Let this be a warning to you, Trader Joe's shoppers.

Do not buy these caramels. I repeat: Do not buy them. You will see them on the store shelves, tucked in with the rest of the seasonal treats, and at first you will be charmed by their packaging. That font! Those colors! That sweet little lighthouse, like a beacon in the stormy night, drawing you nearer and nearer. You'll be all, I like dark chocolate. And sea salt. And caramel. You will think, just one of these will be a perfect, sweet little bite after dinner. But you will be wrong. Oh, so wrong.

Just try eating one of these.

I blame the lighthouse.

After the hit this family took the other day, I have found myself on an emotional roller coaster. One minute I am scared, and the next I am hopeful; one minute I am awestruck at Byrne's ability to remain tactical and maintain a level head despite his disappointment, and the next I am angry and bitter at the decision-makers at his former company who not only failed to fully see his promise but also chose to axe him while continuing to bankroll some self-involved, fancy-free single folks with no families to support. I'm just saying.

So into the kitchen I went to burn off some steam, fill my house with comforting smells, and make something nourishing for dinner. Soup. Isn't that what we're supposed to do in times of economic hardship--don our threadbare coats, set our jaws, and fill our bowls with soup?

I selected a recipe--Indian-Style Pumpkin Soup---from my standby cookbook, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. As I set to gathering ingredients, washing, prepping, chopping, and mixing, I began to realize that I was moving along a familiar axis, and getting closer to feeling better with each simmering bubble that broke the surface.

That is to say: Making pumpkin soup is a lot like moving through the five stages of grief.

My fellow busy-mom friends often ask me about my go-to quick-dinner repertoire. We all have our ideas for well-rounded meals that can be put together quickly and are a step above take-out. One of my favorites is quiche.

What I like best about this dish is its "clean out the fridge" possibilities: You can throw in practically anything you've got on hand. I use a formula adapted from the handy one Molly Katzen provides in her vegetarian classic, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Here it is:

After picking the last of our yellow-pear and Roma tomatoes from the vine and combining them with the week's yield of Early Girls and Red Sun Slicers from our CSA box, I had a pile of about two dozen tomatoes on my kitchen counter. I love a good sliced tomato on a salad or sandwich as much as the next gal, but a haul like this called for one thing only: sauce.

I adore the sweet simple flavor of sauce made from fresh tomatoes, but I hate hate hate to peel them. I know it's theoretically an easy process--score an X in the skin, blanch the tomato, skin reportedly slides off like a silk stocking, etc., etc.--but it's a process I dread for some reason and so whenever I encounter recipes requiring that series of steps, I go to all sorts of lengths to avoid them. Hence, this recipe for Slow Cooker Tomato Sauce that I developed over the course of the summer.

Here, the slow cooker does most of the work for you, not only cooking the ingredients but also doing it so slowly that the flavors of everything in the pot get deeper, almost caramelized, more entwined with the ingredients nestled next to them. You won't break a sweat--not only because you get to avoid the dreaded peeling, but also because the slow cooker allows you to simmer a dish for hours and hours (even while you sleep) without heating up so much as a corner of the kitchen.

Plus, this is my favorite kind of "recipe"--not so much a recipe at all, just a series of recommended ingredients, steps, and methods that can be easily tailored to make the finished result taste countless different ways.

Only seven days have passed since I took that last photo of the watermelon we're growing in the garden. Take a look at it now! If you think you might like gardening but haven't yet caught the bug, a watermelon could be just the thing to put on your planting list for next spring. It's been so satisfying to come out to the garden every day and see the unbelievable progress on the growth of this crop--it nearly doubles its size every couple of days.

Remember how I said I wasn't sure our watermelon plant was going to bear fruit this year? Well, this morning's garden reconnaissance revealed this: A baby watermelon, about the size of an avocado pit! Now hopefully it will be spared the hungry jaws of neighborhood vermin and also those sneaky jerk-offs who stole all of my little old lady neighbor's persimmons off her tree last year just as the fruit was reaching its peak.

Go, baby watermelon, go!

Labor Day may have come and gone and much of the country is strolling toward autumn, but here in the Bay Area it feels like summer is swinging into high gear--and in fact, it kind of is. Our hottest temperatures are often measured in September--this is the time for sprinkler-skipping and popsicle-licking and tomato-pickin' and those rare San Francisco nights when you don't need even a slip of a sweater (let alone a parka, as you do on most "summer" nights here).

Our garden is spilling over the wall these days, even though we didn't plant much this year: One pattypan squash, a poblano chile, a watermelon (which may or may not fruit; we'll see), an eggplant, and two tomato plants--a Roma-like red and a yellow pear-shaped cherry tomato.

The tomatoes are going bonkers so yesterday Harper and I headed out to pick some. For dinner, I threw them raw into a cool pasta dish with some lightly steamed crookneck and pattypan squash from Full Belly Farm, some farmers market basil and parsley, and some dabs of this amazing serrano-chile-flecked goat cheese that we bought at the Slow Food Nation marketplace last weekend. I dressed the dish with olive oil, lemon juice and zest (from our backyard Meyers), and a good amount of sea salt and pepper. It's one of my favorite kinds of meals--Byrne calls it "random pasta", but I call it delicious, refreshing, and a perfect mix of the local seasonal goods.

