After a painfully long day of marching shop to shop near Opera, we needed to eat something. Anything. Shopping with CH and Angela was exhausting normally, but this was sale week in the fashion capital of the world, and it was intense. The hustle...
Maiden Lane in San Francisco on Wednesday at 12:30 was swarming with people chowing down on really affordable organic lunch boxes. The event was sponsored by the Edible Schoolyard and Levi's and went something like this: get in line, grab a lunch...
A recipe for a Japanese dessert: It takes a mizu-yokan recipe and a matcha-kuzu kanten (agar) and plates them next to one another.
A guide to the differences between Japanese Shochu vs. Korean Soju.
I've become addicted to miso. You know, that Japanese brown and weird looking paste consisting of fermented rice, soybeans, salt and the fungus kōjikin. Or at least that is the most traditional recipe, but miso can be found across Asia in many...
Summer this year is a total washout in wet, gray and windy London, so we decided to cheer ourselves up by going and scoffing some afternoon tea. All lady-like and dainty, of course. Not really. We prepared ourselves by skipping...
When you are in Chicago, aside from going on the architecture boat tour, or spend unnecessary amounts of money on the Magnificent Mile, where I stayed (it was basically like 5th Avenue in Manhattan. By the way, sales tax in IL is whopping 9.75%!!), one...
I recently had a fun evening shooting in the kitchen at elements with chef/owner Scott Anderson and guest chef Kevin Sbraga (above), who won Top Chef last season. The dinner was a special prix-fixe event (scroll down...
Recently a surge of concept stores and boutiques have marked our larger cities, the world over, from Paris to São Paulo, all bringing a bit of something new and curated. Concept shops like Paris' overtly "cool" Colette throbs with waves of tourists, often...
Avocado sashimi with yuzu kosho is the easiest dish to make. It's great to serve your guests before the main course. It's also an ideal option to serve yourself when you are feeling really lazy but a little fancy. I prepare this...
You either hate them or you love them--the open-faced sandwich. Most Danes love them, it's what they've eaten since they stopped being breastfed. But of all the foreign friends I have enjoyed a traditional Danish lunch with, around 50% have left most of the food...
Paris is packed with things like bad service, people who don't wear color, restaurants with funky bathrooms, people who embody blasé, park benches older than both of my countries, and street food that will screw your brains out, call you lover, and often never call...
SF Chefs spanned three days, August 5-7, and looked like it landed from somewhere in outer space, onto Union Square (notice how the tent is "punctured" by the Dewey Monument pole in the photo below). I went on Sunday around 1pm and the sides of the...
I haven't hosted any house parties for a while, but on a recent weekend, I ended up hosting three parties in a row. Thursday night was a last-minute potluck baby shower, and of course I made a beautiful diaper cake for the mother-to-be. Friday night,...
Tomatoes in the kitchen at Elements in Princeton, NJ. Skins were left on for a flowery look. Brilliant. Photo by Erin Gleeson.
The Bay Area is a big sprawling wasteland of awesome food, that rivals Los Angeles in its expansiveness. Sadly however, up in the hyped-up food scene of San Francisco ("the city"), no one really talks about the South Bay. San Jose...
The other morning I woke up with the worst hangover I've had in two years. I remember drinking shochu the night before like I was drinking water. I clearly ended up mixing up the two halfway through the night because they both...
Since I have moved to the U.S. from Japan, I have felt sad about how Americans drink, because American people don't drink so much. "飲みが足んねえ" (nomi ga tan ne e, or "They don't drink enough"). They are too discreet. Maybe people can't be a dead...
Cooking at home in your kitchen is so housewifey. Real men cook in nature. Especially when it's summer, and your garden is full of edible food which is the case with my friends C&A. I blogged about our Sunday Forest Lunch last year with...
One of the surprising things about London is that you can get very good, cheap Thai food in pubs. My friends and I call them Thai pubs, but they're just normal pubs serving Thai food cooked by Thai chefs instead of...
