Our birth canal is 7 x 9 inches wider and our book “Salad Daze” is born! It’s wiggly, a little greasy, and absolutely beautiful.

Why make a book when we can blog? This is a tactile, physical, near-perfect object we were lucky enough to toss into the world’s shelves! If you like the blog, we promise you will deeply dig this – but we dare you to find out yourself. Go flip through it by hand in an actual book store. We’ve already heard reports of it being a featured book at a Barnes and Nobles, being peddled along with all the anarchist rhetoric we got siked on in college, local book shops in London and (gasp) its even being sold by Walmart. We’re told Urban Outfitters will carry it.

Even though it seems every book outlet imaginable is infected with AlexandEvanitis we still need you, dear blog fans to help us become printed page moguls. Go bug the stores for it, don’t be afraid to ask for it! Demand the fruit of our literal loins! Tell the local librarian that the kids love Hot Knives! If you see or successfully land Salad Daze at a new outlet, let us know — we’ll reward you in the afterlife!

Seriously though, we couldn’t have done anything like this without all you faithful clickers, office work procrasitnators, and evening meal time experimentalists. There’s more to come — the future will only better than the past.

This little rainbow of roots was scented with our proprietary vadauvan — a heady combo of a ton of aromatics and a ton of spices.

As we type, we are screaming our way back from an awesome interview on “Good Food” with Evan Kleiman (listen for where she calls us two of her favorite guests, smitten!) where we discussed the ins and outs of turning 4 pounds of onions, garlic, ginger and spices into a city block perfuming mass of curry jerky.

This photo ended up being a little too close to the subject, but goddamn we can see the smell these babies got slicked with through this smartphone.

A little while ago, Alex went through a phase that Evan couldn’t understand. Every time he’d come over around a meal time it seemed Alex was at the stove boiling a pot of white rice. “Want some”? he’d offer, reaching for bowls. When the kernels were perfectly cooked, he’d spoon out a little less than a cup. It’d get a slosh of good Spanish olive oil. A dash of soy sauce. A knife’s slick of sweet chili sauce. A thumb’s crunch of Fleur de sel, and half a dozen turns of the pepper mill.

It was maddeningly ideal. Hot white rice sauced just right, and taken instantly, spreads the same inner stillness and imploding comfort that a bowl of macaroni and cheese does. Same painkilling side effect that two fingers of Scotch might. Maybe it gets a shake of spice or a slap of micro herbs, either way the idea’s the same. Now white rice is the pox on both our houses – its what our constant companions want, it’s what we want, every meal – and it makes more adventurous cooking as tempting as taking out the trash in an ice storm. Stay inside and boil some rice.

Just Right Rice Bowl
(Serves two)

1 cup basmati rice
2 cups filtered water
1/4 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons soy sauce
2 pinch of fresh chives
2 pinch of fresh mint
2 pinch of minced ginger
2 spoon of chili sauce
2 teaspoons of ground black pepper
2 pinches of fleur de sel, or maldon salt

1. Combine your rice and twice its volume of water in a 2-quart pot and agitate with your hands to rinse off extra starch for 1 minute. Dump the rice into a fine mesh strainer and rinse out the pot.

2. Combine cleaned rice and water in a 2-quart pot and place on medium heat. Add sesame oil. Once the water hits a boil and threatens to bubble-over, turn low and cover. Cook this way for about 12 minutes or until water is all but gone and rice kernels lose all crunch, but before mushiness strikes. Let sit a minute or two, still covered but removed from heat until ready to eat. Fluff it with a fork.

2. Mince the ginger, mint and chives (on a tiny bias) and set aside.

3. Spoon rice into 2 bowls. Dress each with olive oil, soy sauce and top with chili sauce. Garnish with herbs.

Soundtrack: The Clash, “Straight To Hell Boy”
Beverage: Echigo Stout

Above, behold a sweet and condensed version of how we blazed for Fourth of July. East L.A. taco gutter-style. (Thanks Ian!) That’s chapter one.

Now skip ahead. This Sunday we are hickory-smoking, deep-batter-crispety-crunchety-frying, and saucing the ever loving shit out of anything, or anyone, who gets in our way. Yes, it’s our annual Backyard BBQ Mosh Pit at the Verdugo Bar.

