What Obama and Bush both know about wine

Chicken/egg, TV/commercial, show-me-yours/I'll-show-you-mine; which came first, the food or the wine? In our house, such questions carry weight, a seriousness you might consider more properly reserved for electrocardiograms, or matters of national security. The thing of it is, in wine country, the ordinal structure of food vis-a-vis wine matters, not least because you'll neither be fed nor drunk until we've settled the matter. To wit, a wine that my wife adores and that Presidents Obama and Bush Jr uniquely agree upon, because it's been spilled on the official tablecloths of Republican and Democratic White Houses alike...

Use Those Leftovers: Wild Salmon, Two Ways.

Leftovers, I often think, represent one of the home cook's closest friends and greatest motivators, because respect for the limited resources from which our meals derive is a core moral imperatives for all cooks, and inefficiency and waste are its very antithesis. Of course efficiency in the kitchen saves us time and money, but it's much more than that:

Wild Salmon for Wild Kids

This dish came about, like so much of what transpires here in the PK, because it was the obvious thing to do: Driving home with my eldest daughter, we stopped by the small but exceptional Tuesday market. We had very little time and were already behind schedule for dinner, so prep time had to be short. And, of course, the ultimate test for any kids' meal: Would the little monsters actually eat whatever I put in front of them?

Cooking For Kids with Just Three Ingredients

About a month ago, lacking my hoped-for, fleeting, and frustratingly oft-absent daily quotient of inspiration and incisiveness, I decided to try something new and, I admit, sort of gimmicky: I decided to find out out how many distinct, complete dishes I could compose using just three ingredients. And, importantly for our household, nowhere does the fewer-ingredients/simpler-technique approach bear sweeter fruit than in response to my frustration of cooking for kids.