Leftovers
I've had leftovers on the brain lately. I think today everyone has leftovers on the brain, and on the stomach, but I've been cogitating on them for a couple of weeks. You see, I got tapped by my friend Suzie at KQED's The California Report to do a commentary, a foodie's perspective on the day after Thanksgiving. I knew I was going to talk about leftovers, and I knew where I was going with it, but I w

Thankful
Perhaps it's obvious, but this is the appropriate time to say so: I am thankful. I've been looking back, reflecting on all that I've ever wanted and dreamed of in life. I wanted to live in a city, one that was bustling and diverse and beautiful. I wanted a

How we roll
Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays. Being fixated on food, that should come as little surprise. But it's more than that. Perhaps more than any other holiday, even the pseudoreligious ones, Thanksgiving is about tradition. But our traditions are somewhat new. Like most San Francisco transplants, we are hundreds or thousands of miles from immediate family, so we've become part of other transplants' ad hoc traditions that have taken root. So many of these new traditions

Reconstitution
Remember those olives? Yeah, me neither. Per the instructions, I tossed them in ample kosher salt, set them in a colander over a bowl ... and promptly forgot about them. I was supposed to test them in a week. It's been three. I took a gander under the kitchen towel that daintily covered my little experiment to find a basket full of little mummified nubs, wizened down to a leathery skin adheri

Running on empty
I got nothing. Twenty-three days in and I finally have to phone in a post. It's not that I haven't been writing, though. It's just that, above and beyond the act of trying to squeeze out a post every day on the blog (oh, and a full-ti