morsels & sauces

Oh my friends, I made the best gussied up macaroni and cheese from  Cowgirl Creamery . With those just-burnt tips of the pasta and creamy cheese, this mac and cheese puts Kraft, Velveeta, and Amy’s to shame. Shame, I say. Plus, we went up to Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes Station for a tour and a cheese tasting, which would most certainly humiliate Velveeta or any other industrialized cheese. Committed to keeping cheese both artisanal and farmstead, Sue Conley and Peggy Smith (founders of Cowgirl Creamery) have produced a delightful cookbook to accompany their creamery and their shop in Point Reyes Station. At that shop, they sell not only their own cheeses, but also an array of other artisanal and farmstead cheeses, such as Humboldt Fog and Wabash Cannonball. While the words artisanal and farmstead are starting to lose their cache in the United States (in part because they are not government regulated, so just about anyone ca

The CSA box keeps sending us apricots. Lovely, plump, fresh apricots that should probably be enjoyed solely on their own because they are so sweet. However, the sheer abundance of them demands that we find multiple ways to use them in a week (there are only so many apricots one can snack on). So here we are. I have had apricots on my mind, far beyond the CSA box's insistence that I eat them and eat a lot of them now. For you see, I just finished Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby . You may know Solnit from her lovely book-length essay entitled  Men Explain Things To Me  or her whimsical look at San Francisco in Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (which is how I was introduced to her). However, this past spring break, I was wandering around yet another local bookstore, looking for something to read.  For whatever reason, The Faraway Nearby jumped out at me, and I snuggled into a booth at the nearby coffee shop and was immediately taken in by Solnit's sto

Summer. Summer. Summer. Hello Summer. How I  love you. How I am delighted to meet you again after you have been away for a year. How I have plans for us. Big plans. Most of them involve books and napping, but still big plans. Some of my plans also include cooking. So much cooking. Stay tuned for pasta dishes, peanut butter shakes, ceviche, pastry cream. It looks like's going to have fun together, Summer. One of my first plans was to make Yotam Ottolenghi's Lamb Shawarma. Shawarma is the Arabic fast food of choice that is closely related to the Greek gyro , the Turkish doner  kebab, and the Armenian tarna . It is also big on heavenly goodness and is brought to you from Jerusalem via London from the dear, sweet, culinary mind of Ottolenghi.  What a good man. From the Turkish word  çevirme , which means turning, shawarma can be made from chicken, veal, goat, lamb, even fish. We're going to focus on the lamb--which  Ottolenghi ensures will get us as clo se to