In addition, his book The Apprentice is one of my favorite food memoirs. It recounts his education as a classically-trained chef through apprenticeship at a hotel, de rigeur for the time (1940's) in France, and is filled with much love for food, cooking, and recipes.

He waxes on about his love for simple dishes, like potato-leek soup with only five ingredients. Leeks are a very common ingredient in country French cooking, though I had never cooked with them. Last week, we had our last cold & rainy day of the winter, so it was a perfect time for me to debut Pepin's soup.

It is a white pureed soup, so it's not flashy. But the flavor! Something magical happens between the salt, leeks, and potatoes. Something that doesn't seem possible with its humble origins. Only because I made the soup myself did I believe that it didn't contain any cream (as many versions of this soup do) because of its silkiness. This became an instant classic for me. I'm just bummed that hearty-soup weather has just ended, but I know what I'll be spooning up come October.

Potato-Leek Soup

1 tablespoon butter
2 medium leeks, washed, split down the middle, and chopped (whites only)
2 medium russet potatoes, peeled and diced into ½ inch cubes
3 cups water
salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste

1. Melt butter in a heavy-bottomed soup pot and saute leeks until soft but not browned.
2. Add potatoes, water, and salt & pepper.
3. Bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes or until potatoes are soft.
4. Puree in a food processor until smooth.

Here's a recipe for Irish Soda Bread from my Irish mother-in-law, who's a lovely lassie complete with red hair. Doesn't that sound so old-fashioned? The stereotypical housewife asking her mother-in-law for family recipes to cook for her husband. And boy am I glad I did! It's delicious and practically foolproof.

This is my go-to recipe for Irish Soda Bread, and makes one large loaf that fills a large bundt pan (which said mother-in-law gave me for Christmas one year) or two smaller ones.

Irish Soda Bread

4 cups flour
½ cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1.5 cups buttermilk (or 1 tablespoon vinegar with each cup of regular/soy milk)
2 eggs
½ cup butter (or 1 stick)
"fistful" of caraway seeds and raisins (that's exactly how she said it)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees
2. Mix together dry ingredients in a large bowl
3. In another bowl, whisk together buttermilk & eggs
4. Melt butter and add to buttermilk & egg mixture
5. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients, along with caraway seeds & raisins. Stir with a light touch, trying to avoid overmixing. The batter will be lumpy, which is exactly how it should be.
6. Bake in a greased bundt pan for 40 minutes or divide in half and shape into roundish loaves and place on a baking sheet for about 20 minutes.
   
   P.S. I've heard that it makes a nice base for French toast, too.

It's gorgeous (lotsa colors), delicious, nutritious, and easy to make. And if you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that's my recipe triumvirate, my foodie trinity. There's a lovely interplay between the saltiness of the cheese and sweetness of the orange slices, the snap of the onion and pillow-soft cheese. It's got everything.

Spinach Salad

Baby spinach, washed
Red onion, sliced thinly
Feta or cotija cheese, crumbled
Canned mandarin orange slices in light syrup

Combine & toss all the ingredients. Really, there isn't much more to say. Oh, if you want to eat this as a main course, add slices of hard-boiled eggs. And if you're a carnivore, crumbled bacon on top is almost gilding the lily.

Guess what I'm eating for dinner tonight?

It's been fun, but right now we're tapped out. The site will remain up for future reference, but there won't be any new posts. We hope you enjoyed reading as much as we had writing.

Until we meet again!

Renting two old DVDs was cheaper than renting one new release, so we rented "Chariots" and another Oscar-winning film, "The Paper Chase", for less than it would have cost to rent "All About Steve."

(This strategy has its risks.)

It turns out that Berkeleyites have been so successful in reducing their trash, that the city is $4 million short of projected revenue due to people doing the same.

While some of the adjustments will be painful, overall, I'd prefer to see further reduction of waste in the world, and further adjustment to it.

Loosely translated, it's "Puffy Cake," something akin to sponge cake thanks to its airy texture. What's different about it is that it isn't baked in an oven, but rather steamed in a rice cooker. My mom gave me a vintage one last December, the same model I used to make rice for the nightly meal.

Sadly, the recipe is specially designed for the Tatung Rice Cooker in the 10-cup size, so I have no idea if it will work in any other brand or type, which is an indirect heat cooker.

4 eggs
1.5 cups brown sugar
0.75 cups milk
0.5 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1.5 cups flour, sifted
6 tablespoons vegetable oil

1. Whisk eggs vigorously in a bowl, then add sugar and milk.
2. Dissolve baking soda & powder in a tablespoon of water, then add to egg-sugar-milk
   mixture.
3. Whisk in sifted flour until no lumps remain.
4. Add oil.
5. Pour into Tatung rice cooker's inner pot, then add 1.5 cups water to the outside and steam for approximately 50 minutes, or until a plunged knife comes out clean.

I never understood Mark Twain's assertion about cauliflower being a cabbage with a college education, but it is a standout in an already stellar cast of cruciferous vegetables.

