A bean salad will be as ordinary or extraordinary as the beans you start with. There's nothing wrong with using canned beans, but if good quality dried beans are parked just next door (and you get more beans for the money), it might be time to trade up. Trust me, it's like going from driving a Hyundai to a BMW. This salad features pretty Pebble beans alongside thinner-skinned Mayacoba and a few black lentils, all splashed with a brightly-flavored ginger-curry vinaigrette. You can certainly play around with the types of beans you use, I had two types of beans cooked up, and some black lentils in the freezer. With a minimal amount of chopping and a touch of whisking the salad came together in just a few minutes.

The Pebble beans are delightful to look at, a lot of fun to cook with, and although their colors and marks fade a bit during the cooking process in the end they still retain a nice amount of visual flair. The beans (from a single bush - not a blend) range in color from ivory to pale mustard, fleshy-pinks to cocoa colored. The second bean I used was the Mayacoba, a seductive pale mustard color when dried, they lose most of that in the hot water. This Peruvian bean works well in a salad like this because it's a cameleon of sorts, quite adaptable, nice texture, and it tends to take on the flavors around it - in this case the curry dressing.

More often than not the beans I use are from Rancho Gordo. Steve and his crew sell at my local market and I've cooked my way through many of his beans (which are also available via mail order). Steve's latest Rancho Gordo endeavor is an heirloom bean cookbook published by Chronicle Books - and it looks like it is shipping any day now. I'll feature a recipe from it as soon as I get my hands on a copy.

About a month ago I sent an email to my friend Gwen. I asked her to let me know the next time she was heading down to Chile. She works for the Huneeus family at Quintessa in Napa. They also own Veramonte in the Casablanca Valley just a short drive outside of Santiago Chile, and she travels there often. She replied immediately that a trip was in the works - she was in the process of booking her flight. The plan was to meet up with her friend Mai (who is Chilean and also works at Quintessa), head over to Mendoza (a wine region just a short hop over the Andes in Argentina), and then back to Santiago for a couple days of work/meetings. I asked if I could tag along, they said no problem, we tacked a few days in Buenos Aires onto the tail end of the adventure, and I started packing. It was an exciting whirlwind of a trip and I returned with a notebook full of notes, stories, and recipe ideas that I look forward to weaving into the site over the coming months.

For starters, I thought I'd share with you the day-by-day broad strokes of trip, links to the places we ate, stayed and visited, along with a few of the faces I encountered along the way. Thanks to Gwen and Mai for letting me tag along at the last minute, and for introducing me to their friends (and in Mai's case family!). Also, to all the individuals who were so generous with their time - we were greeted with open doors, stories, and friendship all along the way.

8/2: Getting to South America
American Airlines San Francisco to Los Angeles ---> LAN from Los Angeles to Santiago, Chile ---> Stunning flight over the Andes Mountain range - LAN Santiago, Chile to Mendoza, Argentina

8/3: Arrive in Mendoza
Checked into the Park Hyatt Mendoza, on the Plaza de la Independencia, about fifteen minutes from the airport. Went for a run on the treadmill at the hotel and then walked around central Mendoza. It was a Sunday so not much was going on. Just around the corner from the hotel we tasted a bunch of local wines at The Vines of Mendoza Tasting Room (if you go ask for Emilia Martinez, she did a great job guiding us through the wines). I did the Las Muestras flight, a sampling of signature regional varietals and Gwen did Las Reservas de Argentina, the reserve selections. And we also ordered a fantastic plate of cheeses from the area.

8/4: Lujan de Cuyo, Mendoza Wineries
Picked up our other friend Mai from the Mendoza airport. The Mendoza region is best known for its Malbecs and many of the wineries are a short drive outside Mendoza's city center. Having a driver was key to covering a lot of ground, and both drivers we had were great. If any of you want the details on the car company we used email me and I will track down that info for you. First stop - Carlos Pulenta Winery. Lunch at Club Tapiz’s Terruño restaurant, Maipu. Onto Achaval Ferrer Winery, and back to Carlos Pulenta for a tour of his winery. Checked into Posada Borravino before dinner at 1884 Francis Mallmann at Bodega Escorihuela.

8/5: More Mendoza Wineries
- We ran into Laura Catena at dinner the previous night and she was nice enough to invite us to Catena Zapata - not a bad place to kick of the day and get my camera warmed up. Next up - a tasting at Vina Cobos, and then up the road for a quick tour of Cavas Wine Lodge. Lunch was great - we did a tasting and visited with Mai's friend Sebastian and his family and colleagues at Bodega Ruca Malen. They did some delicious vegetarian inspired food pairings for me - a couple in particular used everyday ingredients (like zucchini and eggplant) in delicious and unexpected ways. More to come on this front in a future post. We were running a bit late and missed our appointment at Terrazas de los Andes, so we ended up stopping off at Marcelino Wine Store on the way to the airport instead. Flew from Mendoza, Argentina to Santiago, Chile, and checked into the Ritz-Carlton, Santiago. Walked up the street for dinner at Akarana.

8/6: Santiago, Chile
I hung out solo in Santiago. Started my day with a macchiato from one of the numerous Starbucks within shouting distance of the hotel (Chile is not known for its coffee). Then took the impeccable subway system to the Mercado Central de Santiago. Took the subway back in the direction of the hotel but got off to try to find one of the tortas shops a friend told me about over dinner. Found the tortas, had another coffee and decided to walk back to the hotel from there when I stumbled on Organisk - a little organic/natural foods shop. I ended up chatting with one of the owners for a while, they had some great products in stock. Freshened up at the hotel before enjoying a fantastic lunch at Rai with friends Paulina and Roberto (of Chileangourmet). They took me to one of their favorite spots where Chef Raimundo Tagle is doing some very cool things with Chilean ingredients - I'll write about the specifics (and why I'm such a fan of the work Paulina and Roberto are doing in Chile) in a future post. Went for a run on the treadmill back at the hotel and decided to stick around the hotel. Went downstairs and had a veg. club sandwich at Ritz-Carlton Wine 365 and then did a tasting flight of Chilean white wines. And chef Leiva gave me an impromptu tour of the Ritz kitchen :)...

8/7: Santiago, Casablanca, and Valparaiso, Chile
Had a leisurely morning and then drove out to the Casablanca Valley for a tasting at Veramonte and a tour of the vineyards. Spent a very special afternoon with Mery and Cristian at the Eden-esque Matetic. I got to walk the vineyards with alpacas, see how Mery makes her delicious Torta del Rosario - made from the milk of the sheep on the ranch, and watch the sunset behind the hills. I threatened to move in. We then drove to coastal Valparaiso and checked into Zero Hotel (if you go, splurge for a room with a view). A big group of us walked down the hill for dinner at Pasta e Vino Ristorante.

8/8: Valparaiso, Chile
Coffee and breakfast on the patio, and then a walk around Valparaiso. We stopped off at Casa Museo La Sebastiana before a drive out to Quintay. Then we headed back to Santiago, and checked back into the Ritz-Carlton. Got back in time to hit up Pura and Pueblito Los Dominicos for a bit of shopping before everything closed for the night.

8/9: On to Buenos Aires, Argentina
On to Buenos Aires where we grabbed our luggage and hopped into a cab to the Palermo Viejo neighborhood. Five Cool Rooms was the destination. Grabbed some lunch and walked around Palermo Viejo - great shopping on the cheap. Stopped at Bar 6 a bit later for a caffeinated pick-me-up, and eventually ate dinner at Bereber - all walking distance from the hotel.

8/10: Buenos Aires, Argentina
San Telmo Antique Market in the morning - loads of vintage cameras, costume jewelry, and vintage wind-up alarm clocks and old, colorful South America license plates. Walked around a bit then hopped into a cab and went to La Boca which ended up over-the-top touristy - we only stayed about 15 minutes. Lunch in Recoleta. Back to Palermo Viejo, where we had dinner at Bar Uriarte.

8/11: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Took a taxi to the Casa Rosada, and then a walked up the street to Cafe Tortoni. Walked from there over to the Puerto Madero district where I squirreled away snacks for the plane at I Fresh Market. Checked out El Gato Negro spice shop. And then took yet another cab to Bio in Palermo for lunch. Back to Palermo Viejo, sat out a thunder storm at Bar 6 and then Mott, before having dinner somewhere not worth mentioning.

8/12: 24 hours of flying
Checked out of hotel. Never-ending series of flights home. LAN Buenos Aires ---> American Airlines Santiago, Chile ---> American Airlines Miami, Florida ---> American Airlines San Francisco, California. Back home before noon in time for lunch with Wayne.

I rarely cook mixed grains because I feel compelled to cook type each grain in a separate pot - a pot for barley, one for rice, another for millet, etc. No one around here looks forward to doing the resulting dishes. It's bad enough scrubbing one rice pot, let alone a collective. Each grain cooks for a different amount of time, hence the need for all those pots - or that's what I thought. Today's recipe is a simple, single pot approach to mixed grains inspired by the following reader email, a grandmother of four...

Dear Heidi...I have three children and four grandchildren. There is one simple dish my three youngest grandchildren totally expect for me to have around when they come to see me. I have named it "Grandma's Grain" and would like to share it with those who frequent your website. It smells so good when it cooks, and is delicious! My grandchildren would rather have a bowl of this cereal than almost anything else I cook - and they can be very picky. This will stick to your ribs for about 4 or 5 hours, much longer than a bowl of regular cold cereal and milk.

We season it with extra virgin olive oil, season salt, food yeast, hot sauce, or any favorite seasoning. Avocado is a wonderful addition we thoroughly enjoy. It can also be eaten with the traditional milk and sweetener. This can also be used in a casserole the way you would use rice. The best, K.J.B.

The resulting cooked grain blend is textured, peppered with flecks of color, and filling. The millet, which cooks fastest breaks down and lends a creaminess that you wouldn't get otherwise. I can think of a hundred reasons to cook up a pot of this over the weekend and use it as the foundation for many meals - breakfast, lunch, or dinner - throughout the week. In the photo up above I've simply drizzled the grains with a bit of half-and-half, and sprinkled with a bit of raw sugar and toasted walnuts. For lunch I might go for a scoop with a poached egg and a little side salad. Or I could use it as the backbone of a "fried-rice" type dish with tofu. Or a baked version of arancini in place of day-old risotto. Or, or, or...

Also, before I sign off I want to apologize for not being very responsive in the comments the past week or so. I just got back from an inspiring trip to Chile and Argentina, which means I've been plane and hotel hopping for the past ten days. I'm looking forward to sharing some stories, recipes, and photos in the coming weeks...And thanks to everyone who emailed me suggestions :)...

I was having second thoughts about running this recipe. My plan was to combine toasted coconut, almonds, ground coffee, and good chocolate into little bite-sized clusters. Simply stir all the ingredients together in a big bowl and then spoon the mixture out onto a baking sheet into little mounds. Sort of like a home-made Almond Joys for the cook who cant be bothered to make a real coconut filling, and who certainly doesn't want to do the dunking required to make a chocolate coating. I also thought it might be a fun kids recipe (you could skip the espresso beans). But in the end, they aren't really my thing...

I should add, its not that I didn't like the taste or flavor of these. I simply think they are ugly. And they are fussy. But everyone around here seems to love them, Wayne used the word decadent, so I decided to share them with you regardless. A word of warning, while I don't normally encourage refrigerating chocolate - I promise you, if you leave these out in a summertime kitchen (yes, even in San Francisco) they will crumble in your hands. So, keep 'em cool.

A mouthful to pronounce, but relatively simple to make, this lemon achiote grilled tofu recipe is a favorite of mine this time of year - meaning the time of year we pretend there's a real grilling season in San Francisco. All I need is a jacket (or a ten minute break in the wind and fog), and we're in business. I'll be back from South America in a few days, and wrote this up before I left, the beautiful brick-colored hue you see on the tofu comes from using achiote powder in the marinade. It gives the tofu a deep, rich, earthy flavor profile, making it a crowd-pleaser with vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike. I'll grill up a bunch of this tofu and use it as a component in rice bowls or grain salads, thinly sliced in sandwiches, or even cubed into "croutons" in soup. The marinade gets a nice tangy backbone from cayenne-spiked, freshly squeezed lemon juice, and is rounded out with a bit of brown sugar.

Pronounced ah-chee-oh-tay, our title ingredient is available as a powder (or paste) made from ground annatto seeds. It seems like many in-the-know cooks who tire of chipotle, graduate to achiote. I use achiote powder and not the achiote paste. Two of the pastes I've found use red dye and preservatives (interesting because annatto is often used as a coloring agent). The pastes are also made with other ingredients like vinegar, and garlic, whereas the powder is simply ground annatto. Let me know if you know a brand of paste that you like that is all-natural, I haven't seen one - but to be fair, I haven't tried very hard.

One of the condiments that survived my recent refrigerator scouring was a three-quarters full tube of harissa - the brick red, earthy, and sometimes potent North African spice paste. I had it earmarked for a pasta dish I had in mind - long, thin whole wheat pasta noodles, olives, kale, pine nuts tossed in a pan for a tangle with a garlic-charged harissa and olive oil sauce. I'm packing my bags for a quick trip to Chile and Argentina, and thought this would be an easy send-off supper - with leftovers I can bring on the flight.

Keep in mind as you head into this recipe that the range of harissas available for purchase is vast - trust your taste buds, and if any of you have favorite brands, give a shout in the comments. One tube might be tastelessly tomato-y, the next tongue-torchingly hot. That being said, the best road to a great harissa is to make your own, but I'd be lying if I said I'm religious about it - hence, the tube of red in my refrigerator door.

I threw together this zucchini-flecked ricotta cheesecake when I got home from the farmers' market the other day. The green and yellow squash skins along with a nice amount of chopped dill visually pepper the interior of this savory cake. I used just enough egg to hold things together, creating a simple batter made primarily of ricotta cheese but also flavored with a bit of garlic, shallots, lemon zest, and a few straggler ingredients I found lounging around the kitchen seeking higher purpose. Lighter and less egg-y than a quiche it takes a while to bake, but minimal time ahead of that. I suspect that along with a few sides, it would be a welcome addition to any picnic basket.

Keep in mind this is a ricotta based cheesecake - not one based on cream cheese. The texture is going to be different (and delicious) in its own right.

Those of you who have been longtime readers know that I struggle on the gardening front. Oh how I struggle. Some years I don't even bother planting anything. I'm sufficiently discouraged by the skeletons of previous crops - they greet me when I step out to stretch on my back patio each morning. One neighbor is convinced I'm simply a drip line away from my own personal container garden of Eden. Sure. I was having lunch with two friends back in March, one is an editor for the garden section of a major magazine, the other is an accomplished food writer - she had an article about her (newly) prolific lemon tree in the newspaper that very week. It was inevitable, the topic turned to gardening. I half-heartedly stated, "well maybe this is my year."

Thinking back on it, this was more a question than a statement. Over the course of the next five minutes, it was decided that I would grow lettuce. They said, "anyone can grow lettuce." They said, "sprinkle the seeds in a pot, water, seriously, anyone can grow lettuce." So I bought a $100 pot. It might have been $200, I can't remember. Shallow, wide, architectural - perfect for lettuce growing, right? Sprinkled the seeds (heirloom red lettuce!), watered, stood back and waited. Nothing really happened. Nothing really happened for weeks, and then months. It was a shallow pot of dirt for the duration of the summer. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a week or so back, the pot sprang to life with stunning red lettuce. In my eyes, a small miracle.

Although the lettuce seeds were (painfully) slow to sprout, it was a gateway crop of sorts. After I planted the lettuce I started collecting other edible plants. Why stop at lettuce? This was my year. I picked up a few edibles at Flora Grubb - one of the nice guys who works there set me up with an earful of advice and some organic fertilizer. I have a pot for thyme, a pot for snap peas, one for pineapple sage, curry, chives, red heritage raspberries, currants, basil and red-stemmed peppermint. The dill plant I bought at the Marin market back in April never made it into a pot, but it is still alive. I harvested three currants last week. Still no drip line.

I love my little garden, even though I'm still trying to understand it. Lots of the plants are flowering, I suspect they wouldn't be flowering if they weren't happy - or at least that's what I tell myself. I made this herb salad using some of them of what I picked out on my patio, supplemented with ingredients from the market. I can't quite bring myself to pick the red lettuce yet.

I thought I'd re-post one of my favorite zucchini bread recipes. The markets here are flooded with summer squash of all shapes and sizes, and I realize I've been light on the summer squash recipes this year. -h I knew I was onto something delicious as I folded the last few ingredients into my zucchini bread batter this afternoon. Sometimes you just know. The thick and creamy batter was flecked with hundreds of green-lined strands of shredded zucchini nestled alongside the occasional flare of yellow lemon zest. The poppy seeds quickly spread themselves into an impossible network of connect-the dots, and at the same time, one of my favorite curry powders was sending notes of coriander, cumin, and clove up from the mixing bowl to tease my nose. There are many zucchini bread recipes out there, plenty of them tried and true, but this time around I wanted to bring my own take to this seasonal classic.

In many places zucchini season has arrived. It's flooding out of your gardens, gobbling up real estate at farmers markets, and taking center stage at grocery stores. Zucchini bread is one of the most popular vehicles for this prolific summer crop because it is delicious, portable, easy to share, it involves baking, and most importantly - it gets rid of zucchini. You'll no doubt notice that most zucchini bread recipes you come across yield two loaves. Why? Because if you were to only make one, you wouldn't put a respectable dent in the zucchini supply. For example, if I were to cut my zucchini recipe in half, I would only get rid of 1 1/2 cups of grated zucchini - the equivalent of one large zucchini? No good.

What else should you know about today's recipe? I thought about doing a more Thai-inspired version, using coconut oil in place of the butter, beating in a small dollop of Thai-curry paste at the beginning (omitting the curry powder later on), using chopped toasted peanuts, adding some grated coconut, etc. There are infinite versions you can try here using different nut and spice combinations. Or, you can strip out all the noted optional ingredients, and you have yourself more of a classic, traditional zucchini bread. Feel free to throw out your ideas in the comments, I love to hear them.

I had my heart set on writing a peanut butter cookie recipe for Super Natural Cooking. A recipe that featured ingredients other than white flour, white sugar, and huge amounts of butter, yet somehow retained the spirit and flavor of the classic peanut-y cookie everyone loves. In the process I cooked many, many batches of bad cookies, and eventually gave up. I tried a lot of flour and sweetener combinations - nothing tasted good. One memorably bad batch tasted like un-sweet, hot, steamy nut cakes. That did me in. Flash forward two years and I'm back at it. My first try last week wasn't so great, but I think I'm really onto something with this version - you be the judge. The cookies are maple syrup sweetened and come together with just seven ingredients. I cut out the eggs and butter altogether. Bonus points for being able to lick the bowl clean and not worry about raw eggs.

I'll mention this in the head notes as well - whole wheat pastry flour is my flour of choice for these cookies. It delivers a tender crumb and traditional coloring. Spelt flour is great too - it just bakes off a bit darker, a worthy substitute for people who might need to choose spelt flour over wheat because of allergies. I did a white whole wheat flour in the past with a slightly different recipe - no good. Too dry and bread like. Vegans, these cookies are for you too - no substitutions needed.