But this time, it’s serious: the party is not just for the sake of busting guts and blowing ear drums, though there will be that, of course. We are in the throes of shooting our second cookbook “Spring Blaze” and it revolves entirely around partying. And photographing the results. We’re guest grilling for quarrygirl.com‘s monthly Vegan at the Verdugo series. We’ll be slinging all vegan barbecue from 3pm ’till we sell out. Bring a fist full of fives to trade in for the following:

1) Oyster mushroom po’boys with radish remoulade, greens and a side of pickled potato salad
2) Mesquite-smoked jackfruit hoagies with peach BBQ sauce and a side of kaleslaw
3) Summer succotash and jalapeño cornbread

Good thing it’s god damn labor day Monday, cuz Sunday your stomach’s gotta work. Wear your rattiest daisy dukes for our camera. And bring your bib!

You’re staring down the rabbit hole of our “Psycedelic Rice” recipe. Just know that this photo is nowhere near as trippy as the one that made the cut, but you see where it’s going…

You will “tie-dye” your roasted beets and make a gremalata out of kiwi and habaneros. The Romanesco broc floret garnish is for fractal effect and farty flavor notes. The purple flowering kale is for its vaginal appeal. Eat with your hands. Exercise your mind…

Making a grilled cheese sandwich look ‘buy-this-book-now’ amazing is sometimes harder than grilling one.

We took two takes on our Belgian Onion Soup Sandwich. Above is the first that got vetoed. And here’s the second one that made the cut.

Both are melty and scarf-able, but ultimately we voted down that sprinkling of scallion tips as 80s-nouvea bullshit and the yellow plate as too kiddy-colored, like a big Kraft Singles. Did we make the right choice? We think so, if for no other reason than sandwich #2′s psychotic curly cue of melted gruyere.

Does soaking spices in alcohol count as a recipe? Sure does! We’ve had great success with booze-infused peppercorns and wanted to showcase ‘em in the book.

But how to visualize? Pepper sitting in a brown liquid could be anything after all. Brand or no brand? First time we shot this, we opted for a little product placement nod to our go-to cooking (and party-mixer) bourbon, a $20 bottle of Bulleit. We’ve met an heiress to the liquor’s legacy at an Echo Park dinner party, so we have a soft spot for Bulleit.

In the end, it was too blatant and not so pretty. The solution, and one of our only dirty little photo shoot food tricks: the pic we ended up choosing is not of bourbon at all, but peppercorns floating in apple cider vinegar.

If it’s good luck when a lady bug lands on you, when it lands on your artichoke during a photo shoot it must mean something more. This speckled damsel alighted on an in-progress thistle inspection and was quickly snapped into eternity by Amanda.

Hopefully Mrs. Dot(com) flew on to bless a few other heathens that day, killed a few hundred aphids, got laid, laid a few thousand eggs, and died peacefully in the sun.

We’re all lucky, in great degree, to exist as we do. At that moment, as at this one, we felt, and feel especially so.

This is when it got real. Getting a morning email with this photo and recipe for our “Citrus y Cebollas” salad laid out by our designer Jen is when we nearly shit ourselves realizing this book was gonna look as sick & slick as any food porn on the news stands. Coming from the school of “point-and-shoot” (and put the camera down so you can keep the stove from erupting or the food from getting cold) this was a milestone for us.

Even this photo got reshot, however; it just seemed a little too white-plate and bright lights. The real photo of this salad, needless to say, is completely insane.

And now for something completely different: a photo that made it nowhere near the book!

Raw asparagus spears soaked in blood… orange juice (with toasted walnuts and herb chevre balls) is a dish we made years ago for the blog; recreated for the LA Times test kitchen; and we wanted to go back to the well for “Salad Daze.” We tried to justify a fresh asparagus dish making a fall & winter book by slapping it at the end where an early spring dish might make sense. A total stretch.

This photo comes out of the first shoot we did in Amanda’s Echo Park kitchen. It’s a convergence of slightly wrong moves. Green and pink on black ceramic screams fusion. The arrangement looks more like MOMA art poster than a Hot Knives dish. For all these reasons, Amanda balked at including it in the book, while we didn’t get what she objected to at first, thanks to our now-famous inability to think critically about food photography (Us: awesome! looks so good! Amanda: You guys are crazy, we’d never include this.) We’ve been working on this failing. Now, during photo shoots we just scream “this is bullshit” for a few minutes to make the photographer to take us seriously.