On the Table

The calendar says it’s September. How did it happen? As an ardent lover of summer, the month that marks the end of my favorite season takes me by surprise. A part of me wants to dislike September, but how can I, when our landscape is awash in golden light and the farmers’ markets are overflowing […]

Almost every weekend for more than a year, Scott Misener’s aging pickup truck has bumped and clanged along a twisting dirt road to a metal shed high on a ridge in Fruitland. There, Misener has milled and mashed, hopped and hoped. Now he’s about to find out whether Humboldt’s beer drinkers approve. Misener is making […]

The chile relleno — a chili stuffed with cheese, battered and fried — is deceptively simple. So, too, was our bracket-style competition, in which regional winners duked it out for the title. As soon as we announced our hunt, a tide of nominations came in the form of emails, Facebook messages, comments and intense conversations. […]

The door to Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate’s new digs (4 W. Fourth St., Eureka) is like a wormhole from Fourth Street’s auto repair shops and motels into a hipster lodge. The woody cocoon of a showroom is more J. Crew than Willy Wonka, with a mounted buck and nautical rope in lieu of a river […]

Steak Your Claim Nothing hurts like taking that deep breath to splurge on a steak only to end up gnawing a flavorless knot of overcooked muscle, wondering if it’s worth making dinner all weird by sending it back or if you should keep chewing and just imagine a wonderful cut of meat from the past. […]

My vegetable pipeline flows unimpeded in winter and spring. Brussel sprouts, various leafy greens, root vegetables, purple sprouting broccoli, leeks and spring onions provide ample material for dishes. And I always manage to stretch my stash of winter squashes until the early months of the year. In the fruit department, on the other hand, come […]

As gently as if she were easing a sleeping baby into a crib, a waitress settles 12 small glasses of beer, cupped in a wooden tray, onto our table in the beer garden outside Eel River Brewing Co.’s taproom in Fortuna. The breeze is soft, the day is warm, and the beers move with barely […]

At 10 a.m., sitting around a window table at Mazzotti’s, we got our instructions (no alcohol, score everything), got our multi-colored ballots and started eating. This year, the 25th anniversary of the Arcata Bay Oyster Festival, was my first time judging. There were some 19 entries for raw and cooked oysters to award up to […]

Ari Friedman grins down at the cherries behind the bar at Dead Reckoning Tavern in Arcata. It’s a wide smile, stretching the corners of his dark mustache and crinkling his eyes. Pluck, twist, plop. Mangled, meaty cherries, freed of stems and pits, fill a wooden bowl as Theo Brown tinkers with the contraption beside them. […]