I could wax excitable and eloquent for pages upon pages about the virtues of the California Hass avocado (and yes, it is "Hass", not "Haas", named for Rudolph Hass, the postman who, in the 1920s, planted the one and only Mother Tree of virtually every avocado you've ever eaten), but I cannot stomach the poor excuse on offer at my local Safeway.
New Healdsburg steakhouse is about to open
What to eat locally for Thanksgiving
Whole Foods has Thanksgiving wrapped up
First, the come-clean: This picture is of the pie that I ate, but is not my pie. I don't really do sweets and, with the notable exception of pizza and its close derivatives, I rarely bake - suffice it to say that we may all have a place in the kitchen, but mine is most assuredly not at the pastry station. But when Thanksgiving - my favorite official holiday bar none, and the only US holiday implicitly engineered for the home cook - comes knocking, I start to anticipate pie like, well, like a crack-head anticipates crack.
Sift becomes a dessert bar
Hopmonk Sonoma opening next week
I've been thinking about cooking green. And no, I'm not pandering to my more aggressively environmentalist brethren, I'm talking about the color green, the shades of which the human eye is more sensitive to than any other part of the visible spectrum: The haughty, peacock green of my grandmother's emerald broach; the brooding, mossy green of the Russian River pooling under Wohler Bridge...
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:
Somewhere between deliciousness and disgustingness lies the Thanksgiving Cake
