linguine

Linguine with Clams

When you’re an old fogey food blogger like me, dinner comes in one of two categories: 1. something you’ve already blogged about and 2. something you’ve never blogged about.

The sad truth is that more often than not, lately, I feel like cooking things that I’ve already blogged about because I love making them. It’s harder and harder to come up with something that I really feel like making that’s new enough for the blog. How to overcome that? The best way is to go to the farmer’s market to find a new ingredient or to wander into a great meat and seafood store, like McCall’s in Los Feliz, to get inspired. I did the latter yesterday when I found beautiful looking clams for $8 a pound. One dish popped into my head that I’d never blogged before: Linguine with Clams. I bought a pound of clams, a box of linguine and got ready to rock n’ roll.

Ramps: What Up With That?

There’s this SNL sketch that Craig and I find pretty funny. Actually, I’m not sure it’s even that funny; it’s more amusing than funny. Essentially, there’s this talk show host (played by Kenan Thompson) who hosts a show called “What Up With That?” and he sings a theme song (also called “What Up With That?”) and every time he starts to interview his guests, he starts the song again and nothing ever gets done and there’s a man in a red track suit dancing and sometimes a choir and weird cameos and confetti. Maybe you just need to see it, after the jump.

What To Do With Meyer Lemons

I’m trying not to be dramatic here, but I can’t avoid the second half of this sentence: if you haven’t had a Meyer lemon, you haven’t lived!

Yes, that was a pretty dramatic thing to say, but let’s look at the facts: (1) A regular lemon isn’t very subtle, it’s an acidic attack on your taste buds. A Meyer lemon? It’s a subtly perfumed orangey lemony hybrid—it makes a regular lemon look like a punk; (2) regular lemons are around all year long, they pile up in their sad bins at the grocery store, and you grab them more out of pity than anything resembling delight. But Meyer lemons? They’re only here for a short time–the winter months up through the start of Spring (i.e. right now!)–and discovering a bin of Meyer lemons at the store is, for a food lover, like a baseball card collector stumbling upon a (insert rare baseball card here) at a garage sale. It’s cause for celebration.

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