piece meal

When an unfamiliar food appears at the family dinner table, often this sacred place of communion summarily shifts to a hostile battleground, pitching parents against their young kids in the struggle to nourish them. Amongst the various domains of child rearing, the inculcation of good eating habits is one of the most common sources of frustration, falter, and perceived failure for parents. Even children willing to eat a broad spectrum of plants typica...

The consummate egg soufflé emerges from the oven—which dare not be either prematurely or belatedly opened—a puffy cloud cloaked in heat-kissed bronze and barely trembling in the center.

Eggs are a delicate, finicky protein, prone to scorching yet nearly inedible in their gelatinous state. Learning how to cook the egg properly is a study in precision, method, and detail, the result of which is total sultry delicacy.

Unlocking the key to the chicken egg’...

Israeli chef Michael Solomonov is both informative and pure fun today in an interview on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air.’ Talking with Dave Davies, Solomonov discusses Zahav—his modern Israeli restaurant in Philadephia, recounts tales of his former struggle with drug addiction, and shares a recipe for tehina, the mother sauce of Israeli cuisine.

Listening to this interview makes one think twice about buying store-bought hummus, or even serving it chil...

On September 12, Mark Bittman announced his departure from the New York Times food editorial section, at least as a standing columnist. Bittman is moving on to greener pastures—quite literally—having relocated to the Bay Area and joined a food start-up devoted to making “it easier for people to eat more plants.” Bittman also adds in his farewell article that he believes he has fully aired his views on social issues concerning food (sustainability, the...

Like the promise of paradise in the afterlife, the reward for enduring a scorching hot summer day in California is the exquisite pleasure of the balmy evening that ensues. When the sun has finally set but daylight still lingers, few activities surpass the sensory experience standing barefoot in the grass with a frosty cocktail in hand, inhaling the warm, tantilizing smoke emanating from the grill.

On such evenings, instead of darting back and forth bet...

A few San Francisco locals join the crowd of hungry tourists starting to queue around ten in the morning. After an expectant half hour, the door finally opens and uncompromisingly fresh, unadorned seafood is served up at the twelve-seat, no-frills countertop at Swann Oyster Depot.

This San Francisco institution has been dealing in some of the best seafood in the country at this same location (1517 Polk St.) for over a hundred years. Purchased in 1946 b...

Those who find themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area this summer would be perspicacious in taking a detour to bucolic West Marin—whose beautiful and abundant preserved land is worth the trip alone—and splurging on a unique agritourism experience.

West Marin Food & Farm Tours, operated by Elizabeth Hill, offers a wide range of tours and private tastings featuring the artisanal bounty of farms and purveyors in and around the Point Reyes area.

From dair...

There's no big secret behind marinated feta. Transforming a brined sheep or goat milk feta into marinated feta requires nothing more than some olive (or safflower) oil, herbs, and garlic.  The result is a wonderfully soft and rich cheese, as the oil irradicates the dryness from brined feta.

Feta is naturally low in fat and the dry, crumbly version in brine provides a perfect counterpoint to rich, fatty meats in dishes such as l...

When the “Paleo diet” emerged, it sounded like another low-carb fad, conjuring memories of the Flinstones and mental images of raw meat on the bone. As it turns out, a true Paleo diet adheres to a comprehensive set of the most admirable, environmentally sustainable, humane, and socially responsible omnivorous eating tenants in existence.  

The “Paleo Approved” certification requires the same criteria many small, independent farms across the country hav...

 Harvesting Chinese mustard microgreens.

“With a few pots on hand, the home chef can reap a variety of microgreens to spruce and sprinkle on every meal.

Victory gardens are worthy endeavors, deserving of all the accolades they amass, but they also yield dishearteningly little produce relative to the effort and expense involved in keeping them. Growing one’s own garden is a noble and enjoyable project in and of itself. It fosters a number of healthy hab...

All good cooks are hedonists on some level, as the devotion to preparing food is driven by the desire to maximize the pleasure of eating. There is no shortcut to becoming a good cook. It takes hours of trial and error in the kitchen, which only those who truly care about what their food tastes like would bother to invest. It’s no coincidence that three top Western cuisines—French, Italian, and Spanish—hail from countries that take their meals seriously...

Piece Meal posted about beloved buffalo milk cheeses from Italy on December 4. We are now re-angling the limelight on another buffalo milk revelation—Double 8 Dairy’s farmstead gelato.

Buffalo produce the richest, creamiest milk imaginable, which is why Double 8 in West Petaluma makes their gelato only with milk, no cream at all. Buffalo milk has a higher butterfat content than cow’s milk and is naturally homogenized. Whereas traditional cow’s milk ice...

A raw or chilled shellfish platter consumed with a cold bottle of champagne or Sancerre is our ideal of holiday merrymaking. That said, cold weather and the foods that countenance it almost always beg for red wine. Red wine is one of winter’s cherished companions, but so often it adds to the many inevitable reasons it’s hard to stay awake around the holidays.

Tannic, oaky wines, often from California, Australia, and France, have many counting sheep at...

Most infused olive oils taste so subtle, it’s as if their flavoring agent has gone incognito on a top-secret mission to infiltrate the olive oil without anyone noticing. Pasture 42, a small-scale, sustainable family farm, blows this covert operation wide open, producing two exceptional organic olive oils that are deeply saturated, one with fragrant meyer lemon, the other with heady garlic. They have become staples of our kitchen, used practically daily...

Get an epicure talking about the source of their interest in cuisine or cooking and more often than not, nostalgic recollections of childhood will abound. Childhood and adolescence is where it all starts; it provides the foundation for how we establish eating patterns as adults, the roots of our knowledge about feeding ourselves and about the edible world around us.

Initiated by Alice Waters twenty years ago in Berkeley, California, The Edible Schoolya...