Urban Honking

Every so often we like to turn over the blog buttons to friends who have a kitchen secret or a standout recipe. The latest comes from Portland natives and recent restaurateurs Ali and Evan. We’ve known them for years and highly recommend peeps check out their new peppermint dreamboat of a shop, the Little Red […]

The anniversaries of many of our favorite breweries mark our calendars with exclamation points and smiley faces. There are some annual milestones that sneak up on us in wonderful ways. Finding the latest special release from Unibroue par example always makes us smile collectively, whereas the yearly release of Hopsickle (equivocally as the birthday celebration […]

When we’re super strapped for cash, the first luxury product we cut from our pantry is canned items. Sure a can of garbanzo beans sets you back, oh, 69 cents. But buying industrial-sized sacks of dry beans for $3/10 pounds feels thrifty. When it comes to putting one of those sacks of beanies to good […]

News flash: If it’s cutesy, someone’s done it before. After a recent impulse buy of little round ring pasta, the obvious direction seemed to be simmering up some old-school Spaghettios, just with better ingredients. Not only did we discover we’ve been trumped on this one by another vegetarian blog, they made the same yuck-yuck intro. […]

For many epicureans, as with any other group of enthusiasts, there will always be archetypal representations of genre based perfection that are lost, or simply cease to exist. The fish that got away, is a typical lament for any manner of minutia masters and for the booze hound and the beer snob, these occurrences become […]

It being mid-September, summer salad season is in its last throes and our salad spinners are ‘bout to be put away. Of course, being produce geeks and living in perpetual sun, we never fully hibernate from the greenery, if anything our kitchens start seeing more salads sans lettuce. Last weekend we messed with a version […]

Fruit salad is a rather nefarious term usually referring to some kind of fructose based nightmare suspended in gelatin that you reluctantly shove down your gullet at a friends’ grandparent house, or a typical mish mash of randomly cut fruits and berries that serve as a buffet throwaway or (apparently) an invitation to sex. For […]

Lagunitas is one of the few breweries that has taken our pitch seriously enough to send us a box of complimentary “review” beer. That was about, oh, a year and a half ago: A huge-ass cardboard box came via FedEx to the Hot Knives offices (back when we were a food and drink column for […]

Most our homies don’t need encouragement to eat their leafy greens, but hey, it happens. For those who don’t get salad (and they are out there, even amongst vegans), there is one and only one cure: excellent croutons. They can turn a plate of salad into a big bowl of tasty bread that happens to […]

Quite literally the champagne of beers, Deus Brut des Flandres is light and sparkly and — if you ask some of the beefier beer advocates out there — for girls. (This despite the fact that it’s extremely challenging to not pronounce its name “deuce.”) It was an unseasonably hot Sunday afternoon and we were gawking […]