Category: BiteClub

Hot Box Grill | Sonoma

Hot Box Grill in Sonoma is about to be huge. Comfort food with a solid foundation of classical French cooking make Chef Norm Owens a toque to watch in the gourmet gulch.

What’s up with the high price of lemons?

I have long shared Ms Jordan's intuitive sense that the better part of a buck for a commercial lemon just seems expensive and, like anyone over the age of 5 and not in a coma, I am painfully aware of the economic date rape perpetrated by such noteworthy offenders as high-speed cable and internet, public utilities, and - to the topic at hand - large scale agri-business, which got me thinking: Is the market for lemons competitive, or just another special-interest screwing?

The Pirate Lord of the Hot Line (Book Review)

...A compelling argument for reading material but, naturally enough, I make it through security at SFO without so much as a day-old copy of the Times, and why I purchase - at prices inflated by profit margins that only airport monopolies and cable companies can dream of - two books, one of which is Jason Sheehan's Dirty Cooking, and which turns out to be an excellent little book about one man's particularly hot, dangerous, sweaty and chemically-enhanced life on the hot line.

The Costco Report

The Costco Report: Episodic observations on where to port safely, and what to avoid like a pestilence, when navigating the oceans of consumer non-durables down in The Belly of The Beast... I sometimes (often, in fact) feel the need to justify shopping at Costco. I'm not sure why, exactly, but one could speculate:

In N Out | Santa Rosa

First outpost of popular burger joint opens in Santa Rosa

Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, & More Cheese (v2.5)

Can you imagine playing Russian roulette with the crust at your favorite pizza joint, the done-ness of your steak, or the hardness of your egg? Take away the obsessive cooks, and we'd all be eating Swanson's Hungry Man or instant ramen with a spork, which is a roundabout introduction to Why I'm Still Trying To Perfect Mac-n-Cheese. The mountains of grated cheese, the errors like some pagan fortune engraved in burnt milk at the bottom of sauce pots, the sweet, nutty smell of flour frying in butter that fill the house, and - finally - today's installment, in which I learn that, unlike Crisco or tickling, if some is good, then more is better.

A Plate of Strange Bedfellows

Pickles, cheese, and chocolate: Three ingredients, three possible pair-wise combinations, two really good and interesting tastes, and one impossibly disgusting mouthful of gag reflex. If I like cheese with pickles, and (somewhat surprisingly) I like chocolate with cheese, then why don’t I like chocolate with pickles? I mean, other than the painfully obvious – in […]