Do not miss The New York Times' Minimalist column from July 2: Mark Bittman's 101 20-Minute Dishes for Inspired Picnics. Following the same "cook this, mix with this, call it that" formula of his popular 101 Simple Meals in 10 Minutes or Less list from last summer, it is chock full of yummy suggestions and is also peppered with little Bittman witticisms. Such as idea #88: Cook peeled shrimp; little ones are best. Toss with pesto: lots. Put on small rolls. (In fact: cook anything; toss with pesto: lots. Put on small rolls.)

Like last summer's list, I think a lot of these "recipes" would also make great dinners on those nights when it's too hot to cook and even the usual suspects from the takeout-menu file sound like too much.

Contrary to what you might think, I have not just been sitting here slacking on this blog's Recipe of the Week feature. I've been sitting here baking batch after batch of Mark Bittman's Crunchy Granola and slacking on this blog's Recipe of the Week feature!

I admit to being a somewhat new convert to the Cult of Bittman, but I have fallen hard for the man behind the New York Times' Minimalist column, and here's why: Mr. Bittman writes the best kind of recipe, one that's usually short on ingredients and simple in its preparation and perhaps because of its spare nature, wide open to variations, substitutions, and tweaking. Mr. Bittman is like the favorite high school teacher you never had (maybe that's why I started referring to him as Mr. Bittman), the one who taught you the fundamentals and then sat back in his chair with a mug of coffee in his hand and his feet on the desk to delight in all the new directions in which his students could take old ideas. If you've ever perused one of his How to Cook Everything books, you know what I mean. For each of the hundreds of recipes in the tomes, Bittman offers a handful of variations, with swapped-in ingredients that put an entirely new spin on each dish.

I'm not usually a fan of flavored yogurts. But I love just about anything flavored with matcha, so this caught my eye at Trader Joe's last week. It's not too sweet, but is creamy and satisfying and will prove a much more healthful pick-me-up than my summer crush from last year: Peets' Matcha Freddo. Matcha-cha!

I was completely ready, dear readers, to write a long post about what a sham this Slow Cooker Lasagna recipe from Real Simple was, how it turned out mushy and inedible. I am always intrigued when I see tasty-sounding meatless slow-cooker recipes, mostly because I've encountered so few tasty meatless slow-cooker recipes. For some things, the slow cooker can't be beat, but these are mainly dishes that benefit from slow simmering even in their non-slow cooker lives: soups, sauces, stewy curries, dried beans.

I've been burned in the past by a few recipes of the "fix it and forget it" ilk that I should have known were too good to be true. A grotesque "slow-cooker risotto" comes to mind: Even as I prepared it my instinct told me, "If a good risotto could really be made by dumping a bunch of ingredients into a pot and cooking it unattended for a few hours, do you really think generations of Italians would have stooped over stoves, adding and stirring, adding and stirring, when they could have just thrown everything into the oven and gone down to the piazza for gelati?"

I returned to that realization as I prepared this lasagna. I don't know what made me keep going with the recipe despite my doubts, but something told me that if it actually worked out, it would be a "do over," as we call winning recipes around here. First, it calls for chard, which is often abundant and beautiful at my farmers market. Second, it is made with real dried lasagna noodles, not those no-boil sheets that I've never really been happy with. The ingredients list is short, the prep simple, and I am pleased to report that the result was indeed a "do-over." The noodles--though a bit softer than they would have been had I prepared the dish the old-fashioned way--were not grossly overcooked as I suspected they might be, even when I forgot about the time and left the lasagna cooking 20 minutes longer than it should have. When served, the layers held up surprisingly well. Serve with crusty bread for mopping up the sauce and you've got yourself a meal.

Note: When cooking recipes that are published online, one should always read the reviews posted by other readers. These comments are often a goldmine of clever modifications, and sometimes they even supply key corrections. Here, for example, the recipe instructs you to cook the lasagna on Low for 2 hours--a temperature and time that most experienced slow-cooker users know would barely warm the ingredients in the pot. A helpful fellow cook lets us know that we should actually set our slow cookers to High. I like to turn on the cooker before I even start prepping my ingredients; by the time I add them to the pot, it's already warm and those flavors can start blending right away.

Every Sunday morning, we all sit down around the kitchen table and tuck into a big breakfast of waffles, pancakes, French toast, or something else similarly comforting and carby. Harper contentedly dips bites into a tiny dish of maple syrup, while Byrne and I pretend we still have the leisure and brainspace to sip coffee and read the Sunday New York Times. (Read: We scan headlines and make sure Harper is not pouring syrup directly into his mouth, in his hair, or on the cat.)

This recipe for Overnight Waffles is one of my favorites, not only because it produces light, crispy waffles with a heady, yeasty zip, but also because the steps are broken down into two simple sequences that make the whole shebang quick and easy. In the morning, you plug in the waffle iron, and by the time you've melted butter, beaten an egg, and stirred the batter, it's sizzling hot and ready to go.

You can substitute 1/2 cup of the all-purpose flour with whole-wheat flour for a heartier waffle. I stir in about a teaspoon of vanilla extract and sometimes a sprinkling of cinnamon with the butter and eggs. We serve our waffles with pure maple syrup, cut up fresh fruit, and veggie breakfast sausages. They're also delicious with a slathering of salted butter, plain yogurt, or quark.

Eek! I have already fallen behind with my plans for posting one new recipe per week. After eating at The French Laundry last weekend, I didn't have the hunger or drive to cook anything new or involved, but I'm back on track this week.

Besides one-pot dishes, I am also drawn to recipes for wholesome and tasty preparations that both my husband and I and our picky-palate toddler can eat. My kid tends to be an all-day snacker rather than a three-square-meals eater (a reportedly healthier way to eat anyway), so I am always on the lookout for portable foods that also pack a nutritional punch.

Enter yet another recipe from Everyday Food: Quinoa Muffins. We're already big fans of quinoa around here (well, two of us are). This South American grain is high in protein and contains all the essential amino acids. It's a good source of B vitamins, iron, and calcium. Also, it tastes pretty good, with an earthy, slightly nutty flavor that holds up well as a side or even as a chilled salad with other goodies mixed in.

The recipe was simple enough that Harper could pitch in with the measuring and stirring, and I felt comfortable making some modifications. I replaced 1/2 cup of the all-purpose flour with whole wheat flour, with good results. We stuck with raisins, as my kid is recently in love with them, but I think these muffins would be even better with chopped dried apricots, dried blueberries, dried cranberries or even a mix of dried fruits. I also added 1 teaspoon of cinnamon to the dry ingredients, because everything tastes better with cinnamon, no?

A small handful of grated carrots or grated and drained zucchini would boost the color, texture, and nutritional value even more. Grownups might also love the addition of chopped nuts or seeds for even more protein and healthy fats.

The verdict: Harper enjoys these muffins as a breakfast or morning snack, and I agree that they are not only tasty but also really satisfying. They freeze well and defrost quickly, making them an ideal make-ahead, take-along snack or small on-the-go meal.

Byrne and I just celebrated our five-year wedding anniversary with a luxurious feast-for-the-senses weekend, just the two of us. I justified the cost of all this by pointing out that we don't have a regular date night and have only paid a babysitter to allow us to go out in the evening a handful of times, so this treat was like two years of dinners and movies all packed into 36 hours.

I started planning this celebration two months ago, when I spent a morning hitting redial and sitting on hold for 45 minutes while simultaneously entertaining a busy toddler, in order to obtain some very sought-after lunch reservations. Then I booked a hotel room in the city for a night and convinced Harper's Ga and Poo-Pa to fly up to take care of him so we could have our (long-overdue) first night away from the little guy (thank you a million and one times, Mom and Dad!). I kept the lunch a surprise for Byrne, stealthily typing the address into our GPS so that he wouldn't know where we were going until Ms.TomTom announced, "You have arrived at your destination." (He admitted to having an inkling, however, once we pulled off the highway in Yountville.)

In an attempt to cook more adventurously and hopefully add a few new favorites to our regular rotation this year (isn't this one on everyone's new year's resolution list, along with the perpetual promise to Drink More Water?), I am going to attempt to try at least one new recipe a week and share the best ones with you here. Bon Apetit!

I love the idea of one-pot cooking: combining a bunch of fresh ingredients at once and later lifting a lid to reveal a perfectly prepared, complete meal. So when I stumbled upon this recipe for Baked Salmon with Couscous Pilaf from Everyday Food recently, I was anxious to give it a go.

Almost every Saturday, Byrne buys seafood from a fishmonger at our neighborhood farmer's market, often a couple filets of amazing, fresh wild salmon. We expanded our long-standing ovo-lacto vegetarian diets to include seafood a couple of years ago, but we're still pretty green when it comes to cooking anything non-vegetable. We're always on the lookout for easy, foolproof recipes and this one is a keeper on both accounts. It is also easy to modify by using different vegetables, nuts, and dried fruits in the pilaf or even a different type to fish (though you might want to increase the olive oil by a teensy splash if using a leaner variety than deliciously fatty salmon).

Recently we received two melons in our farm box, one cantaloupe and one Haogen. Harper and I are the only melon-eaters in this house, and we were still working on the huge cantaloupe that came with the previous week's box, so I went on the hunt for ideas on how to serve and/or preserve melons.

An article about current crops in the latest issue of Edible East Bay made passing mention of melon marmalade, but offered no recipe. Intrigued, I Googled.

Chocolate and Zucchini offered up the most interesting sounding recipe: Confiture de Melon au Gingembre et Citron Vert (Lime and Ginger Melon Jam). I found a similar, and simpler, version at Cooks.com: Honeydew-Ginger Jam. That site's Honeydew- Peach Jam also sounds good, but the 10 cups of sugar called for threw me for a loop. This Portuguese Melon and Pine Nut Spread piqued my interest, but I couldn't find a recipe. And though I don't have the "jam melon" called for in this suggestion from Tasmanian TV for lemon-melon spread, I loved the title for the recipe and just had to share: Anagram Jam.

In the end, I decided to go with the Honeydew-Ginger Jam recipe at Cooks.com, using the green-fleshed Haogen melon and substituting the lemon juice with the zest and juice of two limes. The recipe yielded three half-pint jars of honey-ey deliciousness, one less than the recipe's listed yield, but I simmered and reduced the jam longer than called for because it wasn't thickening. It's still not as thick as I'd like, but it tastes great and will hopefully taste even better--with cheeses, toast, pancakes--after it's had a chance to mellow a bit in the cupboard.

I had a boatload of plums from this week's farm box, and Sunday was dark and gloomy, so I baked this German Plum Cake. If I make it again, I'll make the following modifications to the recipe: Bake for 40 minutes at the most and halve the topping to just 1/4 cup sugar and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (I made the quantity called for and had a lot of extra left over).

I'll be bringing it to my knitting group tonight. One of our favorite longtime members will be there for the last time before she, her partner, and their adorable 3-month-old twins move to Vermont. I am hoping the juicy, sweet summer plums will convince her to forgo nearby family and fall foliage for sunshine and abundant, delectable local produce!

But sometimes water just sounds so boring. So today, I whipped up a pitcher of this refreshing--and caffeine free--"spa water." All the stuff that I dropped into the pitcher--sliced cucumbers, lime, orange, and fresh basil leaves--was already in my fridge or on my kitchen counter. It would be interesting to improvise based on what else is about the kitchen these days, such as fresh mint or rosemary and sliced melon or Meyer lemons.

This weekend, we christened my new ice-cream maker with a batch of homemade mint-chocolate chip ice cream. The recipe--which calls for fresh mint rather than extract or liqueur and no obnoxious green food coloring--came from Williams-Sonoma's Mastering Frozen Desserts, a copy of which I received after proofreading the book. I have a whole shelf of these specialized cookbooks and somehow I rarely find myself using them except as reference for other Williams-Sonoma books I work on. But I am sure to break this one open again now that I have my own ice-cream maker. The question is, which recipe to try next? Banana ice cream with rum? Caramel ice cream? White Chocolate Gelato? Plum sorbet?

Lately I've been enjoying my morning toast with some homemade chokecherry jam that my grandmother in Nebraska sent home with me. Before my visit, I'd never tasted, or even heard of a chokecherry, but it's safe to say that now I'm hooked.

A relative of the black cherry, the chokecherry is extremely sour in the raw and is poisonous to horses. But cooked down in sugar, it makes a delightfully tart spread. It's great on the ABC sandwich, too. How will I ever go back to store-bought cherry jam?

When I turned on my TV yesterday, it was set randomly on PBS in the middle of an episode of the cooking program Simply Ming. I'd never watched this show before, but what the guest chef, Hubert Keller (he of the $5000 burger, puh-leeze), was doing kept me from changing the channel.

At one of his Vegas ventures, Burger Bar, Keller creates a chocolate mousse "cheeseburger" dessert. The patty is a circle of frozen chocolate mousse, the bun is a hole-less donut, the cheese is a thin slice of passionfruit gelee, the tomato is sliced strawberry, and the pickles are sliced kiwi. A slathering of whipped cream stands in for mayo (and holds the whole thing together), and a swirl of raspberry puree on the plate represents ketchup.

While none of these ingredients or even the combination sounds unappetizing, I can't say I looked at the finished product and thought, "Yum!" But that's part of the charm: the way this slightly silly creation plays with your senses, demonstrating how closely sight is tied to taste and vice versa.

I do so love this kind of thing. Another example is candy sushi; NotMartha has a nice roundup of links to photos and recipes for this less gourmand take on food made to look like other food.

It's been a delicious couple of days around here. Check it out:

Green garlic at the Grand Lake Farmer's Market

Orange-Chocolate and Straciatella gelato at Michael Mischer

Gorgeous organic strawberries from Full Belly Farm with Sunday breakfast

Succulent grilled asparagus, giant prawns and garlic-lime opacapaca (say it, now!) by Byrne, for Sunday dinner with /\/\/\/

I've just stumbled on another tasty sandwich idea, one that quashes sweet-savory cravings with aplomb and is destined to become a perennial favorite.

You take a cinnamon-raisin bagel, split it, and toast it. Meanwhile, fry an egg over-hard and shred a little cheese (Cheddar and Gouda both work well here). When the bagel is toasted to perfection, spread one half with a good amount of salted butter, top with the egg and cheese, season with salt and pepper to taste, and top with the other bagel half.

Sweet, savory, satisfying, and hitting three out of four food groups with a single punch. Well, all four food groups if you count the raisins as a fruit, which I don't, so have an apple or some carrots on the side, will ya?

This weekend, I finally tried the no-knead bread recipe that was featured in The New York Times as well as countless blogs and Flickr albums. I had run across a 5-quart preseasoned Chefmate Dutch Oven at my local Target--not quite the Holy Grail (the cherry-red Chefmate enameled Dutch oven that's been flying off Target shelves) but a steal nonetheless at 25 bucks.

I tell you, it was tough waiting lo those 18 hours between mixing the flour, water, yeast, and salt and doing anything else. I kept peering into the bowl to see if the vaunted bubbly surface had made its appearance yet. Then, as the dough rested under its blanket of flour and cotton kitchen towel during the second rise, it was all I could do not to peek in and poke at it. But about 15 minutes after dumping the sticky mass of glutens into the blazing-hot Dutch oven, that smell fills the kitchen and all the waiting is worth it. You know the smell of which I speak. As Byrne said, "It smells like bread, and I want it."

Required patience notwithstanding, the work-to-result ratio of this recipe is pretty awesome. The loaf emerges from the oven with a hearty crust and interior bubbles to die for. Will I make it again? Well, with so many great artisan bakers around here offering instant gratification, I know that more often than not, I'll probably just go out and buy bread when the need for a rustic loaf arises. But the no-knead bread is a satisfying little weekend project. This weekend, for example, I started the dough late Saturday afternoon, baked it midday Sunday, and enjoyed (way too much of) it with fresh homemade carrot bisque for Sunday dinner. Yum.

I'll roast and puree the Kabocha squash. Some of it will be Harper Chow; the rest will be the base for a soup, or perhaps this pumpkin-sage cream sauce for pasta?

I never know what to do with daikon. But these scallops with cilantro sauce and Asian slaw sound yummy. The farm's newsletter suggests roasting the roots; this reportedly mellows their spicy flavor. Mellow enough to puree and feed to a baby? We shall see.

Every time beets come into this house, they get roasted (in their skins, in a covered glass pan at 400 F until very tender; when cool, the skins slip right off). Some I will puree to add to other veggies for Harper, the rest will get thrown into our nightly salads, with some goat's cheese and toasted walnuts.

I better not tell Byrne that broccoli was in this week's box, or he's going to insist I make my baked mac 'n cheese 'n broc. Oh, who am I kidding? I am craving it, too. I have made my own modifications, finely tuned over several years of making it for many a Sunday dinner, to the recipe in Joy of Cooking. Tip: Gouda makes it good-a.

Leeks are a staple of the farm box in spring and fall, and my fall-back dish for them is quiche. But here's a nice-sounding variation: buttermilk leek tart. And these crab-stuffed shells with peas and leeks sound deelish--maybe for a special occasion.

Some of the sweet gypsy peppers will be cut up and added to salad; the rest I'll eat raw dipped into hummus (along with carrots and those oh-so addictive multigrain pita chips from Trader Joe's) on those days when Mama needs a quick, low-prep lunch that can be eaten with one hand.

The lettuce is destined for salads, of course.

One of my favorite parts of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner is the cranberry sauce. I don't eat turkey, but I like to mix little bites of the tart berry relish in with the feast's richer componets--especially the dressing--to add a bit of zing. I also like it eat it straight out of the bowl.

Last night I failed to post on this blog before midnight (gasp), but I had a good excuse. I was out (sans baby--thanks to Harper's "funkle," /\/\/\/, for babysitting) in the city with my husband celebrating the engagement of my best friend. We had dinner, then drinks at Medjool.

Since I wouldn't be feeding the baby for several hours, I decided to indulge in a glass of wine. I admit, I was a little excited when I saw the bar was using the Riedel stemless glasses; they always look so cool and I was curious to see if I, by extension, felt cooler sipping from one.

Brazenly flouting Maggie Mason's proclamation that no one cares what I had for lunch, I am going to tell you what I had for lunch.

I call it the AB&C sandwich: almond butter and cherry jam.

It's a tasty combination. Also good is almond butter and apricot jam, though it does not have as sassy an acronym. And you know I love me some sassy acronyms.

I am continually astounded (and a little frightened) by all the information out there, and how easily accessible it all is. I can't tell you how many times I've wondered about something really random, something about which I am sure I am the only one who would wonder, and then I Google it and find out there are 1,080 other people also wondering about it.

This weekend, I had a hankering for a breakfast recipe I had read months ago in a magazine and had been meaning to try. But for the life of me, I could not find it in my totally disorganized clippings file. A quick visit to Google and "baked oatmeal Sunset" typed into the search box, and the recipe was mine (top result, no less).

Then, as I began to compose a blog post about the yumtastitude of this recipe, a seemingly random memory popped into my head. "Remember those commercials that Wilford Brimley did for Quaker Oats in the '80s and '90s?" I asked Byrne. "What was that line that he always said at the end?"

Byrne couldn't remember, either. So I asked Google: "wilford brimley quaker oats commercials"? Et voila: The ads not only get two Wikipedia mentions (one in Brimley's bio, one in a history of the Quaker Oats Company), but also a 1991 Brimley/Quaker commercial is available on YouTube.

(I realize now that I just could have asked my friend Dori, who has an almost freakishly comprehensive mental catalog of commercials and sitcom theme songs from the '80s. How she also has the bandwidth to think about "An Empirical Validation of Social Action Theory: Applications for Children Affected by HIV", I have no idea.)

