Author: Mike McCandless
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Book publishing and me.
I could have figured what I needed to do long ago. Back when I was young and just getting good at my first real job. Even before that, when I was in the Army, or even in college when I thought I wanted to make films. Or, when I realized…
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Friendsgiving
What a great time when you’re a 20- or-30-something and you get together with work buddies or college buddies or any buddies for a Thanksgiving potluck. Chances are your people are from different places with different traditions and favorite recipes for stuffing, sides, or desserts. Everyone pitches in. Hats off…
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Pasta sauce
Hey, Dad really likes pasta with sauce…or without sauce, actually. I could eat it evey day probably. But then…you get it.
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Sugar is sweet — and so is sugar.
Sugar is sweet, but there so many sugars to choose from. I have a love-hate-2nd chance relationship with sugar. I don’t expect ever to embrace refined white sugar again, but there are several actual sugar and non-sugar sweeteners that pass muster for my various purposes. This is important to work…
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Dad’s Ragu
Just about everyone (We have a notable exception in our family.) likes pasta sauce with meat and tomato. I love it. I’ve made it many times and tried various recipes, mostly called ragu or Bolognese. Ragu in Italian means tasty or savory, or it refers to the meaty, tomatoey, stewy…
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Follow that salmon!
Salmon have been escaping from some saltwater open-net aquaculture sites at an alarming rate, according to Melissa Clark in the New York Times article, The Salmon on Your Plate Has a Troubling Cost. That’s right. In the worst cases, large numbers of escaping salmon have a devastating effect on native…
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Meals in the mail
I figured it was about time to talk about meal kit plans. We have tried several. And have canceled them all after a fair trial. I suppose this sounds like I’m condemning them, but I’m not. It’s just that after a while, it’s time to try something new. My favorites…
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Summer peach cobbler
I’ve always loved a fresh-fruit summer cobbler, even when called a buckle, crumble, crisp, Betty, or slump(!), but thought of them as a lot of work—or at least exceeding my “too much work” threshold—to be thought of as “convenient” or “fast.” No longer. This recipe is proving to be pretty…
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AI
I remember when AI (ah-ee) was a South America, three-toed sloth, and a word that would save your bacon in Scrabble. AI (ay-i) today has been delivered onto the scene after a 75-year gestation period, the offspring of massive-scale computing starting with ENIAC and a gene pool loaded with brainiacs.…
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Natural language
Maybe you’ve heard this one. Back in the 1950s a computer scientist was challenged to test the ability of his mainframe computer to translate from English to Russian and back again. Using punch cards, he submitted this phrase to the computer, “The flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak,”…
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Alice Waters
I hope that everyone knows and admires Alice Waters like I do for her contributions to healthy eating. But in case you’re not clued up, let me enlighten you. Way back in 1974, my future brother-in-law—a undergrad at Cal Berkeley—took me to Chez Panisse for lunch. It had been open…
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Doing Keto Defined
This is the simple definition. Keto is an eating hack. By this, I mean it’s something you do to finesse weight loss. It’s not a program you sign up for or pay a subscription fee to. It’s not just another diet that somebody else thought up to take your money.…
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The National Eating Disorder
DadsRecipeBox got its start when I decided to pass along family-favorite recipes so the kids could make those same dishes in their own kitchens some day. I also shared home-cooking tips I’d learned since stepping up my cooking activity what with The Queen building her home-based business. About that time,…
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Grandma’s Irish Cake
My Irish grandmother, Annie Allen, arrived at Ellis Island in 1909, a twenty-one-year-old with two little boys—my father (4) and his little brother Sam (2), in tow. I can’t imagine. She joined her husband Bill, who’d come ahead two years earlier to work and save money for her passage, Bill…
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Dad’s Holiday Cranberry Relish
My first cook book was a classic, The New York Times Cook Book by Craig Claiborne (Harper & Row, 1961). My ancient, rusty paperclip bookmarks tell the story of why I have kept it all these years. I use the book only a couple of times a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas.…
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Yams Richard
New Orleans is one of our favorite places. On our first trip there, in 1977, we visited—through pure luck—two of its greatest restaurants: Antoine’s, where we had pompano en papillote (in a paper bag) and Brennan’s, for its famous breakfast. We took away two Hurricane glasses from Brennan’s, “>The New…
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Grandma’s turkey stuffing
Thanksgiving has always been my second favorite holiday because when I was a kid, our family Thanksgiving made me feel a happy-family-ness, warmth, and love that were beyond our Scots-Irish/Norwegian family most of the time. Everyone (I think) felt the culinary highlight was the Thanksgiving turkey stuffing (sometimes called dressing…
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Dad’s Keto Chili
One way to make a long-term Keto diet go down easier is to Keto-ize your old favorite recipes. I mean, duh, right? Now that we are Keto veterans, in-it-to-win-it for the third time (!), I’m more interested than ever in making sure my old favs can still be enjoyed without…
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Keto re-re-boot
Yes, we are deep into a Keto diet for the third time. It’s working again, and we have new insights to share. Why did we stray? The pandemic and other priorities like bread-baking, dessert experiments, and new restaurant explorations got us off-track. Sound familiar? But here we are back on…
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Food and our health
For some, food is a means to instant gratification and not much more. But food on a personal level is mostly about health. Garbage in, garbage our, as they say.
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Dad’s Anytime Creamy Pasta Sauce
Versatility is my middle name or something like that when it comes to cooking. Actually, I’m pretty lazy and always looking for ways to cook something that tastes great, is repeatable, but not boring. This has led me to develop some recipes that can easily be adapted to what you…
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A Gentleman in Moscow
Other five-star reviewers have said most everything I might say. I did not want A Gentleman in Moscow to end and will make the rare move (for me) of reading it again, this time for the Kindle so that I can save my favorite references and passages. I was almost…
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Eat plants and prosper
It’s been a long, cold winter here in our town. Since the New Year, really, we just haven’t felt much like eating cold food. You know, like fresh fruits and vegetables. Weird thing. Comfort food has tasted that much more comfortable in this weather. But spring will come, eventually, and with…
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Clam chowder
A family classic in Mom’s clan since who knows when, clam chowder became our traditional Christmas Eve entree back in the mists of time.
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Enough food?
Back in the 1970’s, a Department of Agriculture scientist told me that food science was so advanced that there would no longer be a problem raising enough food to feed the world. There was one valley in Peru that could grow enough peas to meet the whole world’s demand. There…
Guy Cicero 