salsa – The Kitchen Illiterate

Sometimes on Sundays I peruse cookbooks and I start getting excited. I start making up grocery lists and weekly menu plans, and I have it all figured out. I know that Thursday, I’m going to make Chicken Escabeche with Carrots and Jalapenos, and wild rice. Then things happen. The market doesn’t have any acceptable carrots, though the shelves are overflowing with beautiful leafy greens. Thursday, which seemed like a perfectly lovely day earlier in the week, turns out to be kind of exhausting, and when work is over and I’m standing in the kitchen, I know I don’t have the patience for wild rice. I have to re-think my plans, so that I can get back on the couch for a little restorative bad television. Sometimes when this happens, I turn to pizza, or bread and cheese. But sometimes when this happens, I get lucky, and something wonderful manages to happen in my own kitchen anyway. This was one of those times.
Continue reading Chicken and Chard Burritos

My first year of college I wasn’t quite ready to leave the comforting embrace of my small hippie college town. Unfortunately, I found it a little bit tricky to find a job in that town. I graduated during the last serious plunge in the employment rate, in 2001, and it was not a good time to be a newly graduated Lit major, I can tell you that. I ended up working in various coffee shops and restaurants before I finally landed that first desk job, and while I was certainly extremely poor and had to defer payment of my student loans for too, too long, I wouldn’t exchange the experience for anything. I met great people, I had a lot of fun, learned to carry multiple cups of coffee at once, and I discovered what remains to this day my favorite breakfast: The Mike’s Mess from Zachary’s, in Santa Cruz, California. This year, I decided I need to try to make it myself.
Continue reading Laura’s Mike’s Mess