Like root vegetables, cauliflower has a high sugar content that makes it spectacular for oven-roasting. And like most of my favorite recipes, it's embarrassingly easy yet oh-so delicious.

Roasted Cauliflower

• 1 head cauliflower
• olive oil
• salt

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees
2. Wash cauliflower and chop into florets and slices, ensuring each piece has a flat side (so better to caramelize!).
3. Pour a few tablespoons of olive oil on a heavy baking sheet
4. Place cauliflower pieces flat side down onto baking sheet
5. Roast in oven for 15 minutes, or until cauliflower is crisp and the flat sides are deep brown.
6. Sprinkle with salt to taste and enjoy. (They lose their crispness quickly after removing from the oven, so eat 'em while their hot!)

And RIP, Berkeley Daily Planet, my source for news Berkeley. You will be missed. :-(

They even go so far as to display the new items in the front windows of the store a few days before said morning, covered with white bed sheets, before the big reveal on the annointed Tuesday. It's very dramatic. And if you're lucky enough to be on their mailing list, you'll receive a catalog so you'll know what all the featured items are beforehand.

It's a fascinating use of the scarcity principle of selling, whereby a retailer artificially or simply creates the impression that there is a limited amount of time and/or stock to buy an item. To the purchaser, they suddenly feel they must buy now without dawdling, otherwise the fantastic price or item cannot be had.

Let me tell you that their prices aren't that good due to shoddy product quality (but it looks so pretty in the catalog!) and that each store may not even have the coveted item you want. I know this because my sister has been foiled one too many times over the years.

I do have to hand it to them for creating good retail buzz: years ago, I was walking down the street and saw a line of middle-aged, middle-class-looking women halfway down the block patiently waiting for that month's Tuesday morning bounty. The middle-aged, middle-class-looking woman walking in front of me asked the women in line what the excitement was about, and promptly queued up when she heard it was "A fantastic sale!"

One of my failures of frugality was the time I bought from my eye doctor clip-on sunglasses that were fitted exactly to my glasses. They cost a lot.

Yesterday, I bought generic clip-ons from Costco for $13. They fit my glasses well, and look fine. (They're not flip-up so don't have the flip-ups' bulky hardware over the bridge of your nose.) If you were to look very closely, you'd notice their inexact fit, and the small spring that makes them adjustable, and I'm fine with that.

Whenever you're faced with a pricey purchase, make sure you know what the alternatives are.

This is why I love Cooks Illustrated. It's the food and kitchen gadget version of Consumer Reports magazine.

It accepts no advertising, so their editorial content is beholden-free. Not to mention, it's chock full of high quality content, maximized on each beautifully hand-illustrated page.

There are kitchen appliance reviews that take into account price and performance (its editor-in-chief is a frugal New Englander) and explain why a particular brand was not rated a Winner, with several Best Buys as runners-up, again explaining why (usually has to do with an exorbitant, status symbol price tag --- cough cough Viking cough cough).

And even better, the recipes are optimized. A Cooks Illustrated recipe with its strange quantities are there for a reason. Because someone literally made the recipe over and over again (I've heard mention of eighty times) slowly adding or subtracting an ingredient in tablespoon quantities until hitting the sweet spot.

Last week I searched for banana bread recipes on the internet. They all contained the usual ingredients, but some had both baking soda and baking powder in them. It didn't really make much sense to me. It felt like "Well, that's the recipe my mom used."

Sure enough, I went to Cooks Illustrated and found their recipe that called for a single leavening agent. And if they had both soda and powder in the recipe, they would have explained it in the accompanying article. The recipe explanations satisfy the budding food scientist in me. My questions are laid to rest, knowing that someone has methodically questioned every ingredient in the recipe to ensure reproducibility and best taste.

So imagine my surprise when the accompanying CI article mentioned that it was box-mix brownies that pioneered the shiny, crackly top! Saturated fats (read: fats that are solid at room temp) in addition to unsatured fats (oils at room temperature) were apparently the secret.

Looks like there's going to be brownies in my future...

In 1978, at age eighteen, she wrote Possum Living, a frugal-living book that made her briefly famous amid an infamous economy. Then she went off the grid in the most unexpected of ways--she went mainstream. Now Dolly--and her book--are back.

This is a fascinating story about a father and daughter who came close to opting out of handling money altogether, and how the daughter opted back in, and how she's living now.

Pollan further underscores that the U.S. government's food policies facilitate bad nutrition by making junk food cheaper.

As individuals, we can pay more for good food now, or more for health care later. The latter plan is apt to create more suffering.

For instance, we finally did get a GPS. It was a recent, but not brand new, model, looked new, and has worked fine.

For years, I had scoffed at Ask Metafilter's recommendations of Logitech Harmony remote controls, which approach $100. Who'd pay that for a remote? I thought. Not me. But when I found a refurbished several-models-out-of-date one for sale, I tried it, and understood why people like them. I'm still not someone who'd pay $100 for a remote, but I didn't have to be.