Things have gotten busy in my corner, starting with the launch of a food blog with Orange Coast magazine (covering foodthings in Orange County!). Almost exactly on the blog’s launch date, things at my day job swelled, and I’m working longer hours to meet the writing/editing demands. It’s hairy, to say the least.

I’m not at all complaining, though. Life is full right now. But thankfully, it’s full of very, very awesome things.

All of this means I’ve been coming home later than usual. Instead of cooking, I’d much rather order pizza or some Thai, or (ideally) have someone spoon feed me soup or bread pudding for dinner. I specifically say bread pudding because it’s one of the most ultimate comfort foods, one where you don’t have to expel much effort to eat it. Bread pudding requires little chewing, if any at all. And right off of the spoon, it slithers down the back of your throat in a savory mush that warms your insides in a medicinal sort of way. (I underbake it just to experience this exact sensation every time.) Other mushy foods like mashed potatoes and guacamole tend to stick to the roof of your mouth, but bread pudding seems to know where it’s going right from the get-go.  You spoon it in,  and down it goes without any resistance at all. And it’s got chutzpah: If it could, I bet the it would make it’s own little slurping noises when you swallow it.

I bought Sunday Suppers at Lucques at the Los Angeles Times book fair a few years ago. Chef Suzanne Goin was perched in a booth signing books for a line that was at least 45 minutes long. After she signed mine, I sat on the grass and flipped through it, almost immediately landing on this recipe for caramelized bread pudding with chocolate and cinnamon. With that page alone, Goin made me a fan.

Now, if only someone would make this bread pudding for me before I summon the pizza guy. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe)

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There’s this story of a famous journalist who started his career at a daily paper in a town so tiny, that there was no real news to write about. I mean, we’re talking daily AP photos of squirrels on skis and a whole lotta bake sale stories.

But he refused to settle for those ho-hum tales. Instead, this guy would throw a dart at a city map that was hanging on his wall, and wherever the dart landed was where he was going to find his next story. It didn’t matter if the dart pierced the middle of an intersection or the corner of an open corn field. He would find a story.

Using that method, he met all kinds of interesting people, and equally interesting stories ensued. Now, he’s a big-deal reporter in a metropolitan city. Bake sales be damned.

I never learned the name of this guy – and that detail alone makes the tale scream fiction over fact. But real or not, it reminds me to think creatively when developing recipes: Pick an ingredient and develop the flavors around it, just as he picked a place and developed a story around it.

The tale also helps when choosing one recipe over another to try. But instead of using the dart method, I close my eyes and mix up all the cookbooks on my office floor, then point a finger at a page. There. Done.

It was a similar situation when I made this Gorgonzola and leek crème brulee. It was one in a handful of recipes that we testers at Leite’s Culinaria had to choose from in order to fulfill our monthly testing duties. I closed my eyes, and with finger poised at the computer screen, I made a selection.

Only, as luck would have it, my fat, sausage-of-a-finger landed on three recipes instead of one. Of course, I thought. Just when this dart method of choosing was proving to be foolproof, this happens.

But fat finger be damned. I made them all.

(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

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If ever there was a particular herb or scent to describe my mother, it’s ginger. It’s her go-to remedy for almost all ailments headaches, flu, whatever you got. When I was a kid, with even the slightest sniffle, she was in the kitchen tossing bits of the nubby little root into a stock pot full of water.

When the pot had boiled, her voice bellowed through the walls into the bedroom we shared, through the sheets and used Kleenex I had burrowed under. It was one word, both used as an announcement and a stern command. “Steam!!”

I shuffled from my bed into the kitchen, where my mother stood exactly as I had pictured she would be: Upright, one hand on her hip and the other hand pointing downward at the ginger pot on the floor, in front of the wooden stool my grandfather had made.

I handed her a wad of Kleenex as I positioned myself on the stool, crouched uncomfortably over the pot that was between my knees. My mom hurled a blanket over my head and the pot, sealing me into a little heat pod. Scalding steam rose from the water, stinging my face. I cried out in discomfort.

“You have to do it,” she said, as I whimpered from under the blanket. She firmly believed that the ginger would cure the sniffles. So I sat, breathing in deeply the spicy-sweet aroma, at the same time trying to keep my knees from touching the sides of the pot. After I emerged from the blanket I was a defeated, sweaty mess. But the sniffles? Gone. I was usually back to normal the following day.

We did this ritual every time I got sick – even well into my teens, when I much preferred self-medication to ancient herbal remedies that had been passed down the family tree.

It’s been years since I’ve posed over a pot of boiling ginger, that is, until I made this recipe for ginger crème brulee. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

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