Urban Honking

Forget to make that reservation at the new organic small-plate izikaya cocktail raw food bistro for Valentine’s Day? Get stuck with a 4:45 seating time? You know, there’s no shame in cooking, for one another. Like Adam and Eve sharing the apple tarte tatin of knowledge, or whatever. For this V-Day — and the two-year […]

A few years ago we witnessed a close friend be deeply moved by fresh cheese. We had recently visited one of our favorite sandwich stops, Mario’s in Glendale, and happened to have perused their deli case. Along with innumerable cured beef and pork products from and inspired by Italy, there were literally six kinds of […]

On the eve of Super Bowl Sunday, we threw a Hot Knives dinner party. Jokes were made about making “nachos” out of Portuguese thistle rennet cheese and Egyptian fava beans, or terriyaki tofu burrito bites (shudder, barf). But without thinking about it, we really did stumble upon our own kind of couch-potato small plates menu […]

After many successes and failures in beer cookery; we’ve determined what might just be the perfect cooking beer. Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier is a rustic brew with a long history of intensity. It’s one of the few remaining breweries to exclusively utilize open flame drying techniques for roasting malts. For us, this technique poduces a beer […]

“Pop, phisss… utter vacuumed silence.” That is, essentially, the sound a bottle of Older Viscosity makes when you (finally) open it for a drinking. We like to think we could place it a line-up of recorded bottle-openings — much the same way those grating, accented halfwits from “Car Talk” would have you imitate the sound […]

Quick preface: We bow low before the soup kitchen altar of our friend Astara, soup wizard-ess and ancient soul, who throws together far superior carrot creations than we by the mere flick of her pinky finger — her curry carrot soup and her herbed carrot puree are both criminally delicious. If we could join a […]

Lately you’re favorite kitchen hood-rats have been slammed to the gills with the rigmarole of our non-hyperspace rat races. We’ve been slumping into beers and books a little too quickly in these first weeks of January, and our innate drive to spend three hours cooking after eight hours working has been a little stunted. We’ve […]

There have been days when we’ve cursed the Rocky Mountains for keeping the Colorado beers we love (and those we think we could love, if that love were only given a chance) from reaching our beer dealers in Los Angeles — silver bullet indeed. We’re used to getting pretty much whichever beer we want, when […]

In Lieu of super traditional New Year dishes like Tamales or Posole we opted for nothing but booze this year. In the bleary eyed aftermath (the last two weeks) we’ve all been craving a little something from the solid southwestern repertoire of beans, squash and corn, known historically as the horticultural triumvirate of The Three […]

Though we’re more than happy to sling out menu ideas to restaurateur friends when asked, we also have a secret game we play whereby every dish we cook up gets graded for whether it could one day occupy the menu of a Hot Knives restaurant. This is one of those dishes: a winter harvest hash […]