feel like Kraft Mac & Cheese defines every millennial's childhood. Who doesn't remember throwing down their Jansport backpack, grabbing their Skip-It and working up an appetite until mom served you a pile of that gooey mac & cheese for dinner. The truth is my mom almost exclusively served us healthy, homemade, unprocessed food, to the point [...]
Anyone living in California has seen nopales before, even if they don't realize it. Those cactus with the big oval paddles topped with spiky red fruit you see on the side of the road or invading your neighbor's yard? Yup, that's a nopal, also known as a prickly pear cactus. But unless you are from a [...]
Last week I got to do the equivalent of hanging out back stage at a Rolling Stones concert -- I got to go to a "managers' breakfast" with the rock stars of Berkeley Bowl. Diane and Glenn Yasuda opened up Berkeley Bowl in the 1970's and have built a dedicated team of produce buyers and managers that [...]
January is a great time for citrus, but the My Berkeley Bowl challenge means you won't find any navel oranges on this blog. Nope, this blog necessitates something extraordinary. And I assure you, you won't find a citrus fruit more extraordinary than Buddha's Hand.It's not hard to guess how this fruit got its name. The [...]
This week's recipe is one that I developed for an article I wrote for Bay Area News Group, just released this morning. Given the "mainstreamedness" of the readership, I had to keep things a bit more tame to be accessible to a wider audience, while still giving the recipes an "exotic" spin to stay true to [...]
As I already explained in Part I of Squash Week, this is a big freakin' deal in our household. It's like when the fair comes to town, except that instead of feeling all gross inside after gorging on funnel cake and corn dogs, we feel all warm and gooey inside after gorging on one of [...]
Earlier this year I had the pleasure of attending a Thai cooking class with my aunt at Hipcooks during a visit to Portland. As someone who has been on the demonstrator side of the cooking demo cart countless times at work, it was really fun being on the other side of the cart for the first time [...]
If you have never had a cherimoya, you are totally missing out. In fact, Mark Twain called it "the most delicious fruit known to man" in an article he wrote for the Sacramento Daily Union in 1866. The outside looks like some sort of dragon egg, but the taste and texture are out-of-this-world. It is also [...]