I cook because I love to eat. I garden because I love to cook.
My wife sometimes calls me the Angry Chef. I guess it’s a nickname well deserved, but only from my past. Our first apartment together, in the early days, was the entire second floor of an old Victorian house on Long Island. We had a small …
Traditions and celebrations with friends and family are important; they are the joyous events on the horizon to which we all look forward. As last year was devoid of many of these festive occasions, we weren’t going to let our annual Early Thanksgiving dinner with …
The story of Jimmy Nardello’s peppers is an immigrant tale. Giuseppe and Angella Nardello arrived from southern Italy in the late 1800s, immigrating to Naugatuck, Connecticut. With them they brought seeds from their Italian garden, including a sweet frying pepper. They grew these peppers to …
It’s been a doozy of a summer. Unbearably hot and humid on Long Island, where I live, we have been forced to use the air conditioner much more than usual. A passing hurricane this week, which fortunately did not amount to much, made things even …
Sometimes in the heat of the summer you need a simple and quick side dish. You want to add more vegetables to the menu. Tired of raw vegetables and already had enough grilled, it’s time to move on to something different. Something fast, easy, and …
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, …
The first thing I learned to cook when I was young was pizza; every Wednesday, two pizzas for the family. The second thing I learned to cook was Rock Sugar Chicken, a Chinese stewed chicken with bamboo shoots and shitake mushrooms, the sauce saturating a …
My favorite restaurant in Huntington, New York, where I live, closed about 10 years ago. The Cooke’s Inn was a quirky place, run by an imaginative owner. Juanita Cooke was a retired 6th grade teacher who lined the walls of the restaurant with children’s books. …
When we visit my parents in Philadelphia, we always go out to our favorite Chinese restaurant, Lee How Fook. We’ve been dining there literally for decades. They immediately bring a pot of hot tea for the table, and for my mother, without asking, a pot …
