Recession Recipes

I went to the farmers’ market by our house today to stock up on our weekly produce and the strawberry guy was back with a stand after being gone for a few months. Yes, it was 70 degrees and sunny today in Las Vegas, but strawberry season at the beginning of March? It just seems [...]

Every week or so, I get a phone call or text message from my little brother Andrew asking for some kind of cooking advice. His questions have run the gamut from how to roast chiles in his electric oven to what he should make for lunch. I do think one of my favourite phone calls [...]

We have never been the kind of people who cook and eat a prescriptive diet. There are no pork chop Wednesdays or spaghetti Thursdays in our house, and the same 5 or 6 dishes aren’t cooked week in and week out. We have always enjoyed making different meals to taste and always anticipate cooking something [...]

We had a couple of friends over on Sunday night to try out a few recipes from the cookbook Tacos that Carlo got for Christmas. We started off the night with chips, salsa, our friend Mike’s great guacamole, and this queso recipe. We ended up eating so much of the appetizers that all of us [...]

The simple things can often be some of the best. When in Catalunya, the part of Spain that holds Barcelona, this holds true for the well-known pan con tomate (or pa amb tomaquet in Catalan). It’s simply toasted bread rubbed with a clove of raw garlic and a tomato, then salted — and it’s the [...]

I really enjoy a good salad. Meat is an easy way to bulk up a salad, but another trick is adding roasted butternut squash as a topping. It adds a nice sweetness to your salad, as well as some beautiful colour and perhaps more importantly, another way to squeeze in an extra serving of vegetables.
In [...]

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a great holiday and 2010 is treating you well so far. We had an incredible time back in Texas and an even better time in Mexico where we swam, snorkeled, and sunned ourselves to our hearts’ content every day.
The only downside to our adventures is returning home and [...]

Ever since we came back from Tucson, I feel like my diet has largely consisted of Asian food and beer. I’m addicted to this new Sichuan restaurant, Yun Nan Garden in Asiaville (Carlo’s term for Vegas’ China Town), and I dream about their spicy and tongue numbing food ALL the time. When we weren’t eating [...]

I don’t know about you, but my jeans were feeling a wee bit snug after Thanksgiving. Don’t most Americans gain something like 5 pounds between Thanksgiving and Christmas? I don’t know the exact researched amount, but I just know that I don’t want to frighten children in my bathing suit when we go to Mexico [...]

I love Brussels sprouts, and I always look forward to eating them at the holidays each year. Normally they are kind of a pain to make and seem to take forever to prepare and roast, which is why we seem to only eat them at the holidays. However, this recipe from Mark Bittman is very [...]