The Boston Globe: After marketing killed the Chilean Sea Bass, it seemed no other fish was waiting to replace it as a ubiquitous, mild-flavored, un-overcookable presence on menus around the world. Until now. Meet the Next Big Fish: the barramundi — “which means ‘fish with big scales’ in an aboriginal dialect, or Lates calcarifer, if […]

A couple of months ago, Man of La Muncha brought home a chocolate bar along with our normal haul of groceries. I pounced on the bar as it emerged from the shopping bag, to find that the flavor was, (ahem), “Bread and Chocolate”. The brand was 3400 Phinney, and the maker was someone […]

In honor of Halloween here are some creepy facts via this week’s newsletter from the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA), the nonprofit that has managed the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers Market since since 1999. (By the way, if you haven’t noticed our Ethicurean piggy Sloe’s frightening costume, above, hit refresh on […]

One of the challenges of being half a blogging couple is that we discuss ideas, and then the first person scheduled to write in a week tends to use up those ideas. You wake, thinking idly of the post that is due the following day, only to discover that the other person has written […]

Our news larder is rather empty today, but others in the food blogosphere have plenty to go around. Rather than poach off their plates, we’re linking to them.
The Accidental Hedonist: Kate Hopkins does some digging into the latest E. coli outbreak, in lettuce, and finds that Monterey County has been irrigating acres of edible food […]

Today’s Salon has an exchange between Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman about a proposed foie gras ban in New Jersey. Who cares? Well, the Garden State is home to D’Artagnan, one of America’s premier foie gras producers. Bourdain, the trash-talking celebrity chef, best-selling author, and offal endorser, is pissed. Ruhlman — chef and coauthor of […]

Updated with photos!
Our long residence on the West Coast gave us the impression that there is no decent beer east of the Rockies until you cross the Canadian border or reach Europe. This bias could have been argued until the mid-1990s. I remember business trips to the East Coast where the only alternatives […]

Update: We’ve added photos after a slight delay.–MolM.
This last weekend, Man of La Muncha and I traveled to Baltimore for a friend’s wedding. The wedding was wonderful, and we met (and in some cases, re-met) a lot of very fun and interesting people. But, of course, any trip involving Ethicureans involves checking out […]

My willingness to cook something used to follow what I called the Burrito Rule.
Basically, I wasn’t going to make anything that would take a lot of time, cost twice as much, and taste half as good as what I could easily buy in a restaurant or store. And burritos, delicious versions of which are all […]

Seattle cartoonist Dan Piraro has provided his opinion on the topic of best Seattle donuts in his daily strip. If you aren’t familliar with Pirarro’s works, then you may have dangerously low levels of Vitamins S (for surrealism) and H (for humor).

The Butter Bitch and I received an ice cream maker last year as a wedding gift, and we put the gift to good use during the warm summer of 2005. This prompts a belated shout out to Erik and Holly in Oakland, the givers of our much-used ice cream maker. For some […]

It was a slow day here at Chez Beef. Sir Loin was up late last night trying to attach my old laptop to his stereo set-up (this was unsuccessful, and apparently will require large capital expenditures to remedy). I went to bed early but slept in anyway, still tired from some minor surgery a few […]

Late July is the beginning of squash season in Seattle and as our weekend began I realized that we had two pounds of squash from our CSA box, with a good chance of receiving more squash on Tuesday. I had planned to grill squash on the weekend, but work and the reappearance of rain […]

“Getting doned” is how a friend in Portland referred to the consumption of milk and donuts. He rhymed “doned” with stoned because “getting doned” has a satisfyingly stupefying effect. Apparently, being from Nevada isn’t just about guns, gambling, and the mob, but also about how to alter one’s consciousness using everyday food items.
My friend would […]

I’ve read the foraging exploits of the other Ethicureans with some jealousy, but our CSA box has kept us too busy to roam the neighborhood for ripening fruit. There are cherry trees 4 blocks west of us, but we haven’t walked past them since the cherry blossoms started decorating the sidewalks and streets with […]