During my first fall as a single person, I started eating fried fish
for dinner a few nights a week. I cooked it with ingredients I bought
at M2M, a Korean bodega across the street from my apartment building in
the East Village. M2M sold three types of fish: salmon, sole, and basa.
The salmon was bright orange and fat, the sole was thin and yellow with
odd raised bumps like pores, and the basa was light pink and
smooth-fleshed. I have a bourgeois distaste for salmon stemming from a
childhood vacation to France where it had was served at nearly every
meal, and I feared the wan, pebbly sole. So I always bought the basa,
despite the fact that before moving across the street from M2M I had
never heard of this fish.
Each package of basa contained two fillets; when I cooked dinner for myself, I used only one, leaving the other piece in its yellow Styrofoam tray and covering it with cellophane wrap to spend another night in the refrigerator. I rinsed the basa fillet under the water, sometimes squeezing the juice of half of a lemon onto the slippery flesh. Then I traced the seam that ran down the center of the fillet with my small ceramic knife and divided the fillet in two parts. There were no bones. I cut each of the twin pieces into smaller chunks, then broke an egg into a bowls and beat it. In another bowl I mixed together equal parts flour and cornmeal with half-teaspoons of black pepper and oregano and a pinch of salt. I dropped the pieces of fish into the beaten egg, rinsed them around with the fingers of my left hand, and then dropped them into the flour mixture. I tossed them in the flour with the fingers of my right hand.
What? Where?
Not only do I find the word linguine the most attractive to pronouce: lingweeeeeeneh – I also reckon its shape is one of the most appealing of all pastas when wrapped around the tongue. Curiously, linguine is a rare pasta within the indexes of most of the reputable Italian cookbooks I have, but when I finally found a brief description, the gist of it seemed to suggest flattened spaghetti. And, in fact, that is exactly what it is: not as wide as fettuccine or tagliatelle, but a bit thicker than trenette. And trenette is often understood to be the most favored pasta for dressing with pesto.
The best way to enjoy summer is to set goals for yourself. The best
summer I ever had was when my friend Becky and I set a goal to eat at
every single restaurant on the 25 best cheap eats from Los Angeles
magazine. We failed to accomplish the goal, but is failure really such
a bad thing when you’re eating well on the way there? 
I love making pizza, not just because it's fun, but also because I think mine can rival any pizza parlor's. I have the entire set-up, including a pizza stone and peel. But this time I put all that aside to try something new. Instead of the typical way of baking pizza, have you ever tried grilling it? For years I've been told that grilled pizza is the best, but I haven't actually done it myself until now. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by the outcome.