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Last year, I threw a lasagna party. I made four different kinds of lasagnas. Though I spent the entire afternoon in the kitchen, I did no work during the party, and I loved that everyone scraped the casserole dishes clean not long after they came out of the oven. Ever since, I’ve been enamored of the baked pasta dish, the way it’s simultaneously complicated and simple, calibrated yet comforting.

So I had the best time talking to three lasagna geniuses last week for First We Feast, restaurant chefs who know how to get each layer seasoned and cooked just right. I put together a piece that’ll show you how to become a master of your own lasagna, whether you crave a gooey Italian-American pan brimming with marinara and ricotta or a traditional Italian lasagna bolognese. If you’re hosting New Year’s for two or twenty, it’d be a great main to serve.

You can read the whole piece here.

Veggie burgers have long showed up as fake meat patties that taste awful or vegetable pancakes that turn to mush upon chewing. Chicken sandwiches and ramen have recently left behind mediocre pasts; why can’t veggie burgers too? I decided I’d find out for First We Feast.

My discovery? Making a batch of veggie burgers is time-consuming, a limiting factor. Whereas your beef burger entails slapping ground beef at a hot pan, making veggie burger mix means coaxing a lot of different ingredients to serve your purposes in a lot of different ways. No one step is hard, but you’ll need to soak one grain while you toast another, roast mushrooms while you caramelize onions, and then ask your food processor to grind like it’s never ground before.

I learned all this from a few bright lights in a world where restaurants make their own ketchup but microwave veggie burgers from a supermarket package - and used their wisdom as my guide.

Those bright lights are several pretty high-level chefs who have suddenly committed to the veggie burger and toyed with techniques until they created something great. They experimented with grains and legumes and “meaty” vegetables like beets and mushrooms to turn out burgers that look appealing, taste better, and might make carnivores forego beef at least sometimes. Interviewing these pioneers to find out what they did to redeem the VB allowed me to head back to the kitchen and figure out how to make a worthy patty at home.

You can read the full article I wrote over on First We Feast, but I wanted to post the actual recipe back here.

Hello! As you read this, I’m driving south along the Pacific. We started in Seattle on Thursday, and we’ll make it to San Francisco before the week’s out. If you have recommendations for stops in Portland or along the Oregon or California coast, please share.

While back-to-school season always makes me wish I were a student again, the pleasure of a being able to take a vacation after Labor Day can’t be overstated. The summer’s just longer this way.

While I’m on the road, away from the kitchen, a little recap of what the season has brought to this small kitchen:

Growing in the garden:

After planting our first few radishes in April, both our vegetables and the number of containers holding them multiplied. Gardening is addictive.

Here’s what we ended up growing: two kinds of little tomatoes (sun gold, red pear), two kinds of radishes, lemon cucumbers, green leaf lettuce, kale, habaneros, carrots and a bunch of herbs (tarragon, sage, dill, basil, Thai basil, and mint). We planted string beans but they petered out early. I also threw in some marigold seeds and some nasturtiums.

This week, I interviewed Wes Avila of Guerrilla Tacos for my complete guide to tacos on First We Feast. At his Los Angeles taco truck, I learned, he changes the menu constantly, based on inspiration from what’s available or what he finds himself eating in his regular life. He told me he’s made tacos from leftover fideuà and from the Armenian sausages he buys in Glendale, his neighborhood. I loved how he talked about the creativity involved in translating his world into food, particularly tacos. Here’s how he puts it:

Wear what you dig. Cook what you like. If you like really spicy stuff, go for it. If you like exotic things, go for it. As far as you being the cook - professional or home - when you’re cooking something that comes from the heart…that’s when you can make something tasty. If you have good ingredients, and you can simply cook it, and not try to do some BS fusion crap you saw on TV but cook something you like, then you’re in the right direction.

As I so often do when I’ve been testing something for a piece, I ended up subsisting on tacos and leftover tacos materials for several days. I’m not sick of them. In fact, I’ve forgotten all about rice bowls and sandwiches, my usual vehicles for edible miscellany. Now, I want to wrap everything in a corn tortilla, just like Wes. Cooking what you like, right?! Here are 10 dishes from the archives I really like, which are suddenly begging for the taco treatment.

1. Chicken & Cauliflower Yakitori. Vegetables and chicken baked in a sweet soy sauce should come off the skewer and into your taco. Instead of salsa, drizzle on sriracha.

2. Manchurian Cauliflower. The Chinese-Indian favorite features crispy cauliflower in a sweet and tangy sauce. A dollop of yogurt would be welcome on top.

3. Paneer Bhurji. Paneer kind of reminds me of Mexican fresh cheese, and this dish evokes a spicy egg scramble, so maybe it belongs not just on any taco but on a breakfast taco.

4. Corn Pudding. Corn on corn! Add something crunchy to make the textures work, like pickled shallots or radishes.

Summer is the season of eating outdoors, but that doesn’t mean that city dwellers can’t make great barbecue inside, in our little, backyard-less apartments. In fact, the oven is a seriously great tool for turning whole pork butts into the best possible pulled pork sandwiches. I’ve got a guide up today on First We Feast that shows you just how to do this. Check it out here.