Like most cooks, I have Thanksgiving on my mind these days. The quintessential American food holiday deserves plenty of advance planning and this year will be a bit more tricky than usual since we’ll be cooking at my dad’s home in Washington state. Shopping at unfamiliar stores and working in someone else’s kitchen is a recipe for cooking challenges.

I’m not that worried about the turkey. After experimenting with numerous ways of cooking the bird, including brining, I’ve come to the conclusion that only two things really matter: The bird must be fresh and hormone-free and it shouldn’t spend too much time in the oven. When a thermometer stuck into the inner thigh reads 165-170 degrees, it’s done.

As far as I’m concerned, the feast is all about the side dishes. Continue reading Side dishes fit for a feast →

Sometimes it just takes one extraordinary dish to revise my opinion of an ingredient. Until I tasted the amazing Brussels sprouts salad at the original Pizza Antica while doing a restaurant review several years ago, I had written off the little cabbage-like sprouts.

All my experience had taught me that they were bitter, smelly and best avoided. Usually boiled before serving, they were the side dish to be skipped in cafeterias and restaurants or pushed aside like so many soggy green ping-pong balls.

But the salad was owner and chef Gordon Drysdale‘s signature dish. Everyone raved about it Continue reading Brussels sprouts at their best →

Times are tough. Unemployment is growing, the Dow Jones is plummeting and my 401K is a mere shadow of its former self. (Yes, I did peek at the online statement last week and, no, that wasn’t such a great idea.)

What we need now is some good, cheap food that doesn’t leave us feeling even poorer when we get up from the table. My candidate is a wonderful dish of rice, lentils and onions beloved in the countries rimming the Mediterranean from Greece to Morocco.

I first tasted this earthy pilaf at a Lebanese cafe in Portland, Oregon. Smitten, I knew I wanted to make it at home and I found numerous recipes with different spellings of the name, mujadra. They were all very similar. My version uses brown rice to boost the nutrition.

This is one case where the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. Continue reading Good food for a bad economy →

Every holiday deserves a cookie in my book.

Others may associate Halloween with hermetically sealed commercial candy. I think of the cookies frosted in orange icing that my mother and I made when I was a child.

She would roll out the dough and I would help cut out the rounds and bake them. When they were cool, we would frost them with orange buttercream and decorate them with raisins to make jack-o-lantern faces. Then we would pack them up, two at a time, in waxed paper sandwich bags to give to the trick-or-treaters who knocked on our door.

My father was in the service at the time and, although we moved every two years, we usually lived on or near Continue reading Cookies for Halloween →

One of the perks of working in Silicon Valley for so long was the little ethnic restaurants found at virtually every strip mall. You could eat your way around the world without ever leaving the South Bay. And I did.

From Salvadoran pupusas in a converted burger shack to Indian dosas in a barely remodeled coffee shop, I discovered vibrant flavors and delightful textures in unexpected places. One of the things I’ve missed the most since leaving the Mercury News is the Vietnamese sandwiches, banh mi, that I used to grab for a quick lunch at least once a week at the hole-in-the-wall shop not far from my office. Continue reading Vietnamese sandwiches at home →

We can buy red and yellow bell peppers year-round at my neighborhood grocery store. Usually hot house-grown, frequently imported, they contribute welcome color and crunch to our salads during the dreary winter months.

They have little in common, however, with the gorgeous vine-ripened bells that overflowed the bins at our local farmers market last weekend. Large, glossy and richly colored, these thick-walled peppers were meaty and packed with sweet flavor.

Such luscious peppers are among the last gifts of summer. They almost make up for the fact that this year’s tomato harvest is in its waning days. Soon the warm weather produce will be gone and all that will be left in the market will be the sturdy greens, squash and root vegetables of fall and winter.

With such an abundance of appealing peppers at bargain prices, I couldn’t resist buying a bagful to cook in the Italian manner Continue reading Sweet peppers, the last gifts of summer →

If the sun is beginning to ride low in the sky and the evening breeze carries a hint of frost now and then, it must be apple harvest time. This is one of my favorite seasons of year, when apple growers start bringing their crisp Fuji, tangy Arkansas Black Twig, mellow Mutsu, and crunchy Newtown Pippin apples to the farmers market. If I’m lucky, there will be a few Winter Banana and Esopus Spitzenberg varieties in the mix.

Just-picked apples are vibrant testimony to the glories of locally grown fruit in season. Bite into a Fuji fresh off the tree and that imported Granny Smith from the supermarket seems bland and boring by comparison. Continue reading The apples of my eye →

Last week I returned from camping and hiking in the Eastern Sierra with a mission. Inspired by earlier forays into grilling pizza at home, I had decided to make the Italian staple in a skillet on the propane stove after hiking up to Ruby Lake. But something had gone wrong and I wasn’t ready to give up on the idea of hot, yeasty pizza outdoors.

Continue reading Skillet pizza without the oven →

I didn’t grow up eating mangoes. They may be one of the most popular fruits in the world, but the produce available at the military commissaries where my mom usually shopped didn’t get much more exotic than oranges and bananas.

Not until I began eating my way through the myriad Indian restaurants in Silicon Valley did I discover the joys of this luscious tropical fruit. Mango lassi, a cool concoction of pureed mango and yogurt, quickly became my favorite beverage to accompany searing hot curries and spicy samosas. Then I began encountering it everywhere – in salsas, baked goods and a friend’s signature black bean salad.

Continue reading Mango mania →

Every year about this time, I question my sanity. Tomatoes are ripening so fast on my vines that I can’t keep up with them. Trays of beautiful, red, orange, yellow and purple heirlooms crowd my kitchen counters.

When it comes to planting tomatoes, I have no common sense. In the spring, all I can think about is the incomparable flavor of a warm, ripe tomato just plucked from the vine, the pleasant jolt of acid balanced by sweet, juicy flesh. I adore Cherokee Purples with their smoky undercurrent and hint of salt. But it’s hard to resist the sunny sweetness of the beautiful yellow and orange Big Rainbow streaked with red. And I keep trying for a decent crop of the finicky Brandywines despite years of failure.

We only eat tomatoes when they’re in season, so by the time August rolls around, we’re ravenous. Sometimes we try to get a jump on the season with early tomatoes from the farmers market, but they’re rarely as deeply flavored and juicy. I do have a weakness for dry-farmed Early Girls from Dirty Girl Produce in Santa Cruz, but grocery store tomatoes are almost always a disappointment.

Still, by mid-September, we’ve already eaten our share of sliced tomatoes, BLTs, caprese and panzanella salads. My husband and I will can some salsa, dry a couple of batches and make a basic spaghetti sauce in the slow cooker to freeze for later. Yet we’re always looking for a new dish, something simple and easy that puts the focus on the tomatoes.

Continue reading Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes →