I have a lot of plants - my living room is like a jungle. I like the idea of bringing the outside in.
I just drink regular drip coffee, but I'm kind of a coffee baby.
One pillar of my cooking is that salad dressing is sacred and that you always make it with the most delicious oil you can find. Usually, that means extra-virgin olive oil.
When I was young, one Sunday every month or so, my mom would load my brothers and me into our station wagon and drive 80 miles north to Orange County, where we'd meet our extended family at a Persian restaurant for lunch.
No one's born a good cook. You have to learn and practice.
I love mayonnaise. It's one of the first lessons I teach my cooking students. Turning eggs and oil into an emulsion - that creamy, satisfying third thing - feels like magic.
I take, like, 9,000 supplements every morning. I don't know if it's completely placebo or not, but I'm super committed to these supplements: like, I can't face the day without them.
At home, Mom served us turkey breakfast links that she got at the health-food store. But whenever we went out for breakfast, she let my brothers and me order pork sausages (though, inexplicably, not bacon).
The apricot's fleetingly short harvest - only a few weeks long - explains the urge to save the season in a jar. But cooked fruit, no matter how expertly preserved, can never measure up to the flawlessness of its fresh counterpart.
Friends have warned me that I can be a bully in the kitchen. With every fledgling relationship, I'm anxiously aware that the simple act of cooking alongside my new paramour can unleash havoc.
Long-stemmed broccoli should be tossed with olive oil and flaky salt and roasted in a hot oven until the florets turn the color of hazelnut shells and shatter on the tongue.
I live by myself, so I derive a lot of joy from being with my friends and their families.
We all have incredible relationships to what we eat, to what we don't eat, to what we've eaten since childhood and what we were fed, to what food means to us. And so I find it a really powerful tool in storytelling and in opening people's hearts and their minds.
There are two proper ways to use garlic: pounding and blooming. Neither involves a press, which is little more than a torture device for a beloved ingredient, smushing it up into watery squiggles of inconsistent size that will never cook evenly or vanish into a vinaigrette. If you have one, throw it away!
Tart and sweet, tinged with the faint scent of almonds and flowers, the Blenheim is the ideal apricot for both eating and preserving.
For the timid or uninitiated, leaf-wrapped foods offer an ideal and gentle introduction to fire cooking. Liberated from the need to worry about whether the fish is sticking to the grill or burning, pay attention instead to the rate of browning on the surface of the leaf, which you'll get to discard whether it chars or remains pale.
Very early in my culinary career, while helping another cook prepare the staff meal, I stirred some chopped raw garlic and herbs into a bowl of leftover lentils. The atonement for this sin was so extreme that I've never repeated it: After being chastised, I spent the next 20 minutes fishing out the minuscule pieces of garlic.
I'd never been religious, but I'd always obeyed my elders. My decision to become an omnivore was fraught, not because it was a religious transgression but because it was my first act of self-assertion as a young adult.
A successful shrimp boil requires layering ingredients into the pot so that everything is done cooking at once. A carefully timed choreography dictates the order in which ingredients are added to ensure no one has to eat raw potatoes or chewy shrimp.
I've never tasted a store-bought tortilla that compares in texture or flavor with one made by hand, so I'm happy to invest some time. It's worth it just to see a friend take her first bite and understand, finally, that a flour tortilla is meant to be an essential component, not just a lackluster wrapper.
