I was cleaning out the desk drawers in my office the other day, and came across my collection of vintage photographs. They're pictures I've picked up (a couple here, a couple there) at yard sales and flea markets. A dollar for this one, two for that. I thought you might enjoy seeing a few of them. Additionally, a number of you were curious about the cottage cheese pancakes I mentioned (in passing) a couple posts back. They're pretty great, and a nice alternative to pancakes that are predominately flour-based. So, between the pictures and the pancakes, I hope you'll find something to your liking in this post...

Pictures first? I'll start by saying, there isn't much rhyme or reason to the photos I choose to buy. I have to like something about the image, and that's about it. Sometimes it's the expression of the person in the photo, or maybe it's the way they're looking into the camera. The pattern of a dress, the look of a sky forty years ago, the way a table is set - all things that have caught my attention at one point or another. Sometimes I'll pin a picture to an inspiration board, or temporarily place a selected shot in a notebook. It sort of depends on what I'm working on (or thinking about). Sometimes they just live in my office drawer. Flip the photos, and I often find handwritten notes sketched on the backs - names, dates, far-flung places.

The two shots (directly above), I have a special fondness for. The first was printed in June, 1959. Clouds from the window of an airplane. It is printed on matte paper, and you see just a bit of the metallic wing. With the image to the right, it was the expression of the main subject that caught my attention, set against the dramatic alpine backdrop. The back of the photo notes, "Kay & Carlisle, Switzerland." And above those, two Kodacolor prints date 1965 from what I suspect was a vacation to Acapulco.

I choose landscapes, and sometimes interiors, and also portraits. The little girl with the big orange bow and floral dress might be my favorite find. It is July, 1966 and she is watching the airplanes at the San Diego Airport in California. The sky is clear, and she is seated high on a cinder block wall. The image below her is a mystery to me. I'm unsure when, or where, it was taken. Although, it seems to have been cut from a paper scrapbook (something I see a lot of). Let me know if you like this sort of thing, I'm happy to share more found photos at some point, if you're interested.

Now, here's the thing with the pancakes. I'm going to share a version I make that incorporates minced cauliflower. I think of this as "the white version". That said, you can take these in a completely different direction if you like. I just typically work something with added texture, flavor, and nutritional oomph to the base batter. If it's not cauliflower - chopped spinach, blanched/chopped nettles, broccoli, dill - it's hard to go wrong. And it's fun to experiment.

I kept the recipe straight-forward here, but you can also do blini-sized versions of these. They're great topped with the dill butter from Super Natural Every Day. Seriously, blank canvas. Have fun with them.

Hi everyone. I'm not entirely sure what happened, somehow this turned into the mother of all favorites lists. The number of things that caught my attention kept piling up - articles, videos, photo series, recipes to try, places to visit someday - and here we are. Hope you enjoy, and I promise to be back in a few days with a recipe to share.

- Pacific Coast Trail Moleskine Journals

- The Joy of Quiet

- E.L. Williams

- Punjabi-laced chill-banger.

- The Car Picture, 1987 -- 2011 (via wb)

- Fantasy get-away, and this one too.

- Roasted Sesame Winter Slaw & Maria Speck's Artichoke Tart with Polenta Crust

- Things to Worry About

- The Art of Pesto (with Kinfolk)

- Spring 2012 cookbook preview

- Sofia, Bulgaria

- Finnish Potato Flat Bread & Vegetarian Pho

- Where The Wild Things Are - as read by Christopher Walken (via Hustler of Culture)

- Wear Good Shoes: Advice to young photographers (link / PDF)

- School House Electric video

- Gold slippers (via Maggie)

- White picket fence

- John Steinbeck on Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter (via Ill Seen, Ill Said)

- Blue stripes

- Housesitting in Hawaii

- Colorblocked Bread Board

- The perfect way to spend $3.

- From Super Natural Every Day: Carnival Cookies & Quinoa Patties

- Made with love.

- Jen Causey + Nikole Herriott

Lead photo: A number of you were curious about the Buddha's hand referenced in the citrus salt post. It's a beauty, no?

Somehow, I've managed to pass the weekday breakfast baton. Wayne has always been the house barista, keeping me (and any visiting friends) adequately caffeinated. At some point, a couple years back, he started adding a toasty overnight oatmeal to his morning repertoire. Actually, he usually does a blend of oats and other rolled grains, but if you like oatmeal, you'll like this. Lynn, from Satsuma Press, stayed with us recently, was asking about the recipe. This is for her and any of you who are looking for a hot, filling, wintertime breakfast cereal that you can trick out with all sorts of different toppings.

There are a number of four or five-grain breakfast cereal blends you can buy ready-mixed. That said, it is incredibly easy to make your own blend, and keep it on-hand in a jar. We've been using a blend of rolled oats, rolled rye, rolled barley, and rolled spelt. But don't sweat it if you can't find those exact grains. Browse the bin section of your grocery or natural foods store, see what they have, and go from there. The only rolled grain I haven't loved as a part of our mix was Kamut.

