Nice to Meat You: Legendary Butcher at Sonoma Broadway Market

By Ariana Reguzzoni Tom Geney arrives at Sonoma’s Broadway Market at 4 a.m. each day, flips on the lights and prepares for the steady stream of customers seeking steaks, chops, ribs and fowl prepared the old-fashioned way: by hand and to order. Geney, 75, is one of the longest-serving butchers in the county, having plied […]

Making Peace with Whole Foods Butchers

For years, those three little words neatly summarized my feelings about Whole Foods, and made for a Flintstones-sized bone of contention between me and every food-snob I came across; where my friends and family chomped at the bit to feel good about parting with their paychecks, I saw only a business model predicated on sloughing-off expensive products of inconsistent quality, remarkably mediocre prepared foods, and egregiously priced dry goods encased in very clever branding.

The Costco Report: Organic Beef

I cooked this steak - with a simple red wine-honey reduction and a creamy parmigiano-peppercorn salad - in honor of one of my especially snarky fans, someone who objects strenuously every time I buy something from a supermarket for what I've billed as a "cooking locally" weblog. I'll stipulate the point, but my money says I'm not the only parent in the County who'd like to serve their kids a decent, healthy steak for a few less bucks. But is it a decent, healthy steak?

Get her tipsy, feed her chocolate.

I don't know about you, but I'm not above whetting my wife's more carnal appetites with enough wine and chocolate to impair her better judgment. I'm sure that's all very un-PC and certainly, as the father of young daughters, I live in mortal fear of the effects of alcohol on sensibility; but my wife's a big girl, and above all, she knows how I think, so I'm pretty sure our pending Valentine's Date - a savory symphony of handcrafted chocolate and wine at J Winery - will be consensual.

Larks’ Tongues in Aspic

What did you listen to when you were young? And do you still play the same records? Looking back, I may have been indicted as excessively broad, as wantonly eclectic for its own sake: Experimental jazz, baroque classical, LA punk, progressive rock (whatever that means), and lots of metal, a scattershot gang of vinyl finery parading across my turntable.

Sauce Slut: A Glossy, Crimson, Zinfandel Reduction

I confess, I'm a total sauce slut: My wife could legitimately accuse me of infidelity, if only she had thought to proscribe lustfully leering at the 5 mother sauces in our vows, and I might happily eat a shoe, if only it were first slathered with a demi glace of sufficiently high quality.

Fox News: Grass-Fed Worse For Environment (Part 2)

Does grass-fed beef really have a larger carbon footprint than its corn-fed cousin? That’s the controversial claim made by John Stossel, posted on Townhall.com and televised on Fox Business Network, that I talked about in my post from earlier this week. With a little digging, it turned out that the so-called “research” on which the […]

Fox News: Grass-Fed Beef Is Worse For The Environment

Beef from corn-fed, CAFO-raised cattle is actually far better for the environment than the uber foodie-chic, grass-fed variety. Or is it? That’s the question raised by a recent and highly publicized story on Fox Business Network, based on a paper – by a professor of animal sciences at Washington State University – that flies in […]

Another 3-Ingredient Dinner (Stovetop Rib Eye w/ Mac-n-Cheese & Onion Marmalade)

A clear violation of the spirit if not the letter of The Rules for cooking with just three ingredients, using leftovers like this, but one of the principal advantages of blogging, and self-imposed rules generally, lies rooted in the simple fact that one may ultimately do whatever one wishes. Of course, your readers may kvetch, and they'd have a point, but that's part of the game; the most important bit, as ever, remains the food.

Tyler Florence’s Hot Dog Chili (Or, When Bad Recipes Happen To Good People)

A conundrum endemic to parenting and modern life in general, the home kitchen provides an object lesson: When preparing a recipe for the first time, particularly one from a celebrity chef like Tyler Florence, do I trust my instincts and override the recipe whenever something seems amiss? Or, do I remain humble, follow it to the letter, and hope for the best?