Sonoma chef needs your vote

Sears Chef Challenge seeks out top talent -- with local food banks as the benefactors

How Not To Boil Water

You have to love getting a physics lesson from a simple kitchen task: Gravity, for example, seems particularly enamored of demonstrating to me her unwavering commitment, most often when I’m in a rush, by recasting my own kitchen floor as some vast cemetery plot for the night’s dead soldiers, the busted egg shells, the shattered crystal […]

Seeking Mac-n-Cheese Perfection: The Ground Rules

OK, it's Monday, enough of the booze chatter. We promised to engage in the pursuit of mac-n-cheese perfection, and here in the Proximal Kitchen, we don't take such promises lightly. If you caught my previous post on mac-n-cheese, despair not yet another sermon from the culinary pulpit, because today's post - our introductory foray into the mac-n-cheese sweepstakes - is all business.

Fighting Scurvy, One Gimlet at a Time

I'm not a big drinker of cocktails in general, and I'm even less of a drinker of gin. That being said, cocktails clearly have their place: Less so with food, and more before - or after, or occasionally instead of; as an alternative to beer, when the weather or environs don't seem conducive to wine; and certainly, as a welcome to guests who have just endured the Bay Area's northbound assault on wine country traffic

What’s Wrong With ‘Man v. Food’ (Redux)

I have a pretty strict rule of approving every comment but responding to none, no matter how profound and insightful or vacuous and petty they may be. It isn’t always pleasant, but it is fair, which might be the most one can hope for in the blogosphere.  It is also how I’ve managed, pending this post, the acrimonious chatter […]