On seeing my new kitchen bookshelf that holds most of my cookbooks and some organized lunch gear, reader Spiceaholic of One Bite at a Time asked for a list of all my cookbooks. Twist my arm! Please pardon me while I indulge my inner Virgo; here’s an organized list of my 150 or so books (plus food writing) with brief comments. They’re not all ringing endorsements; some of these I’ve had since college, others are more like souvenirs I’ve picked up in my travels. Plenty of award-winners, though — I do have a weakness for the James Beard and IACP cookbook awards. I’ve underlined my favorites. Have a recommendation for a really outstanding book? Let me know in comments. (Read on for the full list of cookbooks with commentary…)

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When the San Francisco skies are clear, bright, and blue I like to pop into Greens Restaurant where in addition to table service, they have a robust take-out menu. I usually grab a tofu sandwich on seeded bread, a side of their famous black bean chili and then walk the short distance to a nearby picnic bench where I enjoy the sailboats, seagulls, and sunshine. As I was reaching for my sandwich the other day I noticed a stack of containers packed with peanut-slathered noodles - inspiration strikes. It has been ages since I've had a good peanut noodle salad, so I decided to throw one together today for my lunch. I couldn't be bothered to walk to the store for ingredients (hence the lazy title), so I tapped my pantry for inspiration. In the end I had myself a perfect, colorful bowl of peanut-slathered soba noodles punctuated with spring onions, tofu, more peanuts, and asparagus.

This makes a big chunky batch of peanut noodle salad. Serve it up family-style on a platter at a potluck, party, or buffet - it holds up perfectly at room temp. I'm taking the leftovers with me on a flight tomorrow. :)

My favorite line in Alice Medrich's buckwheat butter cookie recipe is when she writes, "these cookies can be stored in an airtight container for at least 1 month." I had to smile and then wonder where Alice hides her cookies. Friends and neighbors in my vicinity polished off a batch of these in under an hour. I'm excited to highlight Alice's Pure Dessert book (along with her nibby buckwheat butter cookie recipe) for a few reasons. I'll start by saying, I don't find myself buying dedicated dessert books much anymore. I suspect part of the reason is because it is hard to find ones that use the types of ingredients I like to use. This book is more my speed. Alice uses many fresh ingredients and interesting underutilized flours and sweeteners - today's twist on a traditional butter cookie is a great example.

These nibby buckwheat butter cookies couldn't be easier to make, and the recipe is indicative of the type of treats you'll find in Pure Desserts. In this case, a handful of ingredients and a sliver of active time yields dozens of cacao freckled, butter-bronzed buckwheat cookies made from a blend of all-purpose and buckwheat flours. You can slice them or do as I did and roll and stamp them into whatever shapes you please. Those of you who have been readers for a long time know I have a weakness for a scalloped edge, so that is the route I took.

Other recipes in the book highlight and explore the flavors of some of my favorite grains, nuts, and minimally processed sweeteners as well. She does a shortbread and pound cake using kamut flour, a whole wheat sable cookie, and corn flour tuiles. On the sweetener front Alice serves up a honey ice cream and panna cotta, she also writes of muscovado bread pudding, a raw sugar toffee sauce, and a raw sugar flan. Don't get me wrong, this book has it's fair share of white sugar and all-purpose flour, but for those of you who are looking for a gateway book into delicious, fool-proof baking with some percentage of whole ingredients, Pure Desserts is a great place to start.

Give the cookies a try, if you like them consider trying some of the other recipes from her book as well. There is an amazing range of more minimally processed ingredients out there to explore - the flavors, colors, textures are exciting, unique and unfamiliar to many. Alice's book is a great place to dabble a bit, see what you think, without having to overhaul your entire pantry.

Related Links:
- Traveler's Lunchbox Q&A with Alice Medrich
- Cook & Eat: No Quince-idence
- Molly's take on these buckwheat cookies
- Luisa does Alice's whole wheat sables
- Grace highlights Pure Dessert on her favorite cookbooks list.

I made corned beef and cabbage for our St. Patrick’s Day dinner, so leftovers made their appearance in my three-year-old’s packed lunches last week. Surprisingly, he was a big fan of the cabbage and carrots, not so much the meat and potatoes.

Packing Tip: When packing moist foods in a standard bento box, be sure to drain them of excess moisture first. This helps prevent spoilage if the food hits room temperature before lunchtime.

