Author: biteclub

Sebastopol Applesauce Cookies

A healthier take on holiday cookies, this recipe incorporates applesauce and whole wheat flour for a hearty, cake-like drop cookie.

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...

Cut Your Carrots, Not Your Fingers

There is an unavoidable tension between the desire to manipulate a carrot into uniform, rectangular shapes (including every culinary knife cut in the parallelepiped family, from the batonnet soldier awaiting its Ranch dressing destiny to the microscopically perfect brunoise at the bottom of a bowl of consomme), and the desire to keep one's digits unbloodied and persistently attached to one's hand without surgical assistance.

A nearly perfect French fry, from the oven

The extraordinary potato: A poisonous, inedible plant whose tuber provides one of the world's most critical food sources and is equally at home in a Michelin-star kitchen as it is in a McDonald's fry basket. Is there any food that is simultaneously simpler and more spectacular than a perfectly french-fried potato?