I grew up in Los Angeles, and I feel like I’ve adopted every cuisine represented by the vast LA community – Korean, Chinese, Mexican, Thai – but Filipino food was never on my radar. That changed when The Manila Machine started driving around the streets of Southern California. Marvin Gapultos’ food was a revelation. It was everything I love: tart, spicy, simple yet complex. It was an exciting mash-up of Spanish and Chinese cuisine that was completely new to me…

A few days ago in the middle of a conversation with Roy Choi about Spam (yes Spam) Roy made the point that Spam is one of those foods that’s very “inside” particular cultural communities. “Inside”, like when people next to you start talking in complete minutiae about a subject that you know nothing about and all of a sudden you find yourself on the outside…

The more I use my pressure cooker, the more I marvel at it’s usefulness. Once a year, on or around St. Patrick’s Day we have an old-fashioned corn beef and cabbage dinner. I cook the cabbage with potatoes in the resultant broth from cooking the corned beef. The meat is a treat, but eaters clamor for seconds on the cabbage. There is something about cabbage that is cooked in a salty broth until totally tender that is completely satisfying…

I don’t need an expert to tell me that I eat too much dairy.  I live with a 93 year old mom who puts sour cream on everything.  So when I decided to prepare for my interview with Mark Bittman on his new diet book VB6:  Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health…For Good (well that’s a mouthful), I knew …

The first time I ate muesli I was in Denmark. It was made with an assortment of nuts and dried fruits and made (of course) with whole milk. The whole mass had been soaking overnight. Right before serving, fresh blueberries were mixed in. It didn’t exactly look beautiful because of the pallid color of the raw oats, but those same pale oats were transformed …

Sometimes large dried beans never manage to get that soft creamy center you want in a bean. Unless you cook them in a pressure cooker.  Instead of soaking and cooking for hours, in a fraction of the time you get a perfectly hydrated, tender bean. My recommendation is to find a pressure cooker cookbook you like and use it as a guide. Through trial …

I’m in love with my pressure cooker again after too long apart. After hearing from several interviewees (Christopher Kimball, Richard Blais and Maxime Bilet) that the pressure cooker was the single most useful tool to increase flavor and move “modernist” culinary technique into the home kitchen, I pulled my 4-quart Kuhn Rikon out of its hiding place and got to work.
But then the horror …

I spent some time last week wading through literature on the first transgenic (GMO) animal going through the FDA approval process. It’s Aqua Bounty’s AquAdvantage Salmon. The AquAdvantage is a “domesticated” Atlantic Salmon with two “modifications”. One is a growth factor output gene from a wild Chinook Salmon; the other is a “promoter, the molecular “switch” from the antifreeze protein gene is used” (these quotes come directly from the Aqua Bounty website). This promoter overrides the growth factor turnoff switch to enable growth hormone to work in the fish 24 hours a day, 7 days a week instead of the three month time limit it has in wild Chinook Salmon.

Scott was so busy this year dealing with the national expansion of Tomatomania that we missed our traditional on-air pre-planting conversation with him.   So he kindly consented to participate in a Q and A for us.

How many Tomatomania events do you have now in Southern California?
We’ll have 9 scheduled events in SoCal this year, and a couple surprise pop ups this year too …

I first posted this recipe in 2005.  It was the featured gefulte fish substitute at the Angeli Passover dinner for more than twenty years. But don’t just think of it as Jewish holiday food.  Pesce in Carpione comes from the Italian culinary tradition of agrodolce, sweet and sour, a remnant of times when vinegar was used to preserve food, not just for it’s in …