Tag: Caviar

New Year’s Eve: Serve This, Get Lucky

If you've already got Champagne and caviar lying about, then by all means, use it, and with neither apology nor reservation. But here is my contribution: Whatever you do, make sure you serve something that will get you lucky. As it happens - to nobody's surprise, at least if they're regular readers - we in the Proximal Kitchen are nothing if not opinionated, and we love most of all to pontificate about which foods and wines are most likely to earn you flirty looks and even messier sheets, and we've got just the ticket:

Eat Your Black and Orange

As usual, my keyboard is running several days back of my knife and fork, but at least you know where my priorities lie: Worry first about the cooking and the eating. Having spent two months watching the Giants' thrillingly improbable championship run like a little boy in the bleachers, here is what I served when the Giants brought home the Commissioner's Trophy on Halloween, a plate of black and orange food that didn't require an above-ground nuclear weapon test in order to occur in nature, and still tasted good.

Cold Food for Hot Mamas

As most any mom will tell you, there is a world of difference between "cooking for moms" and "cooking for moms": The noun implies more of her time spent over a cooktop, while the verb at least suggests the possibility that she might end up on the receiving end of the culinary goodie bag for a change. To wit: My wife recently put in a special request for the Moms' Night Out she was hosting for a small cadre of mamacitas sans kids and husbands, a professional dance instructor, and a trunk full of pink bubbly...

Cooking for Date Night, Naughty ‘n Nice

Whipped cream for dinner, because Saturday night, with any luck at all, means date night. Date night - at least around our house - is at least as likely to mean a raid on the wine cellar and a bag of tricks from the farmer's market as a babysitter and a night out on the town, because we live in a sleepy wine country town where most of the bars shutter their doors around the same time my kids shut their eyes...