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 [...]
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 [...]
There's a satisfying logic to why I named this salad after the legendary music producer, Quincy Jones. (Well, it's satisfying if you love puns and music trivia as much as my family does.) Here's the logic: The exotic fruit I feature in this recipe is quince, Mr. Jones' fruit namesake. I'll talk more about quince in a [...]
Gazpacho is my absolute favorite summertime food. But because the cornerstone of the dish is ripe, juicy tomatoes, I only get to make it a few months out of the year. When it's that time, I go buy tomatoes by the flat at the farmers market (negotiating like a crazy pirate woman) and keep a couple gallons [...]
I'm a complete sucker for anything almond. Almond croissants, almond-scented lotion, marzipan, almond paste straight from the tube... yeah, I have been that desperate before. The word "almond" on a dessert menu can magically create a vacancy in my stomach that just a second earlier seemed stuffed to the brim. If you are like me, [...]
You can't walk into a bar in Spain without seeing someone eating the classic tapa, Patatas Bravas (meaning "fierce potatoes"). Fried chunks of potatoes drizzled with a spicy paprika-garlic sauce is hard to beat when it comes to bar food, but it can scare off the carb- or calorie-conscious. Why not smear that bravas sauce [...]