Alright, guys. Do you remember that chickpea salad? The one that makes such a good lunch? The one that has five ingredients and takes five seconds to make, and that tastes ten times better than you expect it to? Well, I’ve just met its Italian cousin, and I can’t wait to introduce you. There are no chickpeas involved, but the feeling is the same, and I think you two are going to really hit it off. I love matchmaking. Especially when it involves wild mushrooms and fresh mozzarella. (I also enjoy it when it involves our friends Sam and Meredith, but that’s a whole other story.) I know it’s a little hard to tell what is happening in the photograph…

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Well. I know it’s May, and mid-May at that, and technically spring and all, so I probably shouldn’t be writing about something so wintry as braised onions. But today it was a cool 56 degrees outside, and anyway, Braised onions. With butter. And Madeira. On pasta. It’s never the wrong season for that, is it? I hope not. Plus, I hear the weather has been iffy on the East Coast too, and heck, in the Southern Hemisphere, it’s autumn, so it must be chilly. Right? Right. I feel entirely justified. Last week we had a house guest. His name is Ben, and he is an opera director, and his wife is one of Brandon’s old friends from college. The two…

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I got some very exciting news on Saturday, and before I do anything else, I can’t help but share it: namely, that my book is available for pre-order on Amazon! A very kind reader of this site wrote to tell me (Thank you, Emily!), and apparently she’d heard because Amazon sent her a notification e-mail. Maybe this happened to others among you? Either way, I promised to let you know when you could pre-order it, so here I am. Somebody asked me the other day about this pre-order thing, and why anyone would want to pre-order something, so in case you wonder, here’s the lowdown: Amazon gives a 5% discount on all pre-ordered books. So you save a bit of…

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I have a confession to make. I haven’t finished writing the thank you notes for our wedding gifts. It has been nine months – nine months tomorrow – and though no one has been brave enough to confirm it, it is becoming quite clear that I am the worst bride ever. I wish someone had warned me about this when we got engaged. Maybe I would have held off on the wedding thing, or chosen a man who has legible handwriting. Instead, once all the fun stuff was over, the whole party part, I had 93 thank you notes to write. Ninety. Three. And as of today, I still have 18 more to go. I am genuinely thankful – really,…

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It’s hard to know what to say about soup. I mean, it’s soup. It’s a liquid, sort of, but it’s eaten with a spoon. It’s not a steak, or chocolate, or fancy cheese, or an ice cream sundae. It’s what people eat when they’re sick or miserable or old, wearing dentures that clack like sad, weary castanets. Soup is a hard sell. But if I could, I would eat it every day. Sometimes, actually, I do. I never get tired of soup. I know that it’s April, and that it’s springtime and so on, and that we’re rapidly approaching the end of soup season, but I want to tell you about one in particular, the one I ate every day…

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Well. I wanted to bring you a real winner of a recipe today. I mean, I guess that’s what I always want, but this time, I really thought it was going to work. For a couple of months now, I’ve had my eye on a salad from the beautiful book Moro East, a Libyan-style salad of pasta, Greek yogurt, garlic, cilantro, and warm spices, topped with pine nuts toasted in brown butter. Doesn’t that sound great? I couldn’t get it out of my head. And so one day last week, I made it, and though I wanted, lord knows, to love it, I didn’t. The warm spices were too warm, and the whole thing needed a swift kick of lemon…

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Traveling is really, really great. I mean, I know that’s not exactly newsworthy, but bear with me for a minute. I guess what I mean is that, especially since I started working at home, where I spend lots of long hours in concentration and quiet, every time I go away, I feel thirsty somehow – like an old, crusty sponge, waiting to soak up something, anything, a new sight or smell or taste. And it feels so good to drink it all in, the way you’d do with a glass of water, in one enormous gulp, on a humid day. All that drinking in and soaking up, all that traveling, so good. But then, after a while, coming home is…

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So, last week, when I said that Brandon and I didn’t really plan, per se, to go to Brussels, I inadvertently left a little something out of the story. What I should have said, in retrospect, is that we did have plans for a vacation, but they didn’t involve Brussels. They involved San Francisco. Sometime last fall, we decided that we needed a vacation. March sounded like a good time to aim for – soon enough, but safely past the hubbub of the holidays – and so we started poking around online, looking for airfare to somewhere relaxing. We sort of ran wild with the whole idea, really, mulling over Mexico and Spain and New Zealand, but as you might…

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We didn’t really plan to go to Brussels. We were just looking for a vacation, that’s all. Then one December night, over a couple of glasses of prosecco and a pizza, our friend Olaiya happened to tell me that she had just found cheap tickets to Brussels. I don’t make, nor do I intend to make, a habit of mixing alcohol and travel planning, but this I can now say from experience: Prosecco + 2 Girlfriends + Talk of Cheap Tickets to Brussels =2 Girlfriends + 1 Husband in Brussels, 2 ½ Months Later. Not that I have any regrets, mind you. I’m just passing on information. I had been to Brussels once before, when I was 18 years old,…

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It’s very hard, let me tell you, to know where to begin. I guess it would be smart to start with Brussels, since that’s where we went first, but then, you know, there’s also Paris. Sometimes when I write about Paris, I worry that I sound like a broken record. You know – saying the same thing over and over, the same thing I always say, the same thing everyone always says about that lovely, gray city. Sometimes I just want to sit quietly, just me and my thoughts, and not say a word. But I’ve never been much good at that, as you might guess. And though my feelings for Paris change a little every time I go back…

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Ahem. Anyone still out there? It feels like I’ve been gone for ages. Whew. We just got home last night, and today I am woozy with jet lag, but I had to pop in for a minute to say hello. Even more, I wanted to thank you for bearing with me lately – with my nasty case of the flu, and then with my running off, willy-nilly, on vacation for two weeks. I feel much better, I’m happy to report, although that was one hell of a flu. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It was mean. But pitted against gaufres de Liège, and all that frothy Belgian beer, and Paris’s infinitely restorative butter and cheese and baguettes and wine…