Anyway, the baked oatmeal: Yum. I made some substitutions based on what I had on hand: pecans instead of almonds, apple instead of pear. We gilded the lily with just a teensy drizzle of pure maple syrup and a dollop of yogurt from Straus Family Creamery. Accompanied by veggie sausage and a hot cuppa Earl Grey from David Rio, it was a perfect, delicious start to a chilly fall Sunday.

The New York Times compares Domino's new "Brooklyn-Style Pizza" with actual, if elusive, Brooklyn-style pizzas. Best quote in the story comes from Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president: "It's a multinational right-wing company, mass marketing the Brooklyn attitude with obsolete ethnic stereotypes, not to mention flimsy crusts."

Daily Candy shares the recipe for Absinthe's deelish Ginger Rogers cocktail.

Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini offers a Thanksgiving-worthy recipe for Aged Gouda and Dried Pear Scones, and explores the Transatlantic differences between definitions of scones and biscuits while she's at it.

Alton Brown creates homemade microwave popcorn. Must try this weekend.

Having never even heard of Indian Pudding before, I ran into four references to the early American dessert (a more elaborate version of Hasty Pudding) last week alone: a recipe in Real Simple, another at a site with slow-cooker recipes, another in Everyday Food, and yet another in the Splendid Table's weekly e-mail newsletter, The Baker's Chronicle. Am I being stalked?

There's a burgeoning urban winemaking scene in the East Bay. Tasting rooms in Alameda, Berkeley, and Oakland! Note to self: Put these on the list of places to take visiting out-of-towners (that's you, Mom and Dad).

Some nights, you just don't want to cook anything complicated but you don't want to spring for takeout, either (or, like us, you've ordered takeout so many times in recent months that you are pretty burned out on all the local options). The pantry and fridge are full of usable ingredients. Is there something you could make that would use up an array of these items but still be easy, and, to boot, cheesy?

We almost always have in the house tortilla chips, cheese, beans, salsa, tomatoes, peppers, avocados and olives. Bonus points if we have fresh cilantro and sour cream.

Here's how I make Nachos for Dinner:

Preheat the oven to 400F. Prep your ingredients: Grate some cheese, dice some tomatoes, peppers, and avocado, cook/mash some beans, etc. In a 10-inch springform pan, spread a single layer of tortilla chips. Sprinkle with 1/4 of the cheese. Top with 1/2 of the beans and veggies (excluding the avocado) and another 1/4 of the cheese. Add another layer of chips, top with 1/4 of the cheese, the remaining beans and veggies, and then the final 1/4 of the cheese. Scatter sliced olives on the top. Bake until the cheese is melted and the nachos are hot throughout, 10-15 minutes. Hit the nachos with the broiler for the final few minutes so that the cheese gets bubbly and the top layer of chips a little toasty. Remove from the oven and let the pan cool for a minute or two before popping off the outer ring and transferring the nachos, still on the pan bottom, to a larger platter for serving. Top with avocado and sour cream. Have your husband mix up a batch of his killer margaritas (or, if you are breastfeeding, a batch of very weak killer margaritas), cue up the latest episode of Top Chef on the TiVo, and dig in!

Yesterday I wrote a bit about our weekly visit to the Grand Lake Farmer's Market. I've been shopping at the market nearly every Saturday since it began, back when it was less than a dozen vendors, only a few selling organic goods, camped in the parking lot under Highway 580. Some of those original vendors are still there, and I am proud to know most of them by name and still get the bulk of my purchases from them. I try to eat what's fresh and in season locally as often as I can, and shopping at the farmer's market makes that possible (and easy).

Last year I took my commitment to seasonal eating to a new level by joining a Community Supported Agriculture program offered by Full Belly Farm, which is located a couple of hours north of where I live. CSA programs generally work like this: You pay a certain amount to the farmer every week, and in return you get a box of whatever's freshly harvested that week. There are pickup spots located throughout the area, or for an extra fee you can have your box delivered to your door. This week's box included a buttercup squash, a bunch of red chard, arugula, beets, leeks, tomatoes, sweet peppers, and salad greens. Sometimes it's a challenge to compose a week's worth of exciting meals with what's in the box (especially in winter, when it's a whole lotta root vegetables and greens), but when I have time to pore through my cookbooks for new recipes, it's actually kind of fun (it's like the home version of Iron Chef). Full Belly doesn't grow a lot of fruits or fresh herbs, so I get that stuff at the market.

Here's what we had for dinner last night: Broiled trout fillets from Danny the fish guy (farmer's market), spiced couscous, and sauteed chard with garlic, raisins and pine nuts (Full Belly CSA). Dessert was an amazing pumpkin-pecan praline mini-pie from the Hippie Pie Lady at the market. The pie was to die for: Just look at that praline, not only caramelized and crunchy on top, but also lining the bottom crust. It was like autumn on a fork. Yum.

I've been a subscriber to Martha Stewart's little Everyday Food magazine since issue number 2, and while I find that each month's offering is usually good for a few simple weeknight dinner ideas, I've rarely found the recipes intriguing enough to serve to guests, let alone a crowd.

