We admit that we're not as diligent about our food consumption as we should be. Being raised as good Catholics, this causes us a judicious amount of guilt. (Which is different than merely feeling bad about eating bad food--after all, Jack in the Box has its own special way of punishing you. . .) We spent this weekend on a trade show floor in Las Vegas, eating candy from the booths and dinner at... [continue]

There's a line in the musical Rent, towards the end, when it looks like all these young hopelessly Romantic hipsters will be cast apart into the cold world, and one of the main characters (I think it's Roger) sings/speaks, "I'll call. I hate the fall." That line has always struck as false. Maybe it's because we love the fall--and even if it doesn't automatically translate into good memories of returning to school for you,... [continue]

In what must be a rite of passage for any aspiring foodie (New meme: Come up with a better word than "foodie." Must mean the same thing, but not sound so, well, twittish. I think it's the cute "oo" sound in the middle of it, followed by the diminutive "ee" at the end--kitty, pretty, snuggly. . . icky. It also doesn't help things that the word is so close to "snooty." Please, we can... [continue]

We here at the eastern-most outpost of SFist's empire hosted a protein party last night. It was a party for my wife's (sorry, SFist plural voice style, I don't share my wife) birthday and she decided to celebrate it with as much meat as humanly possible: pulled pork, tri-tip, fried chicken, chicken-apple sausages, pigs-in-blankets, Greek Balls (meat balls with some feta cheese in them), soppresatta and virginia ham. To round out the protein we... [continue]

We eat more vegetables than normal people. We've almost completely cut out starches from our diet over the past year, substituting an extra portion of vegetables in each meal. We're not totally successful at it, because sometimes you can't control what other people make for you, or the situation you find yourself in at restaurants. (When your boss has you down for sushi for a business lunch, you have sushi, which means rice. We... [continue]

Last year we spent a great deal of time writing a farce about cheese. Yes, it's true, the idea of taking spoiled milk and eating it seemed, to us, to hold a great deal of comic potential. And, while we don't believe we gained enough practical knowledge to actually open up our own dairy, we did learn enough to buy Ricki Carroll's "Home Cheese Making." What we really gained though, was an incredible appreciation... [continue]

When we first start trying to whittle down the hundreds of posts into some kind of order to include in this round-up, we just wade in and start reading. This leads to such great posts as badthings read-able quote about pineapple and mayonnaise. (Which also reminds us of our ill-fated guacamole and oreo cookie experiment.) It also lets us get schooled on steel hardness for knives and sharpeners, drool over bananas and coconut milk... [continue]

Much like the event itself, the blogosphere's reaction to Burning Man can hardly be described, quantified, or adequately explained. We refrain from judging Burning Man itself, but that doesn't mean we don't get to comment on blogs about Burning Man. Henceforth, let it be know across all the land that:... [continue]

We're snarky right now, people. Snarky, snarky, snarky. And it's not just a matter of people taking away a planet. Viva Pluto! Honestly, we're all for clarity, we admire it, we think rational decisions about what constitutes a planet or not are necessary, if sometimes painful--but why Pluto? Why'd you have to take pluto? Hell, why not take Jupiter? Damn things too big anyways, why not call it a dwarf star? Huh? Huh? Sigh.... [continue]

We just finished oven-roasting a big set of baby-back pork ribs--dry, no sauce--and in addition to the neanderthalian (Um, let's all agree it's a real word, OK?) feelings of joy that come along with cooking a huge slab of meat and bones we had a rush of macho pleasure while using our cleaver to, well, cleave them into individual pieces. The cleaver was a wedding present, along with a full-set of kitchen knives--good ones--so... [continue]

A few years back we had to spend some time in Vegas on business. This was before they had a Whole Paycheck. We were determined we were going to buy at least some local vegetables and tried to search out the farmer's markets. Silly us, Vegas really is in the middle of the desert, so the produce that some poor farmer schlepped in from California for the markets--not so much. This experience did, however,... [continue]

Now, normally we don't like to talk about politics here. It's the Bay Area so we'll either be preaching to the choir or being an iconoclast just for kicks. But this week, well, all anyone seemed to want to talk about was Lieberman. So who are we to judge? Our favorite link about Ol' Kissin' Joe was actually not about him at all, but the man who defeated him, Ned Lamont. Steve with No... [continue]

Sometime in the past week we started on a hard-core musical binge. We don't know why--maybe it started when we heard about the bloggers visiting Beach Blanket Babylon, and wondered why we weren't invited. In any event, we're listening to Les Mis (London Cast, disc 2--"A Little Fall of Rain" is playing right now) as we're typing this, plotting our trip to San Jose to see Super Vision (admittedly not a musical) at the... [continue]

One of the things we've discovered in our adult life is a true appreciation for breakfast. Now, we're from hearty midwestern stock, so we've always had an liked a breakfast that would, in our great-grandma's words, "stick to our ribs," but that was generally a once-a-week deal, at most. Eggs (courtesy of Becks and Posh), pancakes (courtesy of 101 Cookbooks), bacon--all that was reserved for Sunday. So our childhood habit of a simple bowl of... [continue]

Growing up we went to a stuffy high school where Latin, Ancient Greek and even a little Sanskrit was taught. In college we surprised ourselves by diving head-first into media theory, examining how the thought patterns of literate people are fundamentally different from people within a solely oral tradition. It's a fascinating subject (OK, yes, we're geeks), but this meant we read Andrew O'Hehir's article on Andrew Dalby's book positing that Homer was a... [continue]

Everyone's got a different idea for beating the heat this week, although most people seem to think ice cream's a good idea. Sugar Savvy discusses slow churned ice cream which also got a mention in the New York Times, while the Oakland Tribune talks about local artisinal ice cream in the Bay Area. In Praise of Sardines samples the gelato from Sketch at 4th Street in Berkeley. Up in Napa Nina does delightful things... [continue]

We need to talk. Recently, things have been a little hot and heavy between us, you know? Way too much drama. And you've gone and told all your friends, and they've all jumped on the bandwagon with their own agenda, and we just feel like we can't breathe, you know? Like you're smothering us. And maybe that's good, but a lot of people say it's bad. So we're very confused. We like hot, really... [continue]

Grandmother's blackberry and blueberry pie was legendary in our family. She lived on the side of a mountain that was alternately blasted away by the stripminers and eaten away by the gypsy moths in a tiny town called, appropriately enough, Blandburg. But no matter how hard hit the mountain-side got, the berries in the backyard always came in thick. This led to amazing pies in the summer, a trend Shuna fully supports. No one lives... [continue]

When we were little we used to catch fireflies at night as it got dark. We'd put them into old mayonnaise jars with grass on the bottom and holes poked in the lid and watch them light up. Then, when it got dark enough we'd play tag with the other kids with flashlights in our yard. We'd forgotten about most of that until we had to prepare a birthday gift for our brother, and spent... [continue]

Make no mistake, we are animals here at the food blog! Animals! Grrr. We only recently added chef Chris Cosentino to our list, thanks to his offal dinner for Anthony Bourdain and Mary Ladd a couple weeks ago, and already he's delighting us and making us queasy. A friend told me a story once about his young (4 or 5 years old) daughter who was watching the movie Babe fairly regularly. "Daddy," she said, "I... [continue]