It’s something of a running joke in our family that whenever I ask Ed what he wants for dinner, he responds vaguely, “A rice dish.” I find this response to be so open-ended as to be useless. It took me a remarkably long time to figure out that what he meant was a cajun rice [...]

It isn’t exactly soup season here in the southern hemisphere, where we are in the midst of a reasonably mild summer. It is, however, cauliflower season. I recently bought a beautiful (and quite large) cauliflower at the market, and all I could think of was soup. I toyed with several ideas before putting together this [...]

When I was in France in July, my friend Juan Carlos made an incredibly rich chocolate tart for dessert one night. It was very simple, with few ingredients, but it was the perfect showcase for the fine Belgian chocolate. It has since become a key dessert in my kitchen. Since chocolate, cream, and butter are [...]

As part of our world history tour, we just visited Ancient Egypt. The goal was to experiment with Egyptian flatbread, but what to serve with it? It turns out that the Ancient Egyptian diet mainly consisted of bread and beer, along with vegetables, legumes, and fruit when available. Meat appears to have been eaten sparingly, [...]

We are currently on a world history tour. The Viking bread was such a huge success that it led to questions like, what would Roman bread have been like? (Sean wants me to tell you that it was made out of Romans, but really we just used wheat.) What about Egyptian bread? (Flatbread, as it [...]

Our two apricot trees both produced a full crop again this year. We planted two based on the idea that apricots are alternate bearing—i.e., they bear a crop every other year. It turns out that our trees are not alternate bearing, so we get lots of fruit every summer. Moreover, the fruit all ripens at [...]

It’s apricot season here in Chile, and both our trees are bearing a full crop (more on that later). What this means in practical terms is that if a recipe doesn’t include apricots, I’m not fixing it. Out of desperation, and almost jokingly, I recently googled apricot + fish + recipe. This generated a few [...]