But at our holiday open house this weekend, I served a spread of hors d'oeuvres that drew heavily on the dip/spread concept, an inspiration that came thanks to some interesting ideas found in holiday back issues of Everyday Food. I was pleasantly surprised at how good some of the dishes turned out. (Too bad we were all so busy eating that we didn't take any photos.) For example:

• Almond-Tomato Spread (December 2004 issue; recipe not available online, sorry): A Spanish-style spread with a smoky bite thanks to a good dose of paprika, a nutty/creamy texture thanks to toasted almonds, and a tangy zing thanks to tomatoes. Served with crostini made from Arizmendi baguettes, olive oil, and sea salt and pepper.
• Fig Spread: I put a little ramekin of this out on the cheese board; it was excellent spread on a piece of crostini and topped with a chunk of Gorgonzola.
• Olive-Caper Tapenade (December 2004 issue; recipe not available online, sorry): A good, basic tapenade recipe, made extra tasty by using good, olive oil-packed kalamatas. I omitted the anchovy. Served with crostini.
• Cranberry-Avocado Salsa: I doubled the recipe and used a somewhat smaller amount of dried cranberries in place of the fresh that I assume the recipe was calling for. I think the recipe calls for the amount of honey that it does in order to temper the bitterness of fresh berries, and as dried cranberries don't have quite as strong a bite, I found the finished dish a little too sweet. I'd cut back the honey if I made this again with dried berries--but it wasn't bad as is, especially when accompanied with salty tortilla chips. The deep red and bright green look very festive.

I also made Everyday Food's Mini Cherry-Pecan Streusel Loaves (I used cranberries instead of cherries) to give as gifts. While I can't attest to their taste since they've all already been assigned recipients, they smelled amazing when they came fresh from the oven, and they look quite pretty with their crumbly pecan topping. Here's a photo of one all dressed up and ready to go.

In a past life, I must have been a vintner. When I first sip a new wine, I love rolling the stuff around in my mouth and picking out as many flavor notes as I can. My husband thinks my talent for this is a little freakish, and he loves checking the label on the back of the bottle to see if I correctly identified any of the aromas listed by the winemaker.

Also considered a little odd is my enduring love for Jelly Belly candies. So you can imagine my glee this morning when I read about Wine X Magazine's Jelly Belly Wine Bar. You know those "recipes" printed on packs of Jelly Bellys that tell you which flavors to mix in which proportions to make a combined taste in your mouth? (For example, "Banana Split": 1 Top Banana, 1 Chocolate Pudding, 1 Crushed Pineapple, 1 Strawberry Jam, 1 Very Cherry, and 1 A&W Cream Soda.) Well, the Jelly Belly Wine Bar takes it to a new level: More than 50 Jelly Belly combinations that call to mind wine varietals based on grape and/or region. Want to break down Central Coast Zinfandel? Pop 2 Raspberries, 2 Strawberries, 1 Cherry, 1 Blackberry, 1 Pepper, and 1 Cappuccino. Says Wine X Magazine:

The idea is to taste the individual Jelly Belly beans first, to understand the different flavors associated with certain wine varietals. Then you put all of the flavors in your mouth at the same time, chew them together, and voila . . . you experience the wine varietal itself.

I see another trip to the Jelly Belly factory in my future . . .


[Spotted at Daily Candy.]

We're now eating something fresh from our backyard vegetable patch with dinner almost every night. Summer has officially, finally, arrived.

For example, last night: Crust, pesto, fresh mozzarella, and Parmigiano-Reggiano by Trader Joe's. Roma tomatoes, red onions, sweet corn, parsley, and basil by Farmer Byrne.

You may think corn an unusual pizza topping, but I assure you, once you've had fresh-cut sweet kernels atop a pizza you'll fall madly in love. One of our favorite pizzas from Arizmendi, our neighborhood bakery co-op, is toppped with corn, tomatoes, red onions, goat's-milk cheese, and fresh cilantro (and was the inspiration for last night's pie).

My prediction: Popsicles are the new cupcakes. (You heard it here first.) It seems like recipes for the things are everywhere, and I must admit, the cute/retro/nostalgia factor combined with some tantalizing new ideas I am seeing (martini-on-a-stick, anyone?) has me totally obsessed. It all started when I received the July issue of Sunset Magazine, which has a pretty spread of popsicle recipes (photo at left), from strawberry-sour cream to blackberry-cardamom. Here are some other recipes I've found:

Ice pops recipes at Martha Stewart (including Tiny Limoncello Ice Pops and Mexican paletas *)

Popsicles recipes at Epicurious **

Ice pops recipes at Epicurious (the Campari-grapefruit flavor has my mouth watering)

Fruit pops recipes at Sunset Magazine (I've already made the mango-coconut. Yum.)

Popsicles recipes from CDKitchen (including a few recipes for fudgesicles)

Ice pops recipes at the Food Network (all of the cocktail-on-a-stick variety)

Watermelon-Cucumber Popsicles at NewYorkMetro.com (Mmm.)

Popsicles recipes at GourmetSleuth.com (including Tuna Popsicles in Lemongrass Jelly--uh, no thanks.)


