When I was a kid, the go-to tomato soup was a can of Campbell’s. We’d slop the contents into a pot, fill the empty can with water, add it to the pot and heat. Okay, I didn’t do any of that. My mom did. She’d also make us grilled cheese sandwiches on the broiler while […]
We held our annual holiday party this week. Although since we hadn’t hosted the party since ’07†, calling it annual is something of a stretch. But enough dwelling on the past. We’re back. Actually, I’m not quite through dwelling in the past. Because the holidays (well, just Christmas, really) have a lot to do with […]
This week’s soup, which isn’t a soup at all, came about because I felt like pandering to my kids. Or, if you have a less sardonic outlook, I made turkey chili because I knew my kids would like it and I felt like treating them. The answer lies more in the notion of parental mood […]
It was one of those weeks when things just went wrong. I thought we’d already gotten through the rough part of the month what with taxes and the big 12-course wine dinner. This week was supposed to be all fun: My daughter’s birthday party, softball games, Easter, warm weather. I’d even bought a big box […]
This week’s soup began like so many others in this blog, at Caputo’s. This ethnic Italian grocery store has some of the best produce in town, even better than Whole Foods most of the time. Their stuff is interesting too. It reminds me of the Jon’s in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles. Jon’s had […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]