When I was facing a significant birthday a few years ago (one that ended in a "0") I began my celebration at SFMOMA, specifically at the Blue Bottle Cafe with a slice of Thiebaud Cake: a chocolate cake covered in strawberry buttercream and filled with Lillet- and vanilla-poached strawberries.  Clearly it was going to be a good decade!  So when the cafe's co-owner Caitlin Freeman published Modern Art Desserts, a cookbook based on the art-influenced creations she sells at the SFMOMA cafe, I was very excited to learn more about these amazing desserts.

Sandwiches are a natural lunch box item. They're easy to make and eat, they keep well, and people love them. But it's also easy to get into a sandwich rut, making the same roast turkey/swiss/mayo/mustard day in and day out. Sometimes you need a little inspiration to kickstart your sandwich routine. What's the easiest place to find new and interesting sandwich combinations? Read on for my free and easy hint! More

Have you heard of Good Eggs? This San Francisco-based startup launched last summer, and we're excited about the concept. Basically, Good Eggs is like Etsy for local foodies. It's an online hub where people can find and buy food directly from nearby farmers and food producers, and then arrange to pick it up or have it delivered. More

When I arrived at Samin Nosrat's house, her front door (which, appropriately, also happens to be her kitchen door) was wide open. I could see her shuffling around inside with a rag underneath each foot as she hastily dried her freshly washed kitchen floor. With sparkling eyes and a wide smile she shuffled forward and welcomed me into her kitchen.

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Newlyweds Ryan and Tim moved into a beautiful home on Guerrero St. in San Francisco, and with Ryan's love of cooking and talents as a chef, the first order of business was to remodel the kitchen into a more functional space, drenched in natural light. Planning a wedding and remaking a kitchen were quite tall tasks to tackle simultaneously but they pulled both events off in spades!

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Kimberley lives in a rented home with a humble kitchen on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. She doesn't let an ordinary space keep her from making extraordinary food on her colorful cooking blog, The Year in Food. Join me for a peek into this food blogger's kitchen so we can collectively marvel at all the props and trimmings she uses to create beautiful images of food.

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Some things make you realize that it's just not that hard to fall in love.

This week, while visiting San Francisco, I happened upon a new favorite place, which makes me all the more proud to be a native of the city. More

Home cooks have to be a careful when it comes to a cookbook written by a restaurant chef. There often can be a disconnect between what it takes to get restaurant food onto our home tables when we don't have exotic ingredients flown to our doors and a dozen employees to prep them, not to mention years of professional training and the extraordinarily high btu's of a huge, multi-burner professional stove. So when I picked up San Francisco chef Mitch Rosenthal's new cookbook Cooking My Way Back Home, I'll admit I was a little cautious. Was this going to be one of those books that frustrated me with hours of prep work, and too many ingredients and complicated techniques? Read on for what I discovered. More

It seems like this is a good year for mushrooms, at least in Northern California. In Berkeley, you can find heaps of delicious looking wild mushrooms at fairly reasonable prices, especially chanterelles, which come in many colors (white, yellow, black.) But what caught my eye recently is the oddly named Fried Chicken Mushroom. Is it true? Does it really taste like fried chicken? At $8.99 a pound, I picked up a small handful for around $2, and took them back to my kitchen to find out.
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Have you ever heard of the staff meal, the ritual in which a restaurant's staff will sit down together for a meal before they open for service? If you're like me, you might find yourself a little envious of that meal and curious, too, about what they eat. Marissa Guggiana must have been interested as well, because she sought out restaurants that took their staff meals seriously and paid them a visit, leaving with a handful of recipes and photos to share with us in her new book Off the Menu: Staff Meals from America's Top Restaurants. More