Playing With My Food ~
A journal about food, thought, travel, and life; by Chef & Raconteur Chaz French.

Penzeys Spices

People often ask where I shop, when I lived in the NYC metro area my answer when it came to spices was Penzeys at Grand Central Market.  Since moving to Berkeley I’ve had to get my Penzeys fix via their website. I got a shipment from them on Friday, a small order really.  Penzeys doesn’t […]

Why I decided to quit facebook…

Hello there, as you might have noticed things around here are getting a little livelier, lemmetellya what happened. In the process of finding a new place to live, I also had to set up a place to stay as a backup for 11 days, (odd, yes, long story not being told).  The house I was […]

An open letter to Pat L.

Dear Pat L. (who works at a Peet’s in the East Bay), You serve me my coffee somewhat regularly, your beard and tattoos make you easily recognizable and I often see you riding your bike around town, without a helmet.  Look, I’m not a preacher, I’m an atheist, but I feel compelled to share a […]

Braised Short Rib Tomato Sauce With Homemade Pasta

This took 3 evenings to make. 1 to braise the ribs, 1 to make the sauce and 1 to make the pasta and put it all together. The short ribs were first seared, then braised in mirepoix, wine, stock, salt, and pepper for three hours. The liquid was saved (fat removed), and the ribs were […]

Another journey begins

Today I got my 2nd tattoo, I wanted a simple black band, no adornment, nothing tribal, or from another culture… I wanted something simple and plain.  Turns out simple isn’t easy, or cheap… When it was finished, I loved it immediately, and as I was going home I thought about what more I could do […]

My Times

Anyone who’s spent more than a couple of minutes talking to me will walk away knowing two things; I love Los Angeles and I miss my home greatly. No I wasn’t born there, nor did I grow up there. I moved there 5 days after I turned 20, having fallen in love with the city […]

Dear Neighbor…

A note I’m very close to putting on my neighbor’s door. Dear Neighbor, Hi, we haven’t met, but we’ve heard each other. Let me introduce myself, my name is Charles and when I was fresh out of high school I went to the TreBas school of audio engineering and production. I tell you this, because […]

I just felt the need to share this…

From RichardDawkins.net Tweet

TD Bank’s unfortunate sign of the times.

“CON” TD Bank in Brooklyn Heights, NY. Taken Feb 16, 2009 Tweet

Auspicious Beginnings

On the first of January 2009 I found myself searching an external hard drive trying to find a photo, at first I couldn’t find the folder and was starting to panic, after a bit of digging I found the folder but not the photo… While searching through this folder I found another, one that had […]