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Okay. So, it seems that I’ve come down with the flu. Brandon has been sick since last Wednesday, sweating and shivering and coughing, and by Friday evening, it had felled me too. Unless you count scrambled eggs and a half-hearted batch of tomato sauce, we have cooked absolutely nothing in the past five days. On the upside, however, we’ve done a first-rate job of filling the sink with dirty dishes. Let me tell you, you know it’s bad when you eat cold pizza and ice cream for lunch, and you don’t even enjoy it. Or when you spend two days sitting on the couch, watching nature documentaries, a mafia movie, the Oscars pre-red carpet show, the Oscars red carpet show,…

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I hate to say it, but I had an awfully hard time getting here today. It’s not that I didn’t want to stop by and say hello; I like you guys too much for that. It’s just that it’s been way too pretty lately to be sitting inside at the computer. As I type this, the front door is open wide and an enormous, gauzy swatch of sunlight has stretched itself along the wall. Yesterday afternoon, when the light was glowy and golden, we rented a rowboat and paddled out onto Lake Union. Then we just sat there for a while, oars up, admiring the white-bellied yachts with frilly names like Princess and Dream Catcher, and let the current pull…

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For almost a year now, Brandon and I have performed a particular ritual at the start of each new season. It’s going to make some of you want to roll your eyes and gag – and really, be my guest; I gag a little just typing this – but I want to tell you about it anyway, because it’s kind of dreamy. You might even want to join in. Basically, the ritual goes like this: one night, when the season is just beginning, we climb into bed, prop ourselves up on pillows, and I read to him from Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking. Now, I know what you’re thinking: You read aloud to him? From a cookbook? Oh,…

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Hi again, guys. I just got the March issue of Bon Appétit in the mail, so I wanted to pop in and tell you a bit about my column and the recipe it contains. This month, I’m tackling the (not-so-)tricky business of baking with yeast. More to the point, there’s a recipe for cinnamon rolls with cream cheese glaze. Yep, you heard me. Cream. cheese. glaze. (!). They’re pretty terrific, if I may say so: warm, soft, and gooey in all the right places. I owe a big thank you to a very kind woman named Yi-Fun Hsueh, on whose recipe mine is based. She’s a baking wonder. So if you find yourself needing a cinnamon roll anytime soon, you…

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I like to think of this space as my personal treasure chest of sorts. It’s a place to keep all my favorite odds and ends, my old dishes and etched spoons, my smudged and splattered recipe cards, the ones with rips and tears and dog ears. It’s my Official Repository of Good Stuff. Every week, I come here, into this warm white space, and deposit something I want to remember: a recipe, a story, maybe a photograph or two. Then, whenever I want, I can pull up a chair and look inside, pulling out ideas one by one, nibbling at crumbs, scheming and dreaming, making grocery lists and dinner plans. It’s very convenient. Much better than sealing things away in…

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I come to you today to redeem myself. You really were terribly kind last week about the whole budino debacle. When I gave you canned beans instead, you didn’t even throw them at me. You really are angels. If I could, I would send every one of your mothers a note to thank them for raising you so well. But that would take forever, I fear. Heck, I haven’t even finished the thank-you notes from our wedding, and the blasted thing was six months ago. (I know, Mom. I know.) So how about we just keep it simple? How about we take a moment to acknowledge, right here and right now, how utterly lovely you are, and then we go…

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I had big plans. I was going to serve you a real whopper of a dessert today. It was going to be the butterscotch budino from Pizzeria Mozza, if you really want to know, the dessert that Frank Bruni calls “a pudding to shame all other puddings.” (Isn’t that that the single best line of praise ever? I want someone to call me “a pudding to shame all other puddings.”) It was going to be great. Have you heard about it, this butterscotch budino? I first learned of it when Luisa wrote about Mozza last March, and then I went chasing the recipe, which, happily, was printed in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Bon Appétit, each…

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I don’t know how it is where you are, but around here, winter has been a little weird. Kind of wishy-washy, I guess you could say. Not that I’m complaining or anything. No sir. I’m just saying. We’ve had the usual load of rain and even a scant dusting of snow, but everywhere, all around, the shrubs are sending out little green buds. Yesterday it was sunny and 50 degrees, and we went to Discovery Park in nothing but jeans and t-shirts – long-sleeved, but still – and collected shells on the beach. We even saw a plum tree with a few open blossoms(!). I grinned so hard that I thought my face might crack open. Then, when we came…

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I’ve never been a big one for hot beverages. Oh, I do like a cup of coffee every now and then, as well as the occasional mug of hot water with a slice of lemon on top, but aside from that, meh, I could take it or leave it. Part of the problem, I think, is that I’m forever burning my tongue. It’s a tender little bugger. Having burned it so many times, I hardly even want hot drinks anymore. If I’m going to burn the darned thing, I figure, it should be for something more substantial, more filling, than just a dinky cup of coffee or tea. (No offense, of course, to you coffee and tea aficionados. Anyway, this…

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Sometimes I can’t believe it’s only been five years, or five years and change, since I moved to Seattle. It feels like ages in all the right ways. Every time I come home from somewhere else, every time the plane bump-bumps to a stop at SeaTac, my heart pumps a little harder. I never knew this city could make me so happy. I didn’t mean to stay here. I came for graduate school, that’s all. But then the big gray clouds sort of nudged their way into my heart, and they must have let loose all kinds of rain in there, because now it’s full to bursting. Christmas on the East Coast was a treat, be-bopping around between Manhattan and…

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