Salad

Not all salads are created equal. Some are complex, with many competing flavors and others are simple and subtle. In the salad world, both are needed. This is a simple one; a lovely butter lettuce and watercress salad with a creamy walnut dressing. Now don’t misunderstand me, by “simple” I don’t mean boring, I mean […]

Mozzarella is an Italian curd cheese made from water buffalo milk, not to be confused with North American buffalo or bison. The Italian Mediterranean buffalo breed was believed to have been introduced to Italy during the Roman times. Because Italian water buffalo are herded in just a few countries (mainly Italy and Bulgaria), most mozzarella you eat […]

Halloumi (or haloumi), is often associated with the Greek island of Cyprus, and is a semi-hard, unripened, brined cheese made from a mixture of goat’s and sheep’s milk and sometimes cow’s milk. Halloumi cheese, is often referred to as a “grilling or frying cheese” due to its high melting point allowing it to be easily […]

Roasted beets with burrata and pistachios: these are a few of my favorite things. There is nothing all that fancy or complicated going on here, just a salad, but a fantastic one. Earthy flavors combined with creamy delicious burrata cheese make the perfect pairing. It’s a simple dish I could honestly live on all year […]

Winter is a wonderful time. Earthy, hearty, beautiful root vegetables are in abundance. But what to do with them?  I say roast them. I love slightly browned roasted vegetables lightly toasted in olive oil. Straight-up, as a side dish, or here, mixed together in a hearty winter salad. This roasted winter vegetable salad hits the […]

Chef and restaurateur Sondra Bernstein, founder of Sonoma’s wildly popular wine country farm-to-table eatery The girl & the fig, is my featured Changemaker for November. Bernstein, whose mantra is “doing one thing is boring,” is someone I have long admired. A one-woman show, Bernstein is credited with “putting Sonoma County on the big-league culinary map 20 years ago […]

Sometimes the origin of food can be surprising. Things don’t always come from where you think they should have. Caesar salad is one of those. One of the most loved salads on the planet, this simple favorite is believed to have been created by an Italian-American restaurateur , Caesar Cardini, in Tijuana, Mexico. The story has […]

My family and I are obsessed with Din Tai Fung, a famous Taiwanese restaurant in at Santa Clara outpost that we frequent.  My husband is the only one of us who has been to Taiwan, which is partly how this obsession began. Once a restaurant opened in our area, we quickly became frequent visitors. For […]

I have not been shy about my love of salads. I am, however, an admitted salad snob. My husband agrees. I like my salads to taste good and to look good. Appearance matters. Making a salad look appetizing should not be that complicated: vegetables in their natural states are inherently pretty, given the variety of […]

Everyone needs a go-to, easy salad. This is my new one. I love tofu almost as much as I love salads, so I feature it prominently in this one for this easy and tasty tofu cabbage salad. Tofu, also known as bean curd, is cultivated by curdling soy milk and then pressing the resulting curds into […]

Jesse Ziff Cool is my featured Changemaker this month. For my non-local readers, Cool is a well-known Silicon Valley chef who has been dedicated to sustainable agriculture and cuisine for more than four decades–long before “farm-to-table” was a catchphrase. To be clear, despite many comparisons, she is not Alice Waters. Nor is she trying to be. […]

This is a fun dish and a great seasonal one for warmer weather. I love to serve it with Noah’s cod cakes. I’m a big quinoa fan. I have basically stopped eating rice, and I do watch my carbs–so quinoa and riced cauliflower have become my go-to’s.  Quinoa is a gluten-free, high-protein plant food containing […]

I have not been shy about my love of salads. Like this salad, my arugula and golden beet salad, are both examples that salads don’t need to be overly complicated to be delicious. My mom had me eating salads when I was a kid and I’m incredibly thankful for that.  Because of that early exposure, I’ve […]

A New Year and, with it, new ideas. This is my first post in what will be my special featured series this year titled “Changemakers.” Our country, our world actually, is a bit of a mess. The news these days seems to be riddled with political chaos, hatred, violence, and discrimination as well as a […]

I think one of the reasons I love the cooler months so much is because it is beet season.  Beets are referred to as “winter’s sweet treats“. You can find beets throughout the year, but during the Fall and Winter months they are at their peak of deliciousness–and I can’t get enough of them. Red […]