I cook because I love to eat. I garden because I love to cook.
About a dozen years ago I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Italy with my family. We spent two incredible weeks there, one with my parents and brothers’ families at a rental in Umbria, the other, just my wife, kids, and I, driving throughout …
January is a bleak month in the garden. There is little growth, and so by leaps and bounds the most exciting activities are perusing catalogues to order seeds for the coming year and planting cabbage, kale, and leek seeds under lights in the basement to …
I love food stuffed inside food. I’m not talking turducken (a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey) or anything extreme like that, but rather smaller bites. Neat little packages with a morsel or two inside a wrapper, providing layers of flavor. The …
Every cold January, I contemplate my garden. I think about the hard work I’ve put in and the abundance I’ve harvested. I ponder my plot’s successes and failures. I salivate when I look back on the fresh bounty it provided, tasting so much better than …
Everybody has some relatives that are a little, let’s say…different. For us it was Aunt Esther and Uncle Stan, E and S for short. Elderly when I was young, they used to bounce back and forth between sparsely furnished apartments in Philadelphia and Florida. While …
With the holidays behind us and a few extra pounds under our loosened belts, many of us have resolved to eat lighter and leaner. It is all well and good; admirable to be healthier. But cleanses and resolutions be damned, let’s be realistic, we are …
New Year’s Eve is a time for celebration. It is a time for a party, for joy and excess, especially as 2020 fades into 2021. This New Year’s Eve should be no exception. More than ever, we need an excuse to have a party, albeit …
It was early spring and snow still blanketed the ground, melting a little during the warmer daylight hours and freezing again when the sun sank below the horizon. I had a craving for Chicken with Hoisin Sauce, a Chinese stir fry I made on repeat …
I am fascinated by the way a food item appears in varying forms in different cultures. Take dumplings, for example. Every culture has a dumpling. Boiled, baked, or fried. Stuffed with a filling or not. It is especially interesting when you see a continuum of …
I’m a lucky guy. My wife and I see eye to eye on most things and real disagreements between us are few and far between. (Notwithstanding that one in the aisles of Costco some dozen years ago surrounding a birthday celebration and frozen cream puffs, …