One of the things I love most about this ritual is the one thing that might put some of you off. The "day-ahead" factor. The night before Wayne makes his cereal, he toasts the grains in a bit of butter. You have to plan ahead a bit, but the trade-off is a house that smells like a batch of oatmeal cookies is baking. Here, the scent drifts from the kitchen at the back of the house, up the hallway, and into each room along the way. It's one of the last things he does at the end of the day, and it let's you know breakfast is going to be good.

I kept track of some of the toppings I've used over the past couple off weeks and listed them below. Allow me to highlight the buttermilk maple butter, which I make for waffles, but use it here as well. Creamy, sweet, with a bit of tang - a generous drizzle is all you need.

A couple other links: I had some fun with the Remodelista ladies, for their new Style Counsel feature. Aaaand my run at the Piglet over at Food52 ended abruptly with a Momofuku Milk Bar face-off. :/ Looking forward to watching the next few rounds from the sidelines though.

In the last week I've done a bunch of things. I returned to a vintage shop, just up the street, to buy a pair of old metal kitchen stools (painted a muted shade of robin's egg blue). Someone beat me to it. I baked a granola pound cake (a bit of a miss), brewed two batches of California common, and bought a sack of stinging nettles at the Farmers market to work into the cottage cheese pancakes I can't seem to get enough of. There were three loads of laundry, two runs of the dishwasher, and lots of friends who've stopped by. And I made this Miso Sesame Winter Squash for lunch yesterday.

It's a riff on one of the recipes in Bryant Terry's new cookbook - his Molasses, Miso, and Maple Candied Sweet Potatoes. I swapped in some delicata squash and tofu for his sweet potatoes, and had myself a pretty spectacular one-pan meal. I'm a big fan of Bryant's recipes (remember these?) They're always flavor-forward, and across the span of a book he tends to pull from a global pantry. He has the ability to put together unexpected flavor combinations, and he's just the sort of person I like to turn to when I need someone to yank me out of one of those occasional culinary ruts every cook finds themselves in.

Here's how today's recipe shapes up. You've got your primary ingredients tossed with a citrus-spiked, maple-molasses marinade of sorts. The sappy sweetness is balanced by the salty complexity of miso and tamari/shoyu, and a toasted sesame backdrop is added for good measure. It works brilliantly. Thinking more about it, I imagine you could use the sauce/marinade to roast any number of ingredients beyond winter squash or sweet potatoes - for ex: tempeh, broccoli, cauliflower. Let me know if you do a take on this that works particularly well.

Thanks for the inspiration B. :) Cheers, and congrats on the new book.

I'm not kidding when I tell you it looks like a citrus orchard shook out its limbs in my kitchen. There are sweet limes and Meyer lemons on the counter near the sink, wild limes in the corners of window sills, oblong mandarinquats and petite kalamansi oranges scattered across other flat surfaces. And then, the prize of all prizes, a massive, electric-yellow Buddha's hand (direct from a very special Southern California garden) putting off more fragrance than the rest combined. So, I set to work making a spectrum of citrus salts.

They're pretty, and provide a pop of surprise, and your friends will love you even more when you hand them little jars to take home. Mostly, I use these as finishing salts. I love the wild lime salt sprinkled over coconut milk-based curries, or as a finishing touch on spring rolls. Mandarinquat salt sprinkled over homemade sea salt caramels? Give me a minute while I add that to my to-do list. Later in the year, the clementine and Meyer lemon salts are perfect on fava beans and asparagus. Beyond that, heirloom tomatoes.

I'm going to give you my basic technique down below. You can use that as a jumping off point and go from there. A lot of what this comes down to is personal preference. You'll notice I call for flaky sea salt. For this sort of thing, I like the kind of light, flaky salt crystals you can crush between your fingertips. I use Maldon. You give this salt a good, long toss with the citrus zest and then bake the mixture dry. You can certainly leave the salt like this, but I like to give it just a few pulses in the food processor to break it down a bit. It's still light and flaky, just less so. All said, feel free to experiment with different salts. And process them powder fine if you like. I typically use about 1 tablespoon of zest to 1/2 cup of salt, but you might want to increase or decrease the amount of zest. Again, play around. Make blends. Take notes related to which ones you like, and how you're using them.

One other note. You'll only use the zest here. But you don't want all that amazing juice to go to waste, so zest the citrus first, then juice it as well. You can freeze the individual juices for later use, or, I like to make riffs on this sort of strong citrus ginger juice.

Thank you!: The Food52 Piglet Tournament of Cookbooks is on. Heartfelt thanks to Nigella Lawson for writing such a thoughtful review and for putting me through to the next (crazy!) round.