It’s on! A rematch of last year’s Iron Chef Duck competition between Chef Tuohy and myself, only this time one lucky couple gets a free dinner AND hotel room. Details? Read on.
Want to learn how to hunt but haven’t the faintest idea how? This should help get you started – but you need to begin your journey soon, as hunting season will soon be here…
The Great Duck Off between Grange head chef Michael Tuohy and me is over, and chef was declared the winner — thanks to a masterful warm rillette he served with a pomegranate-persimmon salad, a dish declared the best of the day by the four judges: Sacramento Bee reporters Rick Kushman and Niesha Lofing, California Waterfowl [...]
I’ve watched Iron Chef for years, and am a big fan of Top Chef. I spend much of my time watching those shows second-guessing the contestants’ decisions — “Why would you put foam on the plate 15 minutes out? Beef with THAT?! — classic armchair quarterbacking. Now I get a chance to put my money [...]
I am excited about finally going to get to meet my virtual friend, Langdon Cook. Langdon runs the blog Fat of the Land, and while I’ve just started writing my book, he has already finished his book about his foraging life, called, of course, “Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager.” Lang [...]
I needed yesterday, on several levels. I spent yesterday from dawn to dusk with my friend Harry fishing, shooting the shit, lounging on the Sacramento River, drinking wine and eating fish. No projects, no appointments, nothing but a lazy Sunday. I also needed the lesson in adaptive cooking I got when it came time to make [...]
Frankly I am a bit surprised. Everywhere I read on the internet, it said that elderberries don’t come ripe until September — and what’s more, they follow blackberries and precede wild grapes; our blackberries are still green. But few of those online sources are from California, where drought and sun ripens everything early. Friday morning [...]
Foragers are always eyeing the world around them, sizing it up to see what might be tasty. This is why most hunter-gatherer societies are nomadic, meandering from place to place in search of the best stuff to eat at any given moment. The point of agriculture is that you always know where that stuff will [...]
Holly and I just returned home from our trip to New York City for the James Beard Awards, and as many of you already know, I did not win. And in what initially appeared to be a potentially unpleasant twist, my fellow nominees at Sunset magazine were the only other group seated at our table. [...]