Contents of preschooler bento lunch: Cabbage and carrots in broth, corned beef, boiled potatoes, and orange segments.

Morning prep time: 5 minutes, using dinner leftovers. In the morning I pre-warmed the thermal food jar with hot tap water while I microwaved the vegetables, and cut up the beef, potatoes and orange into bite-size pieces for easy preschooler eating. (Read on for packing details and an additional preschooler lunch.)

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After seeing all of the great ideas in the lunch gear organization event and Rhiannon’s cool bento bookcase, I was inspired to do a reorganization of my own. First problem: my mess of a kitchen bookshelf, which was overflowing with my ever-growing cookbook collection and insulated lunch bags.

As with my first bento organization push, I turned to Ikea for reasonably priced storage. A new tall Billy bookcase and height extension (US$105 total) go almost to the ceiling of my kitchen and nicely fill the corner near the kitchen table. My husband anchored it to the wall to keep it from falling over in case of an earthquake or energetic little climbers. (Here you can also see Bug’s little play kitchen and an old wall organizer for pot lids, also from Ikea.) (Read on for details and more photos.)

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It's unfortunate, but aside from the holiday season wild rice seems to be all but ignored. For an eight week stretch as the year comes to a close I typically see it used in two ways -in stuffings, or as a side salad punctuated with dried cranberries. Then nothing for another year. Wild rice is such a unique and nutritious ingredient, I made a note-to-self to try to work it in to my day to day cooking more often. As we start getting more warm days, the nuttiness of the rice plays beautifully off many springtime ingredients. For lunch yesterday I decided to make a spring inspired wild rice salad - vibrant asparagus, yellow split peas, and wild rice tossed in an almond butter dressing and finished off with a bit of goat cheese and chives.

For those of you who don't cook with wild rice often, there is a whole world of wild rice to learn about. The first thing (and many of you already know this), wild rice isn't actually a rice - it's an annual aquatic grass. There are a wide range of wild rices available. Some come from their native upper Great Lakes region, others come from Idaho, Washington, and California. You can buy hand-harvested wild rice, you can buy cultivated wild rice. Connoisseurs will be quick to tell you that wild rice hand-harvested from a canoe is like a fine wine, the creme de la creme, others counter that at $10-$20 per pound not everyone can afford it. As I mention in SNC it can be surprisingly light in color and often takes much less time to cook than it's cultivated cousin - the darker, glossy, brownish black wild rice you are likely familiar with.

We talk a lot about cooking times on this site, and as with most grains (or grain-like ingredients), cooking time can vary greatly from rice to rice depending on the type of wild rice you buy, when it was harvested, and so on - so keep that in mind as you go into any recipe that features wild rice.

Semi-related rice recipes:

- Poached Eggs Over Rice
- Red Rice Salad
- Coconut Rice
- Ten Minute Tasty Asparagus and Brown Rice

I know how frustrating it is to get excited about unusual bento boxes and accessories on Japanese websites, only to find out that the online stores won’t ship outside of Japan. Mail order companies that wouldn’t ship internationally were a pet peeve of mine when I lived in Japan, especially when looking for clothes and shoes. Being 5′10″ with size 11 feet made it hard to find properly fitting things there — my nickname “Biggie” is short for Bigfoot, after all! Anyway, I digress.

There are a number of online companies that will act as your own personal shopper or “friend in Japan”, placing bids on Japanese-language online auctions, accepting packages you order from mail order stores that won’t ship internationally, and shipping them over to you (for a price, of course — the low end is around 10%). This opens up the bento treasure of Japanese online stores (in addition to J-List, which does ship their bento stuff overseas). I’ve put together a list of some of these shipping and auction agents, some bigger online stores, and translation tools to guide you. (Read on for the full list.)

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I suspect many of you will have leftover eggs this weekend - ones that escaped the egg hunt and the color bath. I thought I'd post a quick list of favorite egg recipes from the past few years to serve as inspiration. I'm also curious about your all-time favorite ways to prepare eggs, feel free to share in the comments. If you have a blog where you've done a write-up about your favorite egg recipe, link to it in the comments. I'll add the five or ten that look and sound most appetizing to this post (later in the week). I suspect I'll have to shut down the comments at some point, but I'd love to hear about the egg recipes you are passionate about. Not the ones you just sort-of like, or the ones that sounds good on paper. I'm curious about the ones you really love, the ones you rate a ten, the ones you turn to regularly, or the ones with a particularly unique point of view. Please don't paste entire recipes into the comments. If you are referencing a recipe from a book simply share the name of the book, author, and what page the recipe is on. Feel free to give a quick synopsis of the technique or paraphrase the overall gist of the recipe, but please don't paste it verbatim.

