I cook because I love to eat. I garden because I love to cook.
The summer I did research for my master’s thesis, scuba diving in the bays on the east end of Long Island, we traveled the same route every morning to get to the marina. As we drove past the farm fields that dominate the North Fork …
As summer approached and the Philadelphia weather got warmer and more humid when I was young, we looked for ways to cool ourselves down. It was rare that we found a pool as they are hard to come by in the big city and I …
Most of my memories from Bodines, a tiny village in central Pennsylvania about 20 miles north of Williamsport, are only fleeting: talk of rattlesnakes in the field behind the house after the hay was harvested; walking on railroad tracks abandoned after Hurricane Agnes and its …
At some point during the Passover Seder – the spring meal celebrating the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt – a piece of matzo is broken in half and hidden. The children in attendance search for this afikomen, the finder receiving a prize. Seder guests …
When Jacob and Ariana were graduating from high school and moving away to attend college, I was contemplating my mortality. Top among my concerns was the thought that if I died, my children would no longer be able to enjoy many of the dishes they …
I had to repeatedly remind myself: half the people in the world, especially in less developed countries, cook delicious, extensive meals using a single flame, often fueled by dung. We had just moved into our house. Our refrigerator was dying, the kitchen was falling apart, …
This is a lesson in flexibility, a term that would rarely be used to describe me. I don’t mean being able to bend my body, although there’s not too much of that going on, but rather being able to react when things go badly and …
Growing up, every Tuesday and Thursday we ate Bert’s Beans for dinner. Refried beans that my father actually re-fried in a skillet with probably too much oil, we would wrap them in homemade tortillas and slather on hot sauce. As the refrying process neared its …
There are lots of things I never understood about the high school students I taught for 30 years. Chief among them was why they ate the pizza served in the school cafeteria. Long Island, where I live, is the land of excellent pizza. Virtually every …
In the mid-1980s when I was in high school, we held a series of memorable multi-day gatherings at our friend Jody’s house that came to be known as the “Swarthmore Parties.” I think there were two such events, possibly three, obviously at times when Jody’s …
