On Friday afternoons while I was in high school my mother and grandmother would get their hair done at the local beauty salon. My mother worked in the restaurant business so I imagine she did this before returning to the restaurant she worked at for the dinner shift looking like…

Some words are known in Spanish as one thing and English in another. How many …. of you knew that? Pun intended. Read on!…

Shakshouka. It sounds like a dance. But it’s actually a delicious meal with a fascinating history! Here’s this week’s, “A Word On Food”. Thanks WLRN radio 91.3 and 91.5. Broadcasting from Palm Beach to Key West….

Back in the day… as we say… there was a really fascinating man that we all knew by his nickname. He was “The Conch Salad Man”. Frank was his first name I learned later. He sold his Conch Salad out of white pickle bucket at the Sunset Celebration each night…

“The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread and fried chicken”. — Maya Angelou I had the great pleasure of cooking for Ms. Angelou twice. Her voice and her celestial face were simply amazing. Here’s my WLRN show on the subject of cornbread. One of the three in her…

Have you heard words like ‘fufú’ or ‘mofongo’? Want to learn more about them. They lead to delicious things! Here is my WLRN radio show on the subject….

Those heavenly crispy edges on the base of risottos and paellas …. There’s a name for that….

A person … whom I can’t recall …  informed me of the place we’d come to. I often find torn pieces of paper from dinner check presenters or ripped out of my Moleskin notebooks. On one I had written the address of a Honduran restaurant that I needed to try….

Do you know precisely and with no margin of error a dish can be declared … bullet proof? Let me tell you my opinion. It is when you can have it on an airplane and it is not … bad!  Janet and I were flying to Dallas recently to do…

The great writer on our Southern Foodways John T. Edge has morphed in his world view. He has a book titled, “The Potlikker Papers” and in it he writes,  “When I first began thinking and writing about the South, I focused on continuities. Traveling the Pee Dee of South Carolina,…

The Holidays are all around us now. Both the recently passed and those still yet to come…..The spirit of giving is in the air.  That is what makes the season we are in so incredible, so marvelous and so distinct from the rest of the year.  Whatever faith you have…

After two days of crawling in the tight, labyrinthine, sun-blocked streets of Manhattan it was a release to take a cab across the Brooklyn Bridge in spite of a steady early afternoon drizzle. We were heading to what some say is the greatest steak house in America, Peter Luger’s. As…

When I was growing up in Illinois about an eonago we began to have an influx of people from Mexicomove into our small community. I actually grew up in a place of only 250 residents that sat betweentwo small towns. One was Mundelein and the other Diamond Lake. We were…

With my first paycheck from ‘The Midget’ …to clarify… it was a bar and restaurant in Key West I worked in … I sent for my then … girlfriend, Janet, who arrived a few days later on a Greyhound bus from Ft. Lauderdale where she’d been working as a maid…

A writer named Brook Larsen recently wrote in an online magazine named ‘Culture Trip’, “The Japanese and English borrow words from each other all the time. There is a whole subset of the Japanese language known as gai-rai-go (loan words), many of which come from English, including tabako (tobacco) for…

The first time I ever had a causa I was at the groundbreaking restaurant fellow future Mango Gang Chef Douglas Rodriguez opened. It was named Yuca for those who might not know. We were sitting upstairs and I was with a party of six or eight. Douglas was down in…