The pendulum has been swinging between spring and summer in our neck of the woods. With no air-conditioning in our half-century old house and temperatures rising last week, I had to pull our very old electric fan out of storage. This is a fan from my husband's childhood, a contemporary of our ... Read More
Sun-Dried Tomato Dip
My husband and I are beginning to feel like restaurant jinxes. Over the last few years we have discovered a few restaurants in our area only to see them close their doors a couple of years or even just a few months after deeming the eateries current favorites. We don't have a very good ... Read More
Caprese Salad with Fig Balsamic Dressing
If there is one type of dish that makes me miss not growing tomatoes this year it would be a salad. A bowl of pasta tossed in a simple tomato-based sauce is a close second, but I can usually come up with easy substitutes like capers, olives or anchovies to add substance to pasta in the absence ... Read More
Pasta alla Carbonara
Pasta alla Carbonara The traditional preparation for this classic Roman dish using no cream. The summer before my freshman year in high school, my family moved out of San Francisco and to a neighboring town a few miles away. This meant that I spent my first year in a new school trying to ... Read More
The Glorious Pasta of Italy: A Book Review
Many of you might already know how much I love to eat pasta. I can eat it each day of the week and not tire of it. Were I to be asked what my last meal would be, pasta would most certainly be in the equation. So when the good people of Cooks & Books & Recipes gave me the opportunity to ... Read More
Purple Sweet Potato Gnocchi
When I was 11 or 12, my mother deemed me old enough to make quick visits to the grocery store on my own. We lived in San Francisco at the time, on a dead end street where all the families knew each other. The neighborhood market was within view from our front door so my mother would send me ... Read More
