I don’t know what to believe anymore. I’d like to blame the messenger, but since damning the media is fast becoming the new national pastime, I’m reluctant to follow suit. In fact I can’t really blame them. There is so much competing for our attention these days, that the talking heads have to resort to […]
When I was a kid, my family did a fair amount of camping. It was about this time that I developed my near religious love for the great outdoors. We went up and down California with our tent and sleeping bags, hiked up mountains, swam in high altitude lakes and came to believe (mistakenly I […]
As my wife was reading through past editions of this blog, the ones she hadn’t quite gotten around to reading, (You too? Not to worry. I don’t read them all either.) she stumbled on a recurring theme: My children are not all that fond of my creations. I am sure that if my eight- and […]
This week’s recipe didn’t start with Bugs Bunny. Yet because of my never-going-to-grow-up Peter Pan brain, or is it brain pan, it definitely ended up there. I started out making the white wine counterpart to coq au vin soup, which you’ll recall is essentially a chicken soup with mushrooms, onions and pinot noir (see the […]
In the past few months, I’ve produced Charlie Trotter’s (or was it Thomas Keller’s) Acorn Squash soup three times. That’s in addition to the indie soups I’ve made for the blog every week. I cooked it twice playing sous chef for the Italian wine dinner my wife and I worked on and once as an […]
When I started this week’s soup, I had no idea I was headed to the Middle East. It started with some cuts of pork and a few Honeycrisp apples. Nothing more American than that, right? Then I stumbled into the cooking process and the soup went all Moroccan on me. Now, before some of you […]
Be glad that this week’s post isn’t called “Horrible Failure Soup,” because that’s where it was headed until this morning. Lentil soup was scheduled, if I can be said to actually have a schedule for these things, for next week or even later. This week was slated for Brussels sprouts. After all, aren’t I the […]
The soup this week was something of a command performance. My wife and I are co-hosting a fund-raising dinner with another couple on Saturday and we wanted to offer jars of soup as a take away for the attendees. To be honest, co-hosting may be too generous a term. The couple we’re working with are […]
Back when I was single and first learning how to cook, I would invite friends over to my Valley Village apartment, cook all day, drink lots of wine, and wind up smoking cigars on the roof of my garage. Unlike today, the menu was never static. I made pesto lasagna from Marcella Hazan, chocolate mousse […]
