If zesty, tangy, and salty flavors please your palate, this salad is an excellent accompaniment to a summer lunch or dinner. Our Piedmont summer days are relatively mild, but plenty of my family and friends live where daytime temps soar above 100°F and a cold,…
Strawberry fields stretch seemingly forever along Monterey Bay, which means we have a plentiful supply of multiple varieties at our local farmer’s markets. In fact, the majority of strawberries finding their way to American tables come from our California Coastal fields. In the past I…
This quick-ish stir-fry is inspired by a recent dinner with friends. I prepared a veggie-only side dish of stir-fried zucchini and cherry tomatoes. It made an easy switch to a weeknight dinner, with added chicken, for an all-in-one skillet meal. The “weeknight” in the recipe…
Many may not be familiar with kumquats, a petite jewel of the citrus family, where the entire fruit is consumed in one delicious bite of sweet and tart. About the size of a grape, the entire kumquat is eaten including the skin, which is actually…
Every spring I eagerly anticipate the arrival of strawberries at my favorite farmers market vendors. It takes a lot of restraint to skip them the first couple of weeks when they look under ripe with white shoulders and ruby tips. Perhaps the farmers are as…
I’ve been on a bit of a scone binge recently, ever since I made a batch of my cream scones with homemade lemon curd from my backyard harvest of three trees. Scones in winter are an easy, one-bowl creation with basic ingredients many of us…
It’s early September in Piedmont and it is rough going outside for myriad reasons. There’s the pandemic. Unhealthy air quality due to the wildfires. And an excessive heat wave with record-breaking temperatures. If there was ever a time when I had to rely upon preparing…
Over five months into the shelter-in-place, pandemic kitchen and I am missing the variety of meal options we usually enjoy. I particularly miss shopping for foods, fresh and prepared, from the diverse variety of global foods readily available in the Bay Area. A recent craving…
Diana Kennedy is one of my culinary s-heroes. Back in May when I learned of the opportunity to watch the documentary film Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy from my pal Gabrielle, I ordered the movie rental that day (via Rafael @ Home) and signed up for…
One of the things I miss dearly from sheltering in place and physical distancing is not going to our local farmers markets. I’m of the age where it’s better if I maximize caution in venturing out. So, I’ve left shopping and selecting to others, most…