* When I was in Oaxaca in the summer of 2003, I had the most amazing popsicles--paletas, as they are called there. The best selection was at a Mexican frozen-treats chain (a sort of South-of-the-Border Dairy Queen, if you will) called La Michoacan. They had a seemingly endless freezer case of paletas in the coolest flavors (no pun intended), from savory/spicy varietes with chiles, to all manner of tropical fruit flavors with chunks of real fruit, to unusual sweet takes like arroz con leche (a cinnamon-sprinkled rice-pudding flavor). I've been trying to find a local outlet for Mexican-style paletas here in the Bay Area (other than those guys with the musical carts in the parks) with no success. But I found this archived article from Sunset Magazine, with some paleta recipes (the cucumber-chili one sounds interesting). You can read more about Mexican paletas here.

** What's with the popsicle/ice pop distinction? I defintely got differently weighted results when I searched for each term. Is it a regional variation, à la soda/pop/Coke? I've always called them popsicles, and I've definitely consumed my share as a born-and-raised California girl. Thoughts?

Some six years ago, I was recently returned from my post-graduation travels through Europe with my best friend, and I was still a little nostalgic for all of it. As my then-new coworker and friend Matthew and I walked to the park for lunch one day, I was reminiscing about a soda I had enjoyed in Spain and France and hadn't seen anywhere since: Lemon Fanta (or, rather, Fanta Limon, as it will always be known to me). It tasted so good on those hot Barcelona afternoons. I couldn't figure out why we could get Orange Fanta and even--blech--Grape Fanta so easily here in the States, but lemon sodas of all kinds seemed absent in the domestic market. (Of course, now San Pelligrino Limonata--a superior lemon soda--is widely available, but it was still a chichi specialty-shop item back then.) How I pined for the Fanta Limon of my memories.

Fast forward to late April 2005. Matthew IMs me asking if he can stop by after work; he has a surprise. It's some Lemon Fanta! (Now rechristened Fanta Icy Lemon, ostensibly in an attempt to appeal to the "EXTREME!" soda market.) Turns out Matthew has been conducting periodic Google searches for international soda purveyors since that lunchtime fancy way back when (aw!), and he had finally found a site based in the U.K. that would sell him a six-pack and ship it forthwith.

Together with Byrne, we cracked open a can to test the "flavour." It took me back, y'all. I have to say that as an all-grown-up Bay Area food snob, I now appreciate the finer lemony taste of Limonata; but despite its vague taste of "fake lemonade," as Matthew put it, Lemon Fanta will always hold a special place in my heart. (And Miss Dori, you know how I feel about synthetic citrus beverages). The stuff may taste not unlike carbonated Country Time, but I've got five cans of the coveted stuff in my fridge and they're mine! All mine!

(Thanks, /\/\/\/!)

A.K.A. My Latest Fruit Obsession. Ever since one of the vendors at my neighborhood Saturday Farmers Market started offering organic pomelos, I haven't been able to get enough. I am buying at least four per week, and I noticed last weekend that this particular farmer's supply is beginning to dwindle. Whatever will I do when these lovelies go out of season?

With a circumference of about 17 inches (cross-section diameter: about 5.5 inches), the pomelos here are smaller than those I first tried in Vietnam and Thailand and the flesh is more yellow with just touches of pink. But they're just as fun to eat. You peel off the almost-inch-thick skin (with the help of a good knife if needed) and then break the fruit in half or quarters. The membranes between the segments are thicker and more sturdy than your average citrus, so you can peel those away one by one and get straight to the morsels of juicy, bittersweet pulpy goodness within. Bliss.

I've been suffering this entire week with a cold that, at this point, seems anything but common. I've been popping the Quils (both Day- and Ny-), drinking so much fluid that my bladder is threatening me with a cease-and-desist order, filling my desk-side trash bin with used Kleenex, and keeping my poor husband up nights with my incessant tossing and turning. Desperate, I turned to Google. Tea connoisseur (read: addict) that I am, I searched on tea for colds recipe. Here's a sampling of what I found:

• The Spanish solution: garlic, honey, and lemon tea
  
• The Chinese solution: Ginger-Scallion Tea
  
• "Tasty" Vinegar and Honey Beverage
  
• Onion Syrup
  
• Beef Tea

Oh, fuhgeddaboutit. I think I'll just have a hot toddy. Is it 5 o'clock yet??

Readers, I present to you the feijoa, or pineapple guava. One of the vendors at my neighborhood farmer's market had these on offer this weekend, and since I've never seen or tasted one, you know I was rushing on over for one of the free samples. The lady at the booth cut the fruits--which are about the size and shape of an egg--into quarter wedges for us to try. You eat the fruit and seeds out of the middle, and while the peel is edible, it's a little tart. The taste is indeed guava-y and minty at once, and the tangy peel has a floral taste with a banana base note that's more reminiscent to me of the aroma of a banana scratch-and-sniff sticker than that of an actual banana. The combination is actually quite tasty.

I bought a half dozen, since I am the only real fruitie in the house, but I'll be back next week for more.