morsels & sauces

Yesterday, I gave my final exams for the first term.  I am always amazed at how much gets packed into the first trimester.  An open house here, a stack of papers there, a set of student-parent conferences to follow, and I am just about wiped out.  Whew.  We're eyeballing Thanksgiving with a bit of glee, but in the mean time, I am making decidedly non-Thanksgiving fare.  Be prepared! So we begin with this Moroccan Chicken with Dates.  Dates are really just an excuse to mainline sugar with dinner.  Those of you with sweet tooths (teeth?) know what I am talking about. But before we get too far, let's indulge in some fun facts about the date:  Apparently there are 1500 varieties of dates--a dateganza, if you will--and the most popular American date, the Medjool date, came to California in 1927.  A singular Dr. Walter Swingle, an American horticulturalist for the Bureau of Plant Industry, took a little trip to the French-colonial...

I promise.  This will come back to the pork. The husband and I have been married for five years now.  In order to celebrate, we went to Point Reyes .  North Beach was foggy and all but empty, the point with the lighthouse was socked in, and the waves were tumbling loudly.  First we sat against the driftwood and listened, until the husband took a walk and I lay back in the sand to close my eyes and listen a little more carefully.  The sun came out for about two minutes and then the fog closed back in.  When the husband returned from his walk, I did handstands, my hands less stable on the shifting sand, and he had to hold me up.  When I was rightside up again, I felt giddy.  Ready to play.  And so we drove out to the lighthouse point where we clattered down to the lighthouse itself.  The fog horn sounded rhythmically.  And then we hiked the 300+ stairs back up to the road. This felt perfect.  Like the ide...

Adapted from Cookbook #30:  Chez Panisse Fruit Recipe:  Grilled Cured Duck Breast with Pickled Peaches I think that duck is for some people what rabbit is to me:  frightening.  While I have admitted to not making a lot of duck out of avoidance of gamy and fatty tastes, the duck cooking has never filled me with dread.  Here's a lovely little SF Gate article on the avalanche of advice one might receive about duck.  Below you will find a little more advice from Alice Waters (who does say score the skin and definitely brine it). Alice Waters has created two cookbooks that I stand by, and stand by firmly:  This one and Chez Panisse Vegetables .  Both cookbooks are arranged by produce, so when you get that CSA box filled with lemons or the farmers market seems overrun with kale, you can figure out something to do with all of it.  [The Vegetable chapter where we find page 210 is on mushrooms, so we have to wait for the rains again be...