umamimart

One of my tasks as a wee lass in the early 90s was to wash the rice for dinner while my single mom did the rest of the preparation and cooking. She told me that the ultimate goal in rice-washing is to get the water clear.

With my tiny hands,
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Here at Happy Hour the subject all day every day is cocktails. I provide the recipes, and hopefully you enjoy them, and learn a little something new in the process.  But a recent question from a friend prompted the realization that in all the posts
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I try to live my life void of time constraints. I don’t wear a watch, and I’m perpetually in a rush and am nearly always late for everything. I’m not proud of this, and it’s always something I try to improve, but it somehow makes me less anxious, not knowing
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So I’m having an old friend over for dinner, and he’s a vegetarian. Don’t we all hate cooking for vegetarians?

None of my tried-and-true-recipes-for-normal-carnivore guests, like Beetroot Chicken or Bloody Pot Roast Beef, would fit the food customs of my friend.

Luckily I recently had a fab side dish at another (non-vegetarian) dinner party some months ago–
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My sister came over the other day with part of an apple pie she had been talking about making for a while. The young, sour apples came from her garden and worked perfectly with the pie. The crust was very crispy on the ends – just
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Is it really the last day of Sloth Season? Say it ain’t so! Sigh. Totally not fair considering the Bay Area has been a shroud of fog, gloom and sweater-weather all “summer”. In Dante’s Inferno, San Francisco is not unlike the third circle of hell, where the gluttonous are punished in
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This title might be deceiving. You know I cook a lot, from lazyass to the it-will-take-all-day kind. But fish is something I’ve never explored much. As I mentioned last week, something about the eyes, the mouth, and the flesh freaks me out. In Japan, where fish supply is abundant, most people buy fish
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I just had the most unique dining experience of my life and I have no idea what my food looked like. Basically, the above is what I saw for two hours straight.

NOTHING. I mean absolutely nothing. Didn’t matter if my eyes were opened or closed,
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Pizzeria Bruno was the one place I wanted to go during my visit to San Diego earlier this month. Mike Senese, television personality and hardcore pizzahead, had mentioned that it was, “easily the best pizza I’ve found in Southern California,” so of course I had to try it.

I walked
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Lake Tahoe is a bit of a nightmare during the height of the summer. The lake is a dream but South Lake Tahoe is swarming with slot machine hungry tourists from both sides of the border (California and Nevada).

We stayed at the Marriot and I had no complaints, especially
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