The Yellow House

In the wide world of the Internet, it’s easy to get cynical about how rapidly and easily ideas are repackaged, reposted, and reshared, ad infinitum. You could say this about serious subjects, like news coverage, or about less serious subjects, like celebrity gossip. You could also say it about food-related content. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of what I call the “wedding salad” (because nearly every catered salad you’re served at a wedding is a variation on this). It consists of spinach/arugula, goat cheese/feta, dried cherries/cranberries, nuts (sometimes candied), and a vinaigrette. The wedding salad is omnipresent, and for good reason: it is delicious and time-tested. It’s hard to mess up. But the public does not need four million recipes for this salad. Moreover, I worry that all the recipes detailing minor variations on this wedding salad esotericize* something that should be simple. In other words, maybe the recipe should really be: Here is how you make a salad. A nice template for a salad is a tender green + a soft cheese + something sweet + something crunchy + something acidic.

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Hi from our muddy homestead. Perhaps you’ve been spending the past week watching the Olympics, or snuggling up against the continuing winter weather. Me, I’ve been trying my hand at an obscure Italian pasta-dumpling thing that is named after a branch from a bush. To each their own, I suppose.
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I entertain the big questions with frequency but allow them to slide away unanswered with equal frequency, which is one of the 3,798 reasons I should probably never bear children into the world. This is a roundabout way of getting to my point, which is Dear Stephanie, I apologize for taking so long to get back to you. Stephanie wrote me the kindest email weeks ago asking lots of questions, mostly answerable, except for one: How do you do it? » Click to read more

Let’s talk about honestly about millet, because the truth is, millet is birdseed. Yeah. I said it. We can wax poetic about various non-wheat grains and seeds as much as we want, but at the end of the day, when I hear the word “millet”, I remember my maternal grandmother filling her birdfeeders. Which isn’t a bad memory, per se, it’s just not evocative of…people food. » Click to read more