Warmer weather makes us lazy as a species. Unfortunately, ice cream for dinner every night will lead to a myriad of problems, such as running out of pants that fit. Thankfully there are some easy and relatively healthy recipes that require no attention to the stove. Someone once told me, “You don’t have to cook cabbage, it [...]

Lately I have been getting the hungries; I’m like a bear out of hibernation constantly sniffing out yummy recipes.  Everything attracts me, but especially starches.  I hear the call of the potato everywhere.  Although my upbringing was heavy on the rice (Persian father, Filipina mother), I have always had a warm, fuzzy place in my [...]

Summer is coming early in my neck of the woods in the form of 80-degree days and a swarm of carpenter bees outside my door.  When the temperatures rise, all my million or so sweat glands and I want to do is laze in front of the fan and dream of colder climes and less [...]

I owe this week’s short and sweet fierce foodie to my older sister, who took me out for breakfast recently and rocked my blueberry bagel and plain cream cheese world with her sweet and salty discovery. She asked for a toasted everything bagel with honey walnut cream cheese: the perfect combination of oniony and cinnamony, sesame [...]

Spring is my favorite time of year, and my favorite soup is perfect for the varying temperatures of the season. Tom kha gai is a Thai soup made from coconut milk, lemongrass, fresh ginger, juice of a lime, chile paste, basil and cilantro. It is hot and sweet and lemony and limey. Just right for spring in [...]

When I think of nerd food, my mind inevitably wanders past pizza rolls and poptarts to Tolkien’s Middle Earth and the delicious descriptions of fantastic (often hobbity) foods.  I am a LOTR nerd of the first order.  I have read “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy over thirty times, and went to [...]

The ancient Spartans saw food purely as fuel, and both royalty and peasants alike ate black bread with a blood and vinegar soup. The Romans, on the other hand, luxuriated in food as a symbol of wealth, and are famous for their exorbitant banquets of rare ingredients eaten lying down and punctuated by trips to the [...]

The heart is a tough muscle.  Despite the movies that depict a warrior taking a bite of a still beating specimen torn from the chest of an enemy, most cookery books suggest a long marinating in vinegar and red wine followed by hours of slow baking or stewing to render the chewy, lean muscle edible. [...]

For some reason, my mother likes to give me garbanzo beans. To the point where it’s hard for me to get out of her house without finding a can or two tucked in with whatever groceries she wants to send with me. She has tossed them through the open window of my car as I’m backing out [...]

When I was seven years old, I ate nine extra-large, perfectly unspotted, starchy sweet bananas in the space of ten minutes.  I’m not sure why I kept methodically eating banana after banana after banana as if I was in some kind of food challenge for kindergarteners, or why my mother made no move to stop [...]