When I lost the James Beard Award to the crew at Sunset magazine’s One Block Diet this May, I found myself far less disappointed than I thought I would be: After all, their message is pretty similar to what I am trying to do. Besides, as we got our snark on during the insanely long [...]
Hot weather has finally arrived here in Sacramento. We’d been having an unusually cool summer up until yesterday, when the temperature in my backyard hit 101 degrees. Today should be the same, and temperatures higher than 90 should be the rule until September. While Sacramento can be simmer in the summer — we had 114 [...]
As I write this, my father and brother are in the air headed back East. They were here to celebrate Dad’s 75th birthday, piggybacked on Father’s Day. Naturally, we went fishing. My mum was here a few months ago, making her first visit to our house here in Northern California. Likewise, we went fishing. A [...]
I was awash in pork fat this past weekend. In the past few days I have made two types of bacon, a dry cured wild boar salami, more than six pounds of lardo — cured back fat — not to mention a gallon of fresh rendered lard. I blame John Bledsoe. Bledsoe is the local [...]
Coppa di testa. In France it is Fromage de tete. In England, it’s called brawn. All decent enough names; but they don’t translate well. At some point in the past, our ancestors decided to forgo the muscular moniker brawn for a direct translation of the French word for this fascinating cold cut — and by [...]
I have a newfound respect for the ferocity of wild boar after this weekend’s hunt. And I have now seen up close that boar are not just wild pigs; they are something else entirely. Holly and I drove down to high hills of Monterey County to our friend Michael’s Native Hunt ranch Friday night to see [...]
For a time, my favorite coffee was New Orleans style, where the coffee is cut with roasted, ground chicory root. The result is smooth, a little more acidic than normal coffee, with a taste and aroma similar to a mocha — and it makes a drink darker than the inside of a cow. I used [...]
When it comes to my garden, the story always has been “you win some, you lose some.” Never a season goes by without some little victory or some new failure. I’ve had both this week. Yesterday I wanted a salad so I decided to cut a head of romaine lettuce I’d planted in early March; [...]
I was wandering around the Davis Farmer’s Market Saturday and spotted something rare: spring porcini mushrooms. Then I noticed the exorbitant price — $30 a pound — snorted, and walked on. But as I walked, a thought wormed its way into my brain. “You know you’d need to drive to Shasta or Mendocino to even [...]
