At better Japanese restaurants you can order what’s called an omakase meal. Omakase means “I’ll leave it up to you” in Japanese. It apparently comes from the Japanese word “to entrust” because essentially what you are doing is entrusting your sushi selections to the chef. Supposedly it’s the best way to get the chef’s freshest…

There are some things that just can’t exist in healthy form. Kimchee fried rice is one of those things. I tried making a healthy version before, using brown rice and nitrite-free chicken sausage but it just wasn’t the same. A good kimchee fried rice uses a liberal amount of spam. The thing is, a few…

The Donner pass area is named after the infamous Donner party, a group of explorers who set out to California to strike it rich. They spent a disastrous winter in the mountains near Tahoe, with almost half of the group dying of starvation. The group is infamous in that the survivors had to resort to cannibalism to…

So apparently the Nugget Rib Cook-off in Reno is a pretty big deal. According to the website over half a million people visit it every year. I had been wanting to go for the past few years but for some reason or other I was never able to make it until this year. At the…

Even by my fairly gluttonous standards, this weekend was a pretty fattening weekend. First stop was House of Prime Rib. My friend Vince was back from China, so we hit up this bastion of gluttony to celebrate. It was pretty dark inside, my crappy cellphone camera couldn’t get a good picture. Time to get a…