Essays, Reporting, and Other Curiosities
Featured Writing
How a Cookbook Becomes a Memoir
Recipes are easy. The hard part is what happens between them — the kitchen as a space where memory takes shape.
On the Art of Slow Reporting
What you learn when you put down the deadline and stay six months in a town nobody wrote about.
A Notebook, A Diner, A Life
Why I keep going back to the same booth, the same coffee, the same waitress — and how it changed my work.
Why I Wrote About My Mother's Hands
Some essays you don't plan. They arrive at 4 a.m. and refuse to leave until you've written them down.
Articles
How to tell if that peach is ripe? Ask Southern California’s ‘Produce Hunter’
Shopping at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, Karen Beverlin reached into a five-pound box of tart Belle Magnifique cherries, grabbed a couple and ate them. Tart cherries are tricky to size up at a glance: Flavors can range from gently tangy to very sour, and just looking at them offers no reliable clues. All Ms. Beverlin had to go on was her palate. She ate a few more, and smiled.
A celebration-worthy bread pudding
It was my daughter’s first birthday, 27 years ago, and two couples, serious eaters, were coming by with their kids for lunch. I needed a dessert that could both convey the depth of my happiness and satisfy my guests. So I turned to the most challenging cookbook I owned: “Desserts,” by Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles, where I lived at the time. Normally I read this book the way non-travelers read novels set overseas.
Yes, pastry chefs are real chefs and women are leading the baking revolution
For decades, the typical restaurant kitchen in the U.S. operated on faulty logic: Women can’t cook. Baking isn’t real cooking. The conclusion? Women can bake.
Caught between new tech money and a growing homelessness crisis, restaurants on one street in Venice, California, are trying to keep its identity alive
Jason Neroni lives on Rose Avenue, though his house is 10 minutes away. The chef and managing partner at The Rose Venice, a bustling 375-seat restaurant two blocks from the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, spends more waking hours there than he does at home with his wife and two children: weekends, late nights, holidays, usually from 11 in the morning to 11 at night. When he isn’t at the restaurant, he is as close as a text or a call.
Books
Second Helpings
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