Essential Pepin by Jacques Pepin is a great comprehensive cookbook for the home cook.

The first dish I made from Essential Pepin is the chicken diable and it turned out great -- pan seared chicken with a red wine vinegary tomato sauce. Served it with sauteed sprouts, hazelnuts and white rice.

I often give scraps and trimmings to my dog but I made cracklings out of some of the skin since there was so much. Yum.

Really good breakfast the next morning with the leftovers.

I cooked up a big batch of Pepin's kidney bean and beef chili and got a lot of use out of it mixed with rice and coconut milk for dinner and sauteed up with eggs here for breakfast.

Pepin's not so pretty but very tasty lentil bulgur soup.

Surprised it took me so long to finally tackle Tom Yum soup. I made mine with a lot of galangal, ginger, lemongrass, lime and fish sauce and kept it simple with just prawns. I made it when I was sick with a dumb cold and it made me feel better right away.

Some of what went into my Tom Yum soup. From top left Thai basil, Thai chiles, kaffir lime leaves, fish sauce, lemongrass, galangal, ginger.

Really simple Spanish braised beef with mash from Claudia Roden's The Food of Spain. Warmed me right up.

Quick salad with Toro's tapenade, anchovies and a garlicky citrusy vinaigrette with broiled cheese bread.

Planted sugar snap peas a few weeks ago but none have come up so planted another round this weekend.

Took this a few weeks ago -- red-veined sorrel, oregano and mint popping up in the garden.

Ham, egg and cheesy breakfast. Top of the morning.

I made a batch of Choi's Kimchi and it turned out great.

And then I made kimchi jjigae with a jar of it which I order all the time and have never made. Really good.

Toro Bravo charcuterie manager Josh Scofield going through his home tool box finding what he needs to make something that you can read all about in The Toro Bravo Cookbook when it comes out from McSweeney's on Oct. 1st.

Went to my friend Chris and Karen's a couple weeks ago for a sauna and their friend Paul Yonchek (he photographed a couple of Caprial Pence's cookbooks) made these tasty pretzel breads with mustard for everyone. So good!

Debbie gave me a big bag of delicious Green Salmon Coffee, from Yachats, to brew and fill my new mug withfor Christmas.

Several weeks ago my friends Chris and Karen invited me over for dinner and we made buttternut squash and chevre raviolis. So good.

What dinner looked like that night.

My friend Loly made peppermint schnapps and Kahlua for the holidays and I was lucky enough to get both!

My brother and sister-in-law gave me this mug with my nieces on it when I went home to Cincinnati for Christmas this year. It makes me happy.

My neighbor and friend Chris made a batch of this tasty raspberry jam and I got some.

And his girlfriend and my good friend Alison has been giving me eggs from her hens for years. I love my neighbors so much.

My friend Michelle and her daughter Kylie and I making beet salad.

My friend Emily gave me this jar of rendered pork fat from a class that she took recently at Portland Meat Collective.

And just so you know that the gifting goes both ways -- here are most of the edible gifts that I gave to loved ones over the holidays.

I made this version of Choi's White Napa Kimchi while working on a story about the Portland mother-son-duo kimchi business for Mix Magazine. I'm still enjoying it -- really tasty. It's a mild kimchi with no chiles but a lot of ginger, garlic, Asian pear and red peppers.

I made this egg sammy a few weeks back with the kimchi above because I was craving the breakfast sandwich with kimchi and sausage on pretzel bread at the Saturday and Sunday brunch at Kenton Club. If you haven't been to this pop-up brunch yet go get it. Nik Woideck is rocking it in the kitchen there -- really good stuff.

I put all the beds under thick blankets to sleep until the spring. My neighbor Alison and I have an agreement -- if I clean her chicken coop then I get the skat straw for my yard. Perfect.

I made these garlic cheese grits for Thanksgiving. It's an old family recipe and no holiday is complete without them. Sharp cheddar, lots of butter and eggs, heaps of minced garlic and a cornflake topper.

I made a big batch of Toro Bravo's red sangria for Thanksgiving too.

And roasted some paprika glazed hazelnuts from Eric Joppie's Bar Avignon recipe in the August 2012 issue of Mix Magazine.

I also whipped up some smoked escolar butter (Newman's Fish Co.) from a Janie Hibler recipe in her cookbook titled Dungeness Crabs and Blackberry Cobblers.

I'm going to keep cooking through the Toro Bravo Cookbook (due out fall 2013 from McSweeney's) this winter. This big batch of Toro's brussels sprouts with bacon sherry cream was tasty. Life is sweet.

Nigel Slater's Trappist beer beef stew with baked brothy potatoes from his cookbook Tender. So good. Ate it for several days.

Pulled out my homemade 2 year (left) and one year miso...

And scraped and salted it. Made sure to scoop off some to eat before putting it back down to ferment. It's so fucking good. With 5 gallons of the 1 year (on the right) I think I'll be able to get it to 10-plus years. It will just get darker, richer and more developed as it ages.

And racked the plum wine. 21 gallons this year!