- A Tasty Frittata Recipe
The prettiest, tastiest, frittata recipe. Made with potatoes, onions, and eggs drizzled with a cilantro chile sauce.

- Skinny Omelettes
Eggs cooked crepe thin and stuffed. A delicious and lighter alternative to heavy, cheese-stuffed omelette recipes - great for lunch and brunch.

- Egg Salad Sandwich (the only one I'll eat)
The egg salad sandwich recipe I turn to multiple times a week. Light on the mayo, with good quality eggs, chopped celery, and a sprinkling of chives on thinly sliced whole grain bread.

- Curried Egg Salad
A variation on my favorite egg salad recipe (above), this version uses plain yogurt in place of mayo and incorporates curry powder, chopped apples, toasted pecans, and minced chives.

- Baked Eggs
Baked eggs in edible cups with cherry tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and lots of vibrant spices.

- Poached Eggs Over Rice
An unassuming yet satisfying little rice bowl recipe - simply a reasonable serving of chard-flecked whole grain rice topped with a poached egg.

- Sweet Crepes
The perfect standard crepe recipe from Larousse Gastronomique, I've included many variations and topping suggestions here as well.

- Sun-dried Tomato Cottage Cheese Muffins
Golden, puffy, sun-dried tomato, and cottage cheese muffins. High in protein, low in carbs, they are a great, satisfying way to start the day.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend! I'll have a new recipe for you on Monday.

This farro salad accompanied me to a special birthday party recently. Those of you who have either of my books might recognize some of the components. I used my favorite citrus Parmesan vinaigrette to dress a bowl of healthy salad greens and farro grains, crumbled goat cheese and almonds. I make variations of this throughout the year using whatever is in season to go along with the greens and grains. I thought I'd share some footage of the party along with a video show-and-tell of how the salad comes together. You can find the written recipe instructions at the end of this post. And my apologies in advance, I swear it didn't dawn on me until after exporting the final video that you might be more interested in how to make the beautiful cupcakes you'll see at the end. Whoops. Maybe there will be a cupcake post in our future. ;)

- Video: larger version on You Tube
- How to view higher quality video on You Tube (new)

Related Links:
- Video: Big Sur Power Bars
- The cupcakes in the video were from Kara's Cupcakes
- Bluebird Grain Farms

It kills me that I can't take credit for today's black bean brownie recipe. As strange as it sounds (we're talking about brownies packed with pureed black beans), this recipe from a new book by Ania Catalano delivers deliciously dense, bite-sized squares of melt-in-your-mouth fudge-textured brownies. Keep in mind I'm someone who comes across hundreds of brownie recipes a year, it wasn't high on my to-do list to feature yet another brownie recipe. But the quirky ingredient list piqued my curiosity, and in the end the proof was in the pan. Ania mentions that this flourless brownie was the most sought-after recipe at her restaurant and bakery.

Ania's new book is called Baking with Agave Nectar. I was lucky enough to spend some time with a preview copy of it, and even wrote a blurb for the back cover. There are many reasons people are looking to alternative sweeteners. I wrote (and used) agave nectar in Super Natural Cooking because it is one of the most natural, least refined sweeteners available. People looking for sweeteners lower on the glycemic index explore agave nectar, as do many hypoglycemics, diabetics, and people with certain allergies. That being said, don't make the mistake of dismissing it as some sort of "health" or "diet" ingredient. The real reason for chef and home cooks alike to try it (if you haven't already) is because it tastes amazing - it really has its own thing going on. I won't get into all the specifics here, but I encourage you to give it a try. Ania's book is a great starting point for those of you who want to learn to bake with agave nectar in place of the typical white refined sugar called for in so many baking recipes. I also get into many of the specific characteristics of it in the "Use Natural Sweeteners" chapter of SNC with a few recipes that highlight it.

So, like I said - there are some quirky facets to this particular brownie recipe. But I'm now totally enamored with the use of the black beans batter, it really worked, not even a hint of beany flavor. Consequently, my head is now spinning with all sorts of thoughts about how I might use other pulses in future baking adventures. Wayne's comment...."eat your heart out Jessica Seinfeld."

Related link:
- Sugar-free, brown rice syrup brownies on Mighty Foods