The clouds rolled back in with a vengeance yesterday afternoon. The kids and I were caught unawares, having been at a gymnastics birthday party that worked everyone into a sweat, but we emerged from the ritual pizza-and-cake to find that our spring temperatures had dropped and our t-shirts weren't going to cut it. I have a good spot here on my living room couch on Mondays. Through the sliding door next to me, the deck looks bright and pretty despite a gray sky (and windows that need a cleaning if this rain EVER STOPS), the bridge soars above the choppy Bay waters, and through the rails of ... [READ MORE]
Recipe Roundup No. 11: A Week of Something Good
January 10, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Stock for days. So it's the New Year and a handful of my friends have been doing Whole 30. While I've heard many people describe it as "life-changing" it's just a bridge too far for me. For one thing, you know I love my veggie staples and I can't wrap my head around anything that forbids beans. It just doesn't compute. But Ugh, fine, we've just come off the latest round of holiday hedonism (which seemed to come just right on the heels of summer's hedonism...and late summer's hedonism...and early fall's hedonism) so I suppose it makes sense to rein it all in for a bit. Back in ... [READ MORE]
Recipe Roundup No. 10: Nostalgia, with a Side of Salmon
October 24, 2016 by 1 Comment
My husband and I established our evening routine of cooking together very early on, when we first moved in together back in 2001. We were barely out of college and interestingly, though we had already been together a long time, outside of our relationship we had very separate lives -- career-wise and socially -- so our time together on weeknights had a kind of self-conscious "coupled up" vibe: there was a little thrill in the otherwise mundane. Planning meals together, and then preparing them for ourselves and for company, cemented the grown-up status our shared lease seemed to have earned ... [READ MORE]
Recipe Roundup No. 9: Five Great Bean Dishes
August 19, 2016 by Leave a Comment
I just did the First Official Back-to-School Grocery Run and damn, it was a shop for the ages. Backup peanut butter! A pound of deli turkey! Chicken breast tenders for quicker cooking on busy afternoons! Hand sanitizer! Pencils! Scissors! ALL the Kleenex! Ketchup ketchup ketchup! Martini olives (which are LittleMan's preferred lunchbox "fruit", heaven help me)! And another jar of martini olives! For martinis! As has been well-documented here, we are home-cooking people. On the average day we prepare breakfast for three, two lunch boxes (for the kids) and a snack/provisions ... [READ MORE]
Recipe Roundup No. 8: Back-to-School
August 12, 2016 by Leave a Comment
That's my old stove, btw. I literally cannot wrap my head around the fact that today is officially the last day of summer vacation and school starts Monday. First of all, let us review the date, which is August 12. Still squarely in summertime, in my humble opinion. But I am slowly accepting the fact that I don't make the rules when it comes to the SFUSD (oh, but if I did...) and so on Monday we will suit up at the ungodly hour of 7:20am and make the trek to Day One. Babygirl starts Kindergarten on Monday. Did you hear that? BABYGIRL STARTS KINDERGARTEN ON MONDAY. Remember when ... [READ MORE]
Recipe Roundup No. 7: Top Five in Two Weeks
August 5, 2016 by Leave a Comment
The family pilgrimage to Tahoe at the end of July provided a much-needed break from all things real-life related, and aside from a bit of Insta-action I really didn't go online much. Which was healthy. And should happen more. In contrast, this last week has been all the things a first-week-back from vacation usually is: laundry (sooooo much laundry, always), overdue visits to the dentist, grocery shopping, catching up on email, back-to-school shopping, freaking out that it's already time for back-to-school, and so on. Also, after a week of virtually pickling ourselves in ... [READ MORE]
Recipe Roundup No. 6: New Stove Joy
July 22, 2016 by Leave a Comment
In case you're keeping tabs: my stove works. After, Oh, I don't know...four or five years of working periodically, unpredictably, and dangerously, it works at last! All the stoves in our building are electric, which is kind of unusual in San Francisco and definitely takes getting used to. As an added bonus, our old stove (which, for the record, was an old stove), had bent coils that refused to lie flat, meaning that our pots and pans slid around on the stovetop unless you positioned them with the handles just so, balancing the weight of the pan against the weight of the contents of the ... [READ MORE]
