Easy as pie

It is often easier to eat pie than it is to slice and serve pie intact. The filling is sweeter than I would have liked. But it is nothing a small scoop of vanilla ice cream afterward can not temper.

Burger bliss

The U stands for Umami, by far the best burger in Southern California I have eaten today.

Like magic

The tree by the side of the house is sprouting apples again, if sprouting is the right word for apples on a tree. The thing is, I haven't cared for it all year. I haven't given it any special treatment. I haven't pruned it or fertilized it. Nothing. Like clockwork, autumn approaches. The apples return. Like magic, time shifts.

What sugar is

"What sugar is and what it means changes according to where we happen to find it. It's a wholesome ingredient blended into down-home confections or it's the non-nutritive additive dumped into junk food. It's the pure and natural sweetener in fruity retro-chic sodas, or it's the stuff of evil lurking in cereal, baby food, and juice. It's a woman's food, in chocolates and cupcakes. It's a man's food, the stuff of sodas, energy drinks, and nutrition bars.

"It's troubling, these multiple lives. As an equal-opportunity lover of all things sweet, I'd like to think the best of them. I'd like to believe they do no harm when enjoyed in moderation and offer only the most excellent things in life - if not good health exactly, then certainly good spirits, good times, and a sense of freedom that takes us back to our youth. But in reality, the taste of sweet can have positive effects and negative effects depending on the kind we eat, how often we eat it, and what else we're eating with it. Those choices we make color other people's perception of our level of sophistication and our wealth... They highlight the disparities between the haves and the have-nots, and between the strivers and the lucky ones who are already where they want to be."

Joanne Chen, in "The Taste of Sweet: Our Complicated Love Affair with Our Favorite Treats"

The cool down

I see directions for a vegetable paella in a cookbook, and think to tackle the dish myself. I saute onions and bell peppers, but mess up on the spices. The heat is just a tad too intense. Not to worry. There is peach ice cream to finish.

The alumni network

A restaurant does not stay in business for four decades without graduating a few fascinating food folks.

The San Francisco Chronicle's story on Alice Waters and Chez Panisse highlights, among other things, the Berkeley eatery's impressive and far-reaching network of alumni, which extends "to high-end restaurants, artisan bakeries, ice cream shops and cafes - not to mention the pages of dozens of cookbooks throughout the years."

It includes:

Alison Barakat, co-owner of Bakesale Betty in Oakland.

Paul Bertolli, former executive chef of Oliveto in Oakland, and founder of Fra' Mani, a handcrafted salumi and sausage company.

Mary Canales, co-owner of Ici ice cream in Berkeley.

Diane Dexter, co-founder of Metropolis Baking Company in Berkeley.

Suzanne Goin, chef and co-owner of Lucques in Los Angeles, and cookbook author ("Sunday Suppers at Lucques: Seasonal Recipes from Market to Table").

Joyce Goldstein, former chef and owner of Square One, and cookbook author ("Mediterranean Fresh: A Compendium of One-Plate Salad Meals and Mix-and-Match Dressings").

Rick Hackett, chef and owner of Bocanova in Oakland's Jack London Square.

Charlie Hallowell, owner of Pizzaiolo, and Boot and Shoe Service in Oakland.

Paul Johnson, president and founder of Monterey Fish Market in Berkeley and San Francisco.

David Lebovitz, cookbook author ("The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City").

Lili Lecoq, founder of La Farine in Berkeley.

Deborah Madison, founding chef of Greens, and cookbook author ("Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone").

Russell Moore, chef and co-owner of Camino in Oakland.

Mark Peel, opened Campanile in Los Angeles.

Gayle Pirie, chef and co-owner of Foreign Cinema in San Francisco.

Claire Ptak, owner of baking company, cafe and cake shop Violet in London's East End, and cookbook author ("The Whoopie Pie Book").

Judy Rodgers, chef and co-owner of Zuni Cafe in San Francisco.

Amaryll Schwertner, co-owner of Boulettes Larder in San Francisco's Ferry Building Marketplace.

Lindsey Shere, opened Downtown Bakery & Creamery in Healdsburg.

Peggy Smith, co-founded Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes Station.

Steve Sullivan, founded Acme Bread in Berkeley.

Jeremiah Tower, chef and co-owner of Stars in San Francisco.

Jonathan Waxman, chef and owner of Barbuto in New York City, and cookbook author ("A Great American Cook: Recipes from the Home Kitchen of One of Our Most Influential Chefs").

Picking a peach

"Consider where the fruit came from. If it came from 3,000 miles away, then bear in mind that it was probably picked at a much more immature stage, and it's not going to be as ripe and delicious. If it came from a neighboring state, it's probably a whole lot riper."

