This soup is comfort in a bowl, yet elegant enough for company.
It’s velvety smooth, yet has surprising hits of added texture from feta cheese crumbles and chopped sun-dried tomatoes.
“Sweet Potato and Cumin Soup with Feta Yogurt” is from the new cookbook, “Soup, Glorious Soup” (Kyle Books” by food writer Annie Bell, of which I recently received a review copy.
It’s filled with more than 100 soup recipes — from rustic to refined.
Someone very, very smart, that’s who.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Patrón Spirits has introduced a new tequila sure to make anyone swoon.
Patrón XO Cafe Dark Cocoa is Patrón Silver tequila combined with coffee from Vercruz and Chiapas, and chocolate from criollo cocoa beans, the rarest and most expensive grown.
The result is a 60-proof tequila that’s the color of hot fudge sauce.
You know the proprietors behind Bernal Cutlery in San Francisco have to have a rather macabre sense of humor to come up with a knife display like this one above.
They also know their stuff. Their shop, opened in 2005, boasts the largest selection of knives in San Francisco, including Japanese, French and vintage ones.
It also offers precision sharpening using Japanese whetstone grinding techniques, as well as classes to teach you how to care for — and best use — your knives at home.
Owner Josh Donald calls himself a knife geek. He even worked with stone while studying sculpture and poured metal in a foundry in order to refine his knife-sharpening skills even more. His team also includes two sushi chefs.
San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis definitely knows his way around a football field.
But these days, he’s also happily finding his bearings around the menu at his apparently new favorite restaurant — the just-opened Oryza Bistro at the Westfield Valley Fair shopping center in San Jose.
The pan-Asian restaurant, on the ground floor behind the parking structure between the two Macy’s stores, is barely three weeks old. But No. 85 has already eaten there at least three times. The brawny 6-foot-3-inch, 250-pound athlete is partial to the dainty string beans amandine (with toasted almonds, charred cherry tomatoes, soy sauce and shrimp paste; $8.95), which he tweeted excitedly about.
I learned of his fondness for the restaurant from a mention made in the Tablehopper e-newsletter. So, when I was invited to dine as a guest of the restaurant last week, I had my eyes on the alert. As luck would have it, he walked in with a female companion as my husband and I were finishing our dinner. The waitstaff greeted him like an old friend as he took a seat in a booth.
Sure, you can celebrate Valentine’s Day with chocolate.
But that’s just so expected, isn’t it?
Why not shake things up by giving a gift that’s sweet, symbolizes (ahem) fertility and is loaded with antioxidants that do a body good?
I’m talking about the humble grape.
You might be thinking, “boring,” but hear me out. The juicy seedless clusters you mindlessly pick up at the grocery store go all-out glam here.