Bon Appegeek

Today is Bon Appegeek’s second anniversary. I’m marking the day with a long post that has taken more than two years to write. There’s a recipe at the end. I promise.
After several years of on-again off-again reading, I finally started volume 4 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la [...]

I’ve met people who eat chocolate every day, survive on chocolate when depressed, and smoke chocolate after sex. You know those people. Perhaps you are one. Well, not me, I’m stronger than that. Chocolate can’t take me on its own—it takes two to take me down. Caramel plus chocolate works. [...]

Let’s say you’re a woman who never wears hats. One day you spot an outrageously stylish hat, the kind of hat Hollywood startlets from the forties wore when they put their handprints in that sidewalk wherever it is where they do the handprint thing while flashbulbs popped and adoring fans cried at how fabulous [...]

Back in November I wrote a post about the final week of the local farmer’s market: about the gift of free broccoli from my favorite stand, the last green beans of the season, the hand-lettered cardboard sign that said “SUPER TENDER.” You would have kissed your rutabagas and wiped away tears after reading that [...]

Oops. I did it again.
Before I get into another fruitcake story, a reminder that Menu For Hope ends this Friday and we’ve already raised $44,000. Or rather, we’ve only raised $44,000. We can do better! Go! Go and bid right now! Just don’t go and bid on what I [...]

I like fruitcake, but not just any fruitcake, no, I only like—
Wait, what am I saying? I like all fruitcake. All fruitcake. If you ever wonder who buys those stale cakes at the grocery store every year, that would be me. If you spit out fruitcake because of the artificially-colored cherries [...]

Bon Appegeek posts dropped in number this summer, mostly because I haven’t been doing much of that that thing you do where you take food and mix it with other food and heat it. What’s that called…oh yeah, cooking. A combination of fresh fruit, microwaved sweet corn, tomato salads, and hot temperatures killed [...]

Sorry about the cranky title. The original title was, “As God is my witness, I will never make tapenade again.” That became “Hey, this tapenade stuff isn’t that bad,” which became, “OMG TAP3NAD3 RVLZ1!1,” which became, “Holy ****, I’m out of tapenade!” which became, “Why does my grocery store’s tapenade have soybean oil [...]

I have cake head. It’s like bed head, except bed head is a huge bald spot flanked by two cowlicks and accompanied by a sleepy look in the eye whereas cake head is a crazed look in the eye flanked by crumb-filled hair and accompanied by the permanent aroma of vanilla. The cure [...]

I’ve been kicking myself for not participating in The Heart of the Matter event. This blog may not show it much (I guarantee more buttercream photos before the year is out), but I generally eat a healthy diet to maintain my weight loss and keep high blood pressure in check. When you have [...]

A friend in the market for a new computer e-mailed to inquire about technical specifications on SATA hard drives and new types of RAM. I did some research and sent her my findings along with this fact: “According to Wikipedia, SATA is ‘a traditional dish from the Malaysian state of Terengganu, consisting of [...]

Like many people trying to lose weight, I went through a dudstitution phase. This is a tragic period when you do things like take a perfectly innocent recipe for chocolate poundcake and replace the butter with applesauce, the chocolate with pureed prunes, the sugar with Splenda, the sour cream with nonfat yogurt, the white [...]

You know you store too much stuff under the sink when your faucet suddenly squirts hot water around the seams and you frantically fall to your knees to pull out bottles of soy sauce, fish sauce, rice bran oil, olive oil, roasted sesame oil, perilla oil, chili oil, black truffle oil, black sesame oil, honey, [...]

My 33rd birthday is coming up. A few weeks ago my mother, a salt & pepper-haired woman fast approaching her 60s, looked at my hair and said, “You have as much white hair as I do.”
“WHAT?”
“In the back there, I see a lot of white hairs.”
“NO YOU DON’T.”
“Yes I—”
“YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO TELL YOUR DARLING [...]

I was asked about garam masala recipes after my post on Spinach Moong Masoor Dal, so I’ve decided to post the two recipes I use. Garam masala, ground “warm” spices, are generally used as a finishing aromatic touch much like ground black pepper is used in the west. Recipes vary from region to [...]