Like so many good stories, it all started with a curious kid. A bucket. And a pile of gold (in the form of award-winning wine). A Jack and the Beanstalk sort of tale, if you will. Sans the missing bags of gold and whole giant-killing side of things, of course.
Continue Reading...Food history news, book reviews and sure, quirky culinary tidbits from the past few weeks.
Continue Reading...The middle of summer always reminds me of Pam Wright, “The Cobbler Lady.” That I just landed of box of incredible, intensely-flavored Blenheim apricots from the best apricot farmer here in CA for all of $20 for a 25 pound box (!!!) probably had something to do with it.
Continue Reading...Sweet. From the Middle English swete and Old English swēte. According to Merriam Webster, the first known use was prior to the 12th century.
Continue Reading...Of the “histories” out there, there are few that conjure up personal memories with as much immediacy as food history. What we serve on our tables is (literally) surrounded by hand-knitted potholder memories. They’re our memories, real memories. Not distant stories we’ve scanned in history books of characters past, but memories of people we love and have loved. It’s part of the reason why reading tributes to those who influenced someone else’s culinary life can be so moving, even to a stranger.
Continue Reading...Oh, the ongoing candy controversy. Only here, it’s not about corn syrup, but the root beer-flavored, 1970s (Earlier? Depends on who you ask.) pedigree of a certain jelly bean.
The debate continues — and continues to be clarified by semantics (and legal terminology). Either way, David Klein makes a darn good ginger jelly bean. A hoot of a (good) guy, too.
Continue Reading...Amanda Broder is a farmer’s market produce maven some days of the week (she sells produce for Windrose Farms in Santa Monica), a pastry chef others. She prefers the classic term, “baker” — couldn’t agree more — and, come to think of it, has a genuine vintage bakeshop sort of charm about her.
Continue Reading...The sign of really good barbecue: Those crusty, blackened, beautifully erratic edges. The sign of a really good barbecue cookbook: The tattered, torn, sauce-stained pages. Add a generous side of recipe tweak scribblings and plenty of exclamation points in the margins, and you’ve got a barbecue book with more than a fleeting summer shelf life.
Continue Reading...After 75-years, Tapatio Blanco tequila is finally being imported to the U.S. That it’s not yet another overpriced spirit (SRP $34) and the import deal evolved honestly — via personal relationships, not corporate dotted lines — only sweetens the distilled agave deal, so to speak.
It’s a tequila courtship sort of storyline that’s so much better than your average romance novel. And it’s a pretty darn great tequila.
Continue Reading...The 4th of July is smack in the middle of the work week this year. If you have plenty of vacation time accrued, that means you are likely fantastically excited for an entire week of picnics, grilling and leisurely sipping next week. And if not, well, we should all be cursing the Leap Year for its blatant calendar fiddling, as good luck getting two comp days to make for an extra long weekend. What might a 1950s mom have done in these tight entertaining time frames? Why, she would have made hot dog (or sure, bologna) “canoes,” of course.
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