On the Table

The thing about pizza is, everybody likes it. We all have our preferences about styles (obviously NYC pizza being the absolute best — end of discussion), but unless you have celiac disease or one of those cheese issues, you can’t really fuss too much when a homemade pie is on the menu. I like delivery […]

A bit of nostalgia nibbles at me this time of the year: I miss Easter breakfast, a ritual that was part of my life until the end of my teenage years. We always spent the Easter holidays with my aunt Lucia, in my father’s native village, north of Rome. On Easter Sunday, before going to […]

I was 21 years old, and had never cooked a thing. There I was in Manhattan, part of the FLUXUS school of avant-garde composers and artists, acolytes to John Cage. And because Cage was into Indian food (in 1960, virtually unknown in the United States), we all were into Indian food. In the New York […]

Sure, the season’s past its peak. You’ve already satisfied that exquisite anticipation that begins to grow after Thanksgiving of savoring the first tasty morsel of succulent crab meat, but there’s more to come according to local fisherman Jeff Angelo. And lucky for us, living in Humboldt County we are in the mother lode, the middle […]

In the late fall of 1967, the brilliant science writer John McPhee challenged Euell Gibbons (author of Stalking The Wild Asparagus) to a foraging trek along the Appalachian Trail. They would eat only wild food at first. After a week, they planned to gradually add elements of civilization: salt, sugar, coffee, cooking oil. Gibbons was […]

God, this is a good dish. I know I should lead in with a catchy hook about its antioxidant flavinoids, or its localvore superiority, or its ability to increase your prowess in between the sheets. Yeah, I’m getting to that. But really, this dish is just awesomely delicious. It originates back in my poverty-stricken days […]

I grew up not eating winter squashes, not because I did not like them, but because nobody ever put a dish with zucca (winter squash or pumpkin) of any kind on my plate. When, as an adult, I realized what I had been missing, I resolved to devote the rest of my life to making […]

When I started working on the Journal‘s calendar about 10 years ago, I was given a rule: We don’t list pancake breakfasts — and no spaghetti feeds. The thought was that there were just too many of them. I eventually changed the policy. It turned out that there weren’t all that many pancakes being flipped, […]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The greed of the American pork industry has messed with the modern day pig to the point that almost all available pork is now so lean it has lost the ability to be tender. It isn’t hard to trace the switch to lean pork in the […]

Waaayyyy back in the day, when God was a boy, I made whole wheat bread from the venerable Tassajara Bread Book. This was a welcome change from the San Francisco sourdough French that was most people’s idea of good bread in olden days. Making bread appealed to an idler like me, with its long stretches […]

Nebbiolo. Oh, I’m beginning to get it — how humankind, for centuries, has been moved to wax poetic about certain wines. Why Jesus turned water into wine. Why, for thousands of years, Jews have ushered in the Sabbath each week by praising the Creator for the fruit of the vine. Nebbiolo. Moonstone Crossing Nebbiolo. Nectar […]

It happens every year about this time, in magazines and newspapers, online: an outpouring of effervescent enthusiasm for holiday sparkling wine bargains. "The best of West Coast bubbly has rarely been better," trumpets San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. The online wine merchant www.novusvinum.com features the "Top 20 American Sparkling Wines," from a modest $19 for Francis […]