The Snozzberries Taste Like Snozzberries! 22 Jun 08

Tiny martini glasses: cute presentation, or painfully twee?*

A few weeks ago, The Kitchn highlighted an old Bon Appetit recipe for wine-marinated grapes. Because while fruit is tasty on its own, it is almost always improved by being soaked in booze.

I was immediately drawn to this recipe - if you can call it that, it’s so simple I don’t know if it rises to the level of “recipe” - because frozen grapes have always been one of my favorite summer snacks. And if I love frozen grapes, and soaking grapes in booze will make them better, then Newton’s 5th Transitive Rule of Snacks dictates that wine-soaked, frozen grapes should be fan-fucking-tastic. Newton’s actual words.

*Even though I took these photos, I’m going to have to go with “twee.”

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Let’s appropriate others’ cultural heritages: Happy Cinco de Mayo! 05 May 08

Speaking of appropriating: currently on my TV is a commercial for the Mohegan Sun casino with a jingle sung to the tune of “My Sharona.” Clever, or harbinger of the end of culture?

Cinco de Mayo: A day where office workers everywhere can gather at Mexican chain restaurants for happy hour and get smashed on frozen strawberry margaritas in honor of Mexican independence. Olé!

As the rest of us know, Cinco de Mayo is observed mainly in the state of Puebla and commemorates a victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín over the French in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, duh. I know General Seguín (or Iggy, as I like to call him) is probably a personal hero for many of you, as he is for me.

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Now that you mention it, we DO have some bananas today. 05 Apr 08

Three bananas, to be exact. Oh, did you need more than that? Tough.

You know you have them: excess bananas, malingering on your kitchen counters and gradually outliving their usefulness. Unless you’re one of those locavore people who only eat food produced within 1.3 miles of your Berkeley home*, which you built by hand from local stone carried block by block from your homemade quarry (it was a fun family weekend project!). You can go back to steaming your fresh-picked asparagus in the sparkling spring water little Timmy just gathered from the stream running behind your renovated eco-friendly but historically-accurate bungalow. Great job smelting those pots and pans!

I kid because I love! I’m pro organic, local foods that have not spent three weeks sitting in a refrigerated tractor trailer, and look forward to the start of the CSA season. But you know what else? I also love a frigging banana.

*If you’re a Costa Rica-based locavore, enjoy those bananas guilt-free!

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My Darling Clementines 24 Feb 08

Clementines refresh the palate… and the loins.

I’ve always wanted to try the Nigella clementine cake, the flourless one with the whole boiled and pureed clementines. Nigella is sometimes too precious for me; she uses phrases like “give a blitz” and “ferrous tang” while I’m more likely to give instructions like “fry that shit up in a pan,” or “fuck you.” Still, there’s no denying the comforting yumminess of many of her recipes (she also looks like she would give a good hug, if you were the huggy type), or the fact that clementines are all over the place right now, or the fact that I really like some frigging cake and I’ve been kinda cranky this week. So: clementine cake.

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