A gallon of preserved lemons? What was I thinking? The more the merrier? That I wanted to have a big Moroccan themed party and I’d need a lot of preserved lemon? I honestly don’t know. I think it was something along the lines of , “well, if a little is good, then a lot must be great!”

I received Paula Wolfort’s gorgeous book, The Food of Morocco as a Christmas gift. The book is not only beautiful, but she takes great pains to explain all about the cuisine and I’m really excited to cook from it.

First things first, I needed to have the basic ingredients and one of the main staples is preserved lemon. They take 30 days to cure so I guess I figured I might as well make enough to share with my mother who herself was given a Moroccan tagine for Christmas.

The recipe calls …

Last week was one of the most personally challenging in recent memory. You know the expression “when life hands you lemons…”? Last week, life threw oranges the size of softballs at me. The week included the death of our beloved cat Basil (ode below), a wicked cold which left me gasping for breath (still am), and hurricane force winds (in Los Angeles!) which caused damage to our roof, left debris all over our yard and left us without power for 36 hours, all while I was working extra long hours. Any one of those things alone could leave a girl searching the heavens and asking “Why me?”, yet all together, I just had to laugh (after I stopped crying) and say “Seriously??”

The last thing I wanted to do was cook, and for the most part I didn’t. But when I read about the “Souperbowl” challenge my …

Lately I’ve had an obsession with vanilla beans. Don’t ask me why, I just think everything tastes better with a little real vanilla bean added to it. This is coming from someone who has always been a chocolate girl at heart. While chocolate is my longtime love, vanilla beans are my latest crush. Unlike adding vanilla extract, using the fresh bean will actually perfume your food. You will smell the vanilla before you taste it.

I wanted to make a holiday inspired syrup as a mix-in to use with my SodaStream soda. Then of course, I thought “Who doesn’t need want a cocktail on Thanksgiving?” In my family, it’s become tradition to start a large meal with an ice cold shot of gin so the cocktail is an homage to that traditional as well.

Finally, the compote was simply an unexpected bonus. I wasn’t really thinking about what I’d …

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, probably because it’s all about food and there’s no gift buying pressure.

Our family’s Thanksgiving tradition is a little different from most. It started back when my mother was a young graduate student at Berkely in the early 70′s. I remember it clearly and I couldn’t have been more than 4 years old at the time. We had about 25 people over to dinner and they were all “friends and orphans” with no family in the area and nowhere else to go. We didn’t have a lot of money, but somehow my mom managed to put on an amazing feast.
Over the years little has changed. We still have somewhere between 15 and 25 people at dinner, mostly friends and sometimes the occasional relative. The players have evolved to be a greater proportion my generation’s “friends and orphans” but the love and familial …

This is the last installment in a three part series on some of my favorite food experiences in Tokyo and Kyoto Japan. If you missed it, make sure you check out part 1,  Noodles, Unagi and Tempura and Tonkatsu and part 2, Yakatori; Izakaya, Sushi, and Okonomiyaki. This post will focus on the incredible and diverse markets and food halls in Tokyo and Kyoto.

Tokyo Tsukiji Fish Market

If people know you are interested in food and going to Tokyo, they always say “You have to go to the fish market early in the morning!” This was always part of our plan, but we were in Tokyo a mere 6 weeks after the earthquake and tsunami of march 2011, and we’d heard that the vendors, some of whom don’t like tourists in the market, had been lobbying to keep sightseers out all together. That, combined with recent changes to the …

We have an ongoing battle surrounding our persimmon tree with the squirrels in our neighborhood.

It’s actually pretty simple; they eat the persimmons, sometimes tossing them aside after only a few bites, and we shake our fists at them, yell, and sometimes cry. It’s quite sad, but only for us. I think the squirrels are fairly happy with the deal.

To add insult to injury, it seems that our persimmon tree only bears a substantial amount of fruit every other year. In the bountiful years it’s not uncommon for us to get buckets of fruit, 50-75 pounds of it, so much that we are giving it away and don’t notice the squirrel consumption. In the “off” years, we get nary a persimmon with the squirrels eating any and all of the meager amount of fruit on the tree. This is one of those years where the humans did not get a single …

The height of tomato season in my garden seems to be mid August. It doesn’t matter when I plant, or how I stagger the planting, every August shows the bulk of the tomato crop. This year I did a little better, getting some tomatoes to last into September, including a second crop off my Celebrity plant. Some of you who live in colder climates may not start planting until later (I plant in April and May) and might still have plants still with fruit on the vine, or at least tomatoes picked a little green and ripening inside away from the first frost. Here is a way to use up those not-so-perfect tomatoes and the last of the ripe ones. The soup is also warm and hearty enough to say, “ah, Fall…” and the smoked paprika give it a nice little spicy kick.

I know people will ask, can …

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on some of my favorite food experiences in Tokyo and Kyoto Japan. If you missed it, make sure you check out part 1,  Noodles, Unagi and Tempura and Tonkatsu.

Yakatori

Yakatori Daitoryo in Ameyoko Market, Tokyo

We were strolling though the market when we found ourselves stopped in our tracks by the smell of grilling meat. The mouth watering smell was coming from a little yakitori restaurant called Daitoryo smack in the center of the market underneath the train tracks. We stood there, looking to see what they had and if there was a place to sit, but the signs (hundreds of them) were in Japanese and every seat was taken.

Then, the moment.

There was a small group of guys sitting at the tables in front of the restaurant and one of them said, “sit here!”  We did as we were told, ordered a couple …

When our neighbor offered figs from her tree, I called my mother and asked her if she wanted some to make jam. She had been in a jam making frenzy this summer making over 100 jars of various flavors (strawberry vanilla bean being my favorite) to the point where I threatened a canning intervention. But since neither of us could let good home grown food go to waste, she took some and I used the rest of the figs to make flatbread and fig and goat’s milk ice cream.

While mom made some regular fig jam, she also surprised us with this fig, caramelized onion and bacon jam which she swore would be fantastic on a fried egg sandwich. I tend to like my jam plain on toast (as opposed to exotic combonations of flavors and spices) but this jam is amazing, especially on the egg sandwich, and that was the end of it or so …

The tagline for this site is “Cook. Eat. Travel. Grow.” I’ve been a little remiss in keeping up with the “Travel” part, so I thought it’s time to include some of my favorite food experiences from a trip to Japan over the next few weeks. In October I’m headed back to Rome, Naples and Paestum (the home of buffalo mozzarella!) so I’ll also be writing about all the wonderful Italian food we eat and markets we visit.
Don’t worry, there are plenty of new recipes coming as well.

In April, my husband and I spent eight days in Tokyo and Kyoto about 6 weeks after the devastating tsunami and earthquake of March 11, 2011. We had an amazing time and found the people to be so welcoming.
Oh, and the food! I was thrilled with the incredible diversity of deliciousness there. We hardly had a bad meal and ate something different and new …