Desmond Layne, Clemson University peach specialist, on NPR's "All Things Considered"

"The Giant Peach"

"It was quite a large hole, the sort of thing an animal about the size of a fox might have made.

"James knelt down in front of it and poked his head and shoulders inside.

"He crawled in.

"He kept on crawling.

"This isn't just a hole, he thought excitedly. It's a tunnel!

"The tunnel was damp and murky, and all around him there was the curious bittersweet smell of fresh peach. The floor was soggy under his knees, the walls were wet and sticky, and peach juice was dripping from the ceiling. James opened his mouth and caught some of it on his tongue. It tasted delicious.

"He was crawling uphill now, as though the tunnel were leading straight toward the very center of the gigantic fruit. Every few seconds he paused and took a bite out of the wall. The peach flesh was sweet and juicy, and marvelously refreshing.

"He crawled on for several more yards, and then suddenly - bang - the top of his head bumped into something extremely hard blocking his way. He glanced up. In front of him there was a solid wall that seemed at first as though it were made of wood. He touched it with his fingers. It certainly felt like wood, except that it was very jagged and full of deep grooves.

"'Good heavens!' he said. 'I know what this is! I've come to the stone in the middle of the peach!'"

Roald Dahl, in "James and the Giant Peach"

A human noodle vacuum

"You're gonna slurp those noodles. You're not chewing them. You're not cutting them up. You're trying to inhale them like a human noodle vacuum. And they should slurp in a pleasing way...

"And then that broth that they're served in, it should dress the noodles. It should coat the noodles. It should flavor the noodles. It seems like the simplest thing for a bowl of noodle soup to do. But when you're in front of a bowl and that's happening... you're most of the way there..."

Peter Meehan, co-editor of Lucky Peach, on a proper bowl of ramen on NPR's "All Things Considered"

Finger-lickin' good

For Nigel Slater, the best part about honey-glazed chicken wings comes toward the end of the meal.

"Like watching the credits rolling after a film, the licking of fingers is when you get to savour what you have just enjoyed..."

The British food writer serves up another damn fine read in The Observer. Without fail, he makes us hungry.

Bagels on the brain

One minute I am reading about bagels in Britain, reminiscing, for example, about Brick Lane Beigel Bake in London.

"Anyone who has visited an authentic bagel shop will know the steamy, burnished aroma of bagels made in small batches... Freshness is the core philosophy in this place, and the ovens are on the go continually. Under the glossy crust, the dough is dense yet tender, slightly sweet with a beery yeastiness..."

The next minute I am toasting a bagel for breakfast and slathering it with cream cheese. It doesn't take a whole lot of convincing. I am easy like that.

Hard to resist

"Then the Tour started. And it was impossible to resist. It always is. It sits there like a slice of key lime pie or the last piece of fried chicken, mocking will power. Cycling may punish you later, but it's so seductive in the present. That is what the sport knows, why it perseveres, despite its repeated, maddening mess-making..."

Only in The Wall Street Journal perhaps can a sports writer compare the Tour de France, "already stuck in a queasy fog," to key lime pie and fried chicken. Oddly enough, though, the references work.

Peeling the banana

Who knew the banana could be such a complicated fruit? Or, perhaps more accurately, who didn't know? Really.

Dan Koeppel's book "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World" is fascinating.

"The more I researched, the more it became clear that there's nothing we eat - that the world eats - more paradoxical than the banana," he writes. "The humble treat we pack into our lunchboxes is among the most complex crops cultivated by humans. In ancient times, the fruit helped the earliest farmers put down roots and establish communities. In the modern era, the banana - literally - has destroyed nations and ruined lives."

Koeppel's segment on "Science Friday" with Ira Flatow on NPR is equally fascinating.

"Plum Gorgeous"

This is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams, quoted in Romney Steele's "Plum Gorgeous: Recipes and Memories from the Orchard"

Cookie coincidence

I could not let the moment in Manhattan Beach pass without a picture.

Pass the passata

Ever since a friend in London mentioned passata in a curry recipe from his mother's kitchen, I have wondered about it. Is it essentially pureed tomatoes?

The Telegraph talks about San Marzano tomatoes in a piece on store-bought passata, used in this case to add depth and texture to weeknight pasta sauces. It provides some enlightenment.

Kabuki before Carmageddon

On a Thursday in Southern California, we navigate the 405 one last time before Carmageddon strikes over the weekend.

The sushi at Kabuki in the Howard Hughes Center is worth the drive. We enjoy the food and the company.

All-around goodness

Breakfast might or might not be our favorite meal of the day. That remains a toss-up. It does, however, give us an excellent reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Travel + Leisure offers a compelling look at hotel breakfasts around the world. There are dumplings in China, for example, and parathas in India. There are bangers and bacon in Britain, and biscuits and beignets in the U.S. There is goodness everywhere.

