On the Table

Bien Padre — The hip Mexican brand name surprised me when I first saw it years ago. I wondered if the owners of the company knew what it meant — but more on that later. Let’s review the chips: Most of us on the North Coast are familiar with the industrial-sized corn chips from Bien […]

Fare una frittata in Italian means, literally, “to make a frittata” — a dish of lightly beaten eggs (to which vegetables or other ingredients are often added) cooked in a skillet. Fare una frittata also means, figuratively, “to make a mess,” as when you drop an egg on the floor. Whenever my mother sent me […]

Oysters, oysters and more oysters. That’s what you’ll find on the Arcata Plaza Saturday — along with oyster eaters galore — as Arcata Main Street presents their 20th Annual Oyster Festival. They’ll have dozens of restaurants and local chefs preparing bivalves in all sorts of ways: grilled, fried and raw, supplemented with who knows what […]

Salad at our house in the 1950s was iceberg lettuce with bottled “French dressing.” Seasonally, tomato wedges were added. On special occasions we slathered on Thousand Island dressing, an awful-but-addictive concoction of mayonnaise, catsup and sweet pickle relish, a highlight of childhood memories of vegetables. Mine was the age of Betty Crocker mixes and frozen […]

I want to marry pork. The crisped, buttery edge of a seared chop is the epicurean equivalent to a money shot; you can’t get more delicious. My esteemed colleague Joseph Byrd wrote a series of articles in this paper pointing out the cultivated leanness and resulting tastelessness of supermarket pork, which is damned not only […]

A couple of years ago, in a column called "Secret Ingredients," I wrote of the crowning touch to my baked macaroni and cheese, revealed to me by Gus, chef of the late Crest House in Culver City: After it has baked, before heating and serving, over the top of the casserole you place slices of […]

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 […]