Super (Rice) Bowl

I love the Super Bowl. It combines two of my favorite things – food and football. It’s especially great to celebrate with foodie friends. Sure, we had all the usual suspects like beer, chips, salsa, guac. But then we stepped it up a notch with things like homemade crab dip (find my Guessipe here) and homemade…

Pasta Party

For Christmas, Katy got pasta attachments for her KitchenAid mixer. She invited a bunch of us to come over and make our favorite sauce to go with the three different kinds of homemade pasta she whipped up. Definitely my kind of party. Capellini First, she had capellini. These were the thinnest noodles. Alyssa made Marcella…

Carrot Coconut Curry Pasta

We were doing a pasta party, and all of the standard sauce bases were covered – tomato, vodka, bolognese. So I wanted to experiment with something different. When I was recovering from knee surgery, my cousin had made me a big batch of carrot coconut curry soup, and I remembered thinking those flavors might be…

Closing Out the Year of the Monkey

Chinese New Year is one of my favorite holidays. It’s largely centered around food, and you go home with sweets and red envelopes full of money. Need I say more? I inherited my love of food from my family, so there is no shortage of good eats at our Chinese New Year feast. It typically…

Snowy Smorgasbord

What happens when a bunch of foodies go up to a cabin in the mountains for a winter weekend getaway? A lot of cooking and eating… oh, and some snow play too. Day 1 Coconut pancakes for breakfast. Some off-trail riding to work up an appetite. Chicken under a brick, chickpeas romesco, and garlic rice…

Ravioli, Gnocchi, Marinara, Brown Butter Sage Sauce

Cookbook Club – Handmade Pasta The holiday season tends to be filled with gatherings that heavily involve eating (and therefore cooking). It’s a wonderful time for the kind of people who would join a Cookbook Club, but we were worried that people might need a bit of a break. We didn’t want to skip December’s…

Iron Chef X-mas 2016

Special Ingredient: Cinnamon! I get my love of food from my family. We’ve often been known to start discussing what we’re going to eat for our next meal, while still in the process of eating our current meal. We decided to make Christmas 2016 an Iron Chef X-mas – Special Ingredient: Cinnamon! Each participant could…

Turkey, Mashed Cauliflower, Gravy, Butterscotch Pudding

Cookbook Club – Thanksgiving For November’s Cookbook Club, we decided to do a Friendsgiving celebration. Instead of specifying a cookbook, we left it open to give everyone a chance to test run the recipes they planned to make for Thanksgiving. I had planned to make mashed cauliflower and gravy, but ended up also making turkey,…

Sunday Supper

A group of our food-loving friends got together for a Sunday Supper potluck, and it was quite the fall feast. Warming comfort food was abundant and wine was flowing! I made jook (go here for my Guessipe), which is a hearty soup made with turkey and rice, then dressed to taste by the eater. This…

Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party

If you haven’t heard of it, you need to know about this amazing (as in causes amazement, rather than startlingly impressive) show called Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party. It is exactly what it sounds like – a cooking show with Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg. Of course my foodie friends and I had to check it…

Fermented Bean Curd Spareribs

Fermented bean curd is a wonderful seasoning you can buy jars of at the Asian market. It has a salty, almost meaty flavor, which is so good that in a pinch I’ve been known to just mash up a cube of fermented bean curd and eat it over rice. So if you mash it over…

City of Gold

City of Gold is a documentary in which Jonathan Gold explores the food culture of LA. Given my little side project of working my way through Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants list, seeing this movie was a must for me. I was so excited to hear that they would be doing a City of Gold event at…