On New Year’s Eve, a steaming pot of lentils with whole sausages and slices of traditional cotechino, large pork sausage, was always on the dinner menu at home in Perugia, Italy. In preparing this festive comfort dish, my mother followed a tradition meant to bring prosperity, as lentils have come to symbolize coins. As a […]
Simona Carini
Posted inEat + Drink
A Cook’s Book Club
My cooking is variously inspired by seasonal produce, memories of people or places, cravings for specific ingredients or dishes, and reading. Yes, you read that last one right. For the past 11 years on my blog Briciole, I have been hosting a literary/culinary event called Novel Food. And for the past 10 years I have […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Meet Kohlrabi
It is hard to pass by a basket of kohlrabi without stopping. Pale green or purple, this vegetable naturally attracts your gaze with its bulbous enlarged stem. The name kohlrabi comes, via German, from the Italian cavolo rapa and literally means turnip cabbage. It is not a turnip, though, but a cultivar of Brassica oleracea, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Dryads Live in Sitka Spruce
Not shy as tree nymphs are said to be not oak-dwelling, but Sitka spruce never worry about leaves leaving and not returning, like dawn-swept dreams. With Artemis, we see unseen hands hired to wrench Dudleya plants off their native North Coast. Bluff lettuce, pale green rosettes of fleshy leaves vermillion-tipped, erects a stem and blooms […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Chicken Asparagus Salad for One
It’s asparagus time. Years ago I planted asparagus crowns in the Berkeley community garden where I volunteered. There I learned the storage roots and rhizome of the 1-year-old Asparagus officinalis grown from seed are called crowns. I also learned that in the first year of establishment spears should not be harvested but allowed to grow […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Game for Indonesian Vegetable Scramble
When people learn I am a food writer, sooner or later, they ask me about writing a cookbook: Have I done it or thought about doing it or am I doing it now? Until recently, the answer has been “no” on all counts. A cookbook is a lot more than a collection of recipes and […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Mushrooms and Tofu
This New Year started differently from previous ones: I made a resolution. I also read about New Year’s resolutions and their meager chances for surviving January’s cold. I decided to ignore the naysayers and plow on. My New Year’s resolution is to add weight training to my exercise routine. Like broccoli, weight training is good […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Things of Rare Beauty
Let’s talk about eggplants,” I suggested to Spencer Hill at his Arcata farmers market stall on the eastern side of the plaza. We were talking over baskets filled with a number of eggplant varieties he and his son Jules grow at Small Fruits, their farm in Hoopa. Spencer’s face lit up and he started detailing […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Bounty Hunting
The light has turned from summer’s glare to fall’s golden glow. The changing of the light heralds the changing of the season. September is the month of bounty, when both summer and fall produce are available together. This convergence of seasons makes September the perfect choice to celebrate as Local Food Month. Now in its […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Good Things Come Small-Packaged
When I invited Janet Czarnecki, farmer and owner of Redwood Roots Farm, to contribute a recipe to my Farmers’ Favorites series, she answered without hesitation: “Grilled little gems with cheese, walnuts and balsamic vinegar on top. So good!” Her answer delighted me — the recipe would give me an excuse to get to know Little […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Sculling
At the Humboldt Bay Rowing Association (HBRA) sculling boathouse at the Adorni Center, my sculling buddy and I lose no time getting on the water, each one in a single boat. Once we push off the dock, memories of the pre-dawn rise, the drive, the maneuvering of boats and oars down to the water fade […]
Posted inEat + Drink
A Hearty Belgian Mash
I learned as much about growing cabbage, corn and zucchini as I did about my neighbors while volunteering at the Happy Forever Community Garden in Berkeley 10 years ago. Calling the 12-by-18-foot traffic diverter on a side street a community garden was a bit of a stretch but the barren diverter-turned-food-producing island taught me a […]