Funky But Really Useful Household Thingy

September 2, 2010

stainless steel soap Home Economics 1-0-1: rubbing smelly hands on your stainless steel sink eradicates odors like fish, garlic, mildewy-rubber-glove-insides. Yup, true. But it only works with stainless steel. So, if you don’t have that, you may not be in-the-know. This post is an unpaid product endorsement for a thingy I got for free.

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Citrusy Olive Oil Cake with Limoncello Drizzle

August 31, 2010

Olive Oil Cake

This cake was such a surprise! It’s not a fluffy commercial texture, nor is it a brick – which was my first thought when I heard we’d be making an Olive Oil Cake with Limoncello Drizzle at our “Date Night Romantic Mediterranean” cooking class with Chef Diane Brown. If you haven’t noticed, we’re a little addicted to cooking classes at the moment, and this one at Chef’s Inc. on Pico in LA was especially attractive because it was a Friday night. And you bring your own wine.

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Cucumber, Cream Cheese and Lox ~ a Foolproof Appetizer

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If you’re one of those people who claims to not cook, or thinks they cannot cook, this recipe is for you. Don’t be “one of those” who stop at Whole Foods for something from the deli to bring to a potluck. Or a frozen Trader Joes fan. To a party?? Be a hero; bring homemade, [...]

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Look: My Glazed Lemon Pound Cake Recipe Is Now An Illustration

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 This blogger is an artist with a delightful idea – draw high-quality illustrations of food bloggers’ recipes and post the art on her blog. Then, allow visitors to click to the source recipe. This is the work of the talented Lisa Orgler at The Lunchbox Project. Her artwork and products are available here on Etsy.  [...]

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Bottlenotes.com Wine Tasting ~ Guest Post by Larry

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  From Patti:  Hi readers, this past week I was invited as a blogger to attend a wine tasting event. To be honest, while I love wine, I rely on Larry to make decisions about the stuff. I’m sort of the Jack in “Sideways” who proclaims at the sip of practically any wine, “tastes pretty [...]

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Larry’s Best Caramel Corn

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Larry is a good cook, and an enthusiastic one. Sometimes we practically arm wrestle “who gets to make what” when we feed other people. But he usually wants to be the dessert guy, so he selected caramel corn for our picnic in the Hollywood Forever cemetery with Cathi and Barry. He was all over this [...]

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Road Trip: Taste of San Diego Walking Tour

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What you see here is what awaits you on a walking food tour of downtown San Diego. SD was my college town. Back then, the only reason to go downtown was… uh, well, there was no reason. The closest I may have gotten was my stint working in a Mexican restaurant in Old Towne, but [...]

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Citrus French Toast with Marmalade Drizzle

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  Lately, I’ve been eating challah on Fridays around sundown. My Jewish readers might think, “Such a good girl, going to Shabbat.” Catholic-raised me must tell the truth: I volunteer at the UCLA Ronald Reagan Hospital until 5 PM on Fridays. We have a meditation room (not to be confused with a medication room) and [...]

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Mushroom, Basil and Goat Cheese Lasagna Roll-Ups

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There’s this thing out there called Wordless Wednesday. I think food bloggers tire of writing posts, but have some nice food photos to share, so they use Wednesday to get caught up. I like the idea. So, consider this an Almost Wordless Wednesday post. I created this Mushroom, Basil and Goat Cheese Lasagna Roll-Ups for [...]

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Road Trip: Picnic and a Movie at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery

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Confession: I don’t always share my fav things on this blog. Publicity can easily wreck a great experience. Case in point: the LA Times decided the week before this adventure to run a feature on something Larry and I’ve been trying to hit for three years: Cinespia movies at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa [...]

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Triple Citrus Cupcakes with Lime Glaze

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  Culinary throw-down: prepare a dessert elegant enough to complement friends’ upscale picnic contributions, portable, and cannot compete in flavor with the other two desserts: Larry’s Famous Brownies As Seen In Bon Appétit, plus a batch of caramel corn. The venue? A cemetery, but not to visit dearly departed. We were there to picnic and [...]

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Milk Chocolate Dipped Shortbread Cookies

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Whenever a TV show had Husband “surprise” Wife with the news that a business associate was coming to dinner, I’d think, “Who really DOES that?” Surprise! Larry just did. Told me Tuesday that Bruce was coming over Thursday for a meeting and dinner. WHEW. I already had the makings for an entree post I’d planned, [...]

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Simple San Diego Sandwich

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It may look unassuming, but I’d been dreaming about this sandwich recently. THIS was the quintessential sammy of my San Diego college years and a defining food for me. Back when I was “college poor,” hanging with cheap friends, I rarely ate in restaurants. But I remember this sandwich, practically every San Diego casual menu [...]

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Lemon Ricotta Cheesecake

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Gourmet Club dinner: GREEK. Four couples, each once yearly hosts a “theme” meal at their home. Marlene and John will be cruising the Greek Isles next month and, happily, this theme choice produced one of our absolute best group collaborations. Laura snagged the coveted DESSERT course. Laura makes perfect flan, and so a “water bath” [...]

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Road Trip! U-Pick Strawberries in Carlsbad

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Our home in Westwood is at the north-west end of LA.  Cousins Nancy and John graciously hosted a family potluck at their home in Del Mar (North San Diego). That’s about a 2+hour drive IF no traffic. But since there ALWAYS IS traffic, we brought a big ice chest to keep our dishes cold. The [...]

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Farfalle with Mushroom and Prosciutto Ragu

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The Mushroom Channel is a cooking and info blog produced by the “mushroom council” marketing group. Practically every agriculture product in the U.S. has an organized committee such as this, and in my oh-so-long career, I’ve worked for plenty. Frankly, they’re very helpful. I mean, who else knows more about mushrooms than the growers?  If [...]

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Look, Ma! I Made A Chicken Pot Pie

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Larry and I are boomers. Frozen chicken pot pies were awesome eats in our formative years. They were cheap, salty, fatty, easy, high-cal pots o’ tasty stuff a kid, teen, babysitter, college student happily ate. Now, as conscientious grownups (buzz kill), we’d probably STILL eat those bombshells of bad nutrition if not for the consequences. [...]

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Road Trip! Foodie Walking Tour of Cantonese San Gabriel Valley

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Three and a half hours, more eating than walking, we were rapt students during our culinary tour of LA’s “new Chinatown.” The San Gabriel Valley Food Tour by Six Taste Tours was Larry’s idea (again, he luvs this stuff). Adventure pals Cathi and Barry (the ones who zipped around Long Beach on Segways with us), [...]

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Strawberry Sour Cream Pie

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This pie was scrumdiddlyumptious. So much, in fact, that after Larry and I had our slices, I pawned the rest off on two neighbors’ households. It was TOO good and my fear was we’d eat it all. Larry wasn’t thrilled with this, scored one more slice, tucked it into the fridge and I bolted up [...]

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Lemon and Goat Cheese Pasta

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Here is last night’s dinner — an adaptation of the easiest recipe imaginable penned by friend Erika of In Erika’s Kitchen. Her Meyer Lemon Spaghetti with Goat Cheese spoke to me. And I hadn’t planned on photographing the meal; I was just interested in eating it. But Larry said, “no, shoot it.”  Wayadaminnit, that’s strange… [...]

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