Toasted Four Grain Cereal

Somehow, I've managed to pass the weekday breakfast baton. Wayne has always been the house barista, keeping me (and any visiting friends) adequately caffeinated. At some point, a couple years back, he started adding a toasty overnight oatmeal to his morning repertoire. Actually, he usually does a blend of oats and other rolled grains, but if you like oatmeal, you'll like this. Lynn, from Satsuma Press, stayed with us recently, was asking about the recipe. This is for her and any of you who are looking for a hot, filling, wintertime breakfast cereal that you can trick out with all sorts of different toppings.

There are a number of four or five-grain breakfast cereal blends you can buy ready-mixed. That said, it is incredibly easy to make your own blend, and keep it on-hand in a jar. We've been using a blend of...

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Toasted Four Grain Cereal (with recipe)

In the last week I've done a bunch of things. I returned to a vintage shop, just up the street, to buy a pair of old metal kitchen stools (painted a muted shade of robin's egg blue). Someone beat me to it. I baked a granola pound cake (a bit of a miss), brewed two batches of California common, and bought a sack of stinging nettles at the Farmers market to work into the cottage cheese pancakes I can't seem to get enough of. There were three loads of laundry, two runs of the dishwasher, and lots of friends who've stopped by. And I made this Miso Sesame Winter Squash for lunch yesterday.

It's a riff on one of the recipes in Bryant Terry's new cookbook - his Molasses, Miso, and Maple Candied Sweet Potatoes. I swapped in some delicata...

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Miso Sesame Winter Squash (with recipe)

I'm not kidding when I tell you it looks like a citrus orchard shook out its limbs in my kitchen. There are sweet limes and Meyer lemons on the counter near the sink, wild limes in the corners of window sills, oblong mandarinquats and petite kalamansi oranges scattered across other flat surfaces. And then, the prize of all prizes, a massive, electric-yellow Buddha's hand (direct from a very special Southern California garden) putting off more fragrance than the rest combined. So, I set to work making a spectrum of citrus salts.

They're pretty, and provide a pop of surprise, and your friends will love you even more when you hand them little jars to take home. Mostly, I use these as finishing salts. I love the wild lime salt sprinkled over coconut milk-based curries, or as a finishing touch on spring rolls. Mandarinquat...

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Citrus Salt (with recipe)

As promised, black bread. It's what I crave when I think of winter-time baking, and I've been making consecutive loaves over the past few weeks. Caraway-crusted, flecked with dashes of grated carrot, it's dark and hearty, and perfect when toasted then topped with a fat smear of dill butter. This is a hodgepodge of a recipe that isn't shy with the rye flour, and stems from a version of black bread in Dan Lepard's Short & Sweet. I use Dan's ingredient list and the method of bread-making I learned as a kid. Pretty much - mix, rise, punch, rise, bake.

What you end up with here is a rustic, elbows-on-the-table style of crusted loaf with an assertive caraway-molasses streak. Once it's out of the oven, use your best butter to top it. Or, let a slab of it sit under a broiler...

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Black Bread (with recipe)

Hi everyone, how about a favorites list? I feel like I have enough good stuff to roll it out a bit early this month. Not to mention, it'll give me a chance to focus on jotting down a recipe for the bread I've been baking every few days for the past couple of weeks. This bread is dark and hearty, yeast-leavened, and perfect for soup-dunking. Or crouton making. Or tartine broiling. I think you'll like, or at least I hope you will. In the meantime,

- A Polaroid a day for 18 years.

- Sequin photobooths.

- Fantasy real estate listing.

- Joan Didion's packing list.

- On the list to cook: this, and this.

- EAMES: The Architect and the Painter

- Revisitng this soup.

- Anna's Daughters' Chocolate Rye Bark

- Get-away.

- This photo...

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Favorites List (January 2012)

2011 was the best kind of chaotic year. There's no other way to say it. I flew to London, Portland, Palm Springs, and West Virginia. I rode rails to Paris, drove to Marfa, and walked my way through the soles of three pairs of shoes. I moved. Not far, it took the moving truck just under four minutes to drive from house A to house B. But how we filled that beast of a truck with our stuff, I'll never understand. What else? I took a lot of photos. There was a five-alarm fire scary close. I turned my kitchen / basement into a brewery. I spent time, in person, with people I'd previously admired from afar. And I spent a good number of quiet hours on Saturday mornings trimming flowers. A hobby that helped, because at exactly this time last year I was...

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Oregano Brussels Sprouts (with recipe)

From where I sit, I can see the laundry piled high knee-high. The trash, compost, and recycling are overflowing, threatening to take over the kitchen entirely. When I glance down, I can see my toenails are painted a shade of vampy maroon, my feet sit flat against a white tile floor covered in a hideous patina of flour, sugar, and fiber particles that have migrated from the jute runner in the hallway. It's just gross.

That said, this is the first time in the past ten days I've had a moment to sit down and spend some time with a growing pile of magazines and media (including the new Kinfolk), and I have no intention of moving anytime soon. I did a short little essay about winter in the new Kinfolk (volume two), it goes along with some pictures Wayne...

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Green Lentil Soup with Curried Brown Butter (with recipe)