With Labor Day weekend coming up, and outdoor parties and barbecues on the horizon, it's good to have a classic guacamole recipe in your back pocket. Although I don't have brothers or sisters, I never felt lonely when I was growing up.
My mother and father had siblings to spare, and my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins gathered often -- to celebrate birthdays, holidays, half birthdays, television events.
One of the main reasons I wanted to move back to Los Angeles from New York was to give the Nuni (then just a twinkle in her parents' eye) that family and community that I grew up with. The menu varies -- my mother makes mean spare ribs, my aunt often grills sausages.
My grandmother's fallback is barbecued chi...

I don't really understand the marketing of Mother's Day.
I see all these floral pastel cards and delicate lacy handkerchiefs and early morning breakfast in bed and advertisements for "brunch" and "afternoon tea" with fussy hats implied.
Let me set the record straight.
I am a mom, and I know a lot of moms.
An informal survey of what our ideal Mother's Day would look like involves 1) sleeping in; 2) a pedicure with some celebrity gossip magazines; 3) sushi; 4) chocolate and 5) lots of wine.
Maybe this holiday doesn't sell so well on a greeting card, but it sounds pretty awesome to me.
Too awesome to be an also-ran Mother's Day. Maybe I will name it something else, like "Saturday".
And it will fall once a week. If your Mother's Day vee...

I was roasting a chicken the other night, and I realized that I've never posted roast chicken on my blog, which I really should.
It's my go to Sunday night supper, one we have at least once or twice a month.
It's elegant enough for company, but casual enough for a kitchen supper (if you had an eat in kitchen, which we don't.
Say it's casual enough to eat while curled up on a couch, with a glass of $4/bottle Tempranillo and a
DVD of Mamma Mia.
Don't judge.)
It appeals to kids, picky eaters, those who don't eat red meat.
It doesn't require fancy ingredients.
And it creates wonderful leftovers which can be repurposed into all sorts of great things -- chicken salads, chicken curry, and chicken stock (more on all of those, later).
In short, roast chicke...

I'm not much of a muffin girl.
Despite my rather extreme sweet tooth, I don't tend to like sweets for breakfast, and most muffins are just cupcakes without frosting.
And the times I actually want something sweet -- elevenses or tea time -- a muffin doesn't quite cut it.
I might as well have the frosting.
Or a cookie.
Or a bacon salted caramel brownie. And it doesn't much help that most muffins are not worth the paper they're baked in.
Take the blueberry muffin -- what really should be the king of the genre.
Most are cakelike, too sweet, with an indifferent texture that has neither the chew of bread nor the ...

I hate to say that I don't care about the Super Bowl because it's such a lame girl thing to say.
On the other hand, I don't really care about the Super Bowl.
And I am kind of a lame girl.
In my defense, L.A. hasn't had a pro football team in years, so I can't exactly root for the hometown.
But the truth is, I'm just not really a pro football kind of girl.
Football food, however, is something I can get behind, because I am an appetizer kind of girl.
Salty, spicy bite sized morsels?
Yes please.
Creamy dips with crunchy chips?
Absolutely.
I remember a highlight of my college dining hall experience being Super Bowl Sunday -- in addition to the regular Sunday night fare like lentil tortilla rollups or ...

I don't come from a place where chili is a thing.
Heck, I'm from California -- we put barbecue chicken on pizza.
We don't have things.
What this means is that I don't have firm and fixed ideas about what should and shouldn't be in chili, and as a result, I've tried many a chili recipe over the years.
I've tried white chicken chili, turkey chili, chili con carne, chili without beans, vegetarian chili, what was supposed to be Cliff Huxtables super spicy chili from the Cosby Show, and even a really weird one from epicurious that had green olives and raisins (which wasn't bad, it just wasn't chili.
I may not be a firm con carne or con frijoles person, but I feel about chili the way the Supreme Court feels about pornography -- I know it when I see it...

Some of my friends who read this blog seem to be laboring under the delusion that I am a gourmet cook. While I do occasionally go a little crazy with some super fancy cooking, I imagine that my everyday cooking is a lot like yours.
I cook dinner for my family.
I use what's on special at the store, or on a good week what I've found at the farmer's market.
I call my mom for recipes, or look in a cookbook, or troll the internet.
And usually I feel pretty lucky if I manage to get a main dish and a vegetable (or two) on the table at a reasonable hour for dinner.
I just also happen to put it in a nice dish and take a picture of it.
Probably ...

New Year's Day is really a strange holiday.
Everyone celebrates hard on New Year's Eve, leaving the holiday itself as a day to lie around, nurse your hangover, and watch the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl on TV (which is an excellent hangover nursing activity, though perhaps I'm a little biased towards the Rose Parade since I grew up in Pasadena). But New Year's Day has some lovely traditions, most of which are associate with the idea of beginning the New Year as you mean to go on.
My friend Rebecca spends all of New Year's Day doing activities she hopes to do throughout the year -- spending time with her family, doing the things she loves.
This is a tradition I try to aim for, but I've already spent more t...