Food and family

When friends in the United States ask about her native Singapore, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan often tells them she misses "the food first and then my family. They think I'm joking." She assures them she's not.

She misses the complexity of dishes influenced by Chinese, Malaysian, Indian and European flavors. The availability of seafood and a love of spices, for example, gave birth to chili crab, "a signature Singaporean dish of crab fried in a vermilion, egg-streaked gravy."

In "A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family," Tan charts her affection for items she grew up eating. She describes her recent return to Singapore to cook with relatives, and to reconnect.

She contrasts situations in New York City, where, as a journalist, she always seemed to be on deadline, with adventures abroad alongside her mother, maternal grandmother and aunts. "I had slowed my life down so I could try to watch, to listen, to learn."

Tan reminisces about time she spent as a child with her father alone, after her mother and younger sister, Daphne, had gone to sleep.

They "huddled over late-night suppers of take-out noodles from Singapore's hawker stands... The slippery fried shrimp noodles we adored came sprinkled with chewy circles of squid. The noodles, wrapped in industrial-strength wax paper, were generally so greasy that the oil penetrated the paper, filling it with dark spots. I always looked forward to the moment when we would carefully peel back the wax paper and steam would rise, fogging up our glasses." It is a touching and evocative scene.

Over meals like these, she heard about her father's personal history and the pressures he occasionally faced. She learned of his work. They talked politics, sports and economics, too. He encouraged her ambitions, giving her the drive and confidence to leave home at 18 to attend college in America.

With humor and humility, Tan also recalls cooking lessons she received more recently from females in her extended family. She spent afternoons in their kitchens in Singapore making pineapple tarts, for example, the way her paternal grandmother made them decades earlier for Chinese New Year. They are small buttery shortbread cookies topped with a sweet, dense pineapple jam.

She sat anxiously with a camera and a notebook, she says, thinking it would be the best way to capture every detail. In the end, however, consistent and exact measurements proved elusive. The women around her worked quickly and instinctively.

While Singapore had been home to Tan, a place linked inextricably to her past, the Middle East becomes a new sort of home to Annia Ciezadlo. In "Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War," the New York City reporter shares her recent experiences living and working in Baghdad and Beirut. She describes the ways in which eating and cooking helped to settle her there.

Ciezadlo talks about the meals she had in Queens with her Lebanese husband, Mohamad, also a journalist, early in their courtship. They ordered baba ghanouj, for example, and stuffed grape leaves, something her Greek grandmother in Chicago used to make, something his mother in the Middle East still makes.

At his favorite neighborhood restaurant, they had "bolani kashalu, crisp oily little turnovers packed with soft potatoes and herbs and blistered brown on the outside." They had "banjan burani, charred, buttery eggplant slices buried under yogurt sprinkled with dried mint." They had chicken kebabs, basmati rice and grilled Afghan bread.

She writes of the couple's move overseas after he becomes chief of Newsday's Middle East bureau, and of their stays in Iraq and Lebanon. In unfamiliar locations, Ciezadlo says, she defaults to food.

"Some people construct work spaces when they travel, lining up their papers with care, stacking their books on the table, taping family pictures to the mirror. When I'm in a strange new city and feeling rootless, I cook. No matter how inhospitable the room or the streets outside, I construct a little field kitchen."

In Baghdad, for example, Ciezadlo plugged a hot plate into an electrical outlet in the hallway of their hotel. She shopped in local markets and prepared whatever she could find: green almonds, black figs, chicken.

She cooked, she says, "to comprehend the place I've landed in, to touch and feel and take in the raw materials of my new surroundings... (and) for that oldest of reasons: to banish loneliness, homesickness, the persistent feeling that I don't belong in a place." In terrific, deeply affecting prose, she speaks to the inherent pleasures of food and the necessities that transcend geography.

Ciezadlo met her in-laws in Beirut, too. She was tense in the beginning, fearful perhaps of what they might think, but soon realized she needn't be. Mohamad's mother, Umm Hassane, welcomed her with a large pot of zucchini stew. "The whole place smelled like garlic, beef stock, simmering vegetables, and lemons; to me, it smelled like home." She knew everything would eventually be all right.

Whether returning home to reconnect or venturing forth to strengthen bonds, whether in New York City or Singapore, Baghdad or Beirut, Tan and Ciezadlo celebrate the value of eating and cooking in their lives. They honor the role food plays in relation to family, the one they are born to as well as the one they marry into. They recognize what's important.

(A version of this review appears on www.culinate.com.)

Red, white and blue

Because it is the Fourth of July.