Crab Season’s Coming

By Andrew Hunter

If you ask someone from Baltimore what’s the best crab, they’d say blue crab, with a local’s pride. But if you ask folks up and down the Pacific Coast from San Luis to Juneau, they’d say Dungeness. Regional food pride is one of the things that makes our country’s cuisine great!

Personally, we like Dungeness because we can get it from local fishermen, and we associate it with the holidays because crab season starts in November and peaks in December. Yes, you can get it through June, but our opinion is it’s sweetest in December. So use any kind of crab you like in this recipe; just buy local when you can.

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Brown Bag a Bento Lunch

By Sandy Hu

When Steve and I go on vacation, we love to poke around in local farmers’ markets and explore supermarkets to check out what the locals are eating. Our suitcases on the return home are always bulging with cans and boxes of transportable food, a few new cookbooks and some food magazines . We try to make our vacation last a little longer by replicating some of the dishes we enjoyed.

During our first trip to Japan in May, we fell in love with o-bento lunches (Japanese box lunches, artfully arranged in partitioned containers).We can buy them easily from Japanese markets in San Francisco of course, but in Japan, we could purchase them everywhere and in great variety. Whether from the fabulous food emporia found in the basement of every high-end department store, to train station kiosks and even the 7-11, o-bento lunches were uniformly tasty.

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Birthday Bouquet of Greens

By Lori Powell

Another B’day is right around the corner and an early gift has arrived on my doorstep. A bouquet of greens!

They’re especially great when fresh-picked at a farm stand or from your neighbor’s garden, but to present them this way as a gorgeous bouquet of healthy greens to celebrate my birthday is just perfection. So lovely that I could have put them in a vase and placed them on my table.

So gorgeous…how could I even think of cooking them? Well at least for a day or two.

I quickly came to my senses as I can’t get enough of kale – raw, cooked or in a smoothie. It was love at first bite.

Below is one of my favorite ways to serve them…oh and they are amazingly good for you. Go figure. So below, my happy b’day kale recipe.

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Avocados, Then and Now

By Sandy Hu

I remember dining with fashionable Vogue magazine editors in New York City when I was a college student and feeling terribly intimidated by the menu. As a finalist in the Vogue Prix de Paris competition, I was flown to this sophisticated city, along with more worldly competitors, vying for the top spot: a year as a junior editor at Vogue and a trip to Paris.

Growing up in the small town of Hilo, Hawaii, before the advent of the Food Network, I was insulated from glamorous delicacies like escargots and caviar. Would I like them? Could I figure out how to eat them?

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A Barbarian Feast

By Katie Barreira

Last Saturday, armed with yellow rain ponchos (which doubled conveniently as full body drop cloths) my sweetie and I attempted to sample a Taste of Danbury at the town’s annual food festival. Unfortunately, tornados were the only thing taking a bite out of Connecticut that day and the foodies were sent packing. But one booth braved the storm- The Barbarian Grill would not go quietly into the night and we were there to reap the spoils.

While regaling us with tales of his Mongolian war sword, Hungarian chef Steve Lang doused a full rack of his meltingly tender rotisserie smoked pork ribs with Louisiana hot sauce before wrapping them in a foil to-go pouch, which we tore into as soon as we reached the shelter of our vehicle. It was a delightfully uncivilized meal. Good thing my man’s the type who keeps wet naps stashed in the glove compartment.

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