I live in the Pacific northwest maritime climate - The real problem with fall is that winter comes after it. The very first part of autumn isn’t too bad but I’m done with autumn before Halloween rolls around and silently hoping for the calendar to magically skip forward to Easter. Annually, we need about two more…

Went to the store yesterday and picked up some peaches which I know are grown in WA. I can now officially report they’re freestone. They’ll be around until the end of September if we’re lucky. The early season peaches from CA tend to be either cling/free and I always feel a small moment of anxiety right before the all…

There’s nouthing coul abot superfluous and randoumly oumitted U’s.

I had a freestone peach yesterday. I’m didn’t look to see if the peach was from CA or WA but I’m in the latter and the peaches sold at the local store under the “grown in WA” label are freestone and wonderful. They typically show up some time in August so I’m gonna have to pay better attention next time and try to not…

Every year is different. Out here on the western side of the Cascades, most of the plum trees planted in populated areas tend to be purple-leaved varieties that inconsistently produce viable fruit, if any at all. Last summer, I happened to go for a bike ride alongside the local lake shore here and when I stopped for a…

I can’t imagine a more pointless conveyor of calories than mayo. It doesn’t have a whole lot of flavor to begin with and what little flavor it does have is easily overwhelmed, especially on foods like burgers and sandwiches. Taking that into account, it really is in certain foods to improve mouthfeel, and that problem…

One is a million too many!

The only time I ever really eat cabbage is when it’s been stir-fried with teriyaki sauce. Not sure what kind of cabbage the restaurant uses but the sweetness from the teriyaki sauce mitigates the cabbage’s earthy bitterness. Though I do like the idea of using crushed ramen noodles as a crouton of sorts and I’m…

“This is bad, real bad...”

A got a major buzz on a couple weekends ago and I was planning on making pizza at some point. I always make the sauce the day before and at some point I realized that I hadn’t made the sauce yet so I ventured forward with that task in an altered state. I dunno if it was the munchies being in full effect but when I tast…

There’s only one serving size for ice cream...

To be fair, there’s a lot of times where the caloric count of a dessert won’t be that far off from a main course so swapping one out for the other isn’t necessarily a bad trade on that front. The real damage is done when both courses get fully consumed in one sitting. I remember having a birthday dinner at some…

That’s the beauty of using ingredients that are either pickled or brined. Olives, peperoncini, and feta seamlessly blend in with whatever dressing there is and take it up a notch. Add in the refreshing bite of green peppers, the umami of fresh tomatoes, and the sharpness of red onion and you have a winning combo. If…

Usually when I make ground beef tacos, I cook the onion first, move it to the edge of the pan, switch the burner to a smaller size but higher temperature, and plop the whole hunk of ground beef in the pan. I cook the beef until one side starts showing some nice color, then I flip the whole hunk over and do the same to…

That top picture looks like a bunch of grapefruit I bought not too long ago. The grapefruit looked gigantic from the outside but the actual fruit inside wasn’t any more voluminous than a normal-sized fruit. If I’m gonna pay for rind, I’d rather get a pomelo.

Oh, wow....

As a Washingtonian and a coffee drinker, it somewhat irks me to see coffee be our representative. Sure, Seattle is the birthplace of the nation’s largest chain coffeehouse but I’m not sure if there’s a coffee culture that’s really germane to either Seattle or the state as a whole. I also don’t think a state’s “iconic”…

I can’t speak for others, but I typically go red for beef and green for pork/chicken. 

Indian soft tacos could be made with ground lamb, sauteed onion and garlic, some kind of garam masala, paneer, and naan to wrap it all up in. Throw in some pickled peppers and you have a winner.

Just recently, I tasted a store-bought fire-roasted salsa my dad was eating and it tasted more like marinara than salsa. I figured it’d be terrible on nachos or chips but pretty good on a Mexican pizza. Other than being a little more watery than regular red pizza sauce, the salsa added the familiar tomato-y brightness…