When I was about 8 years old I made friends with the three brothers who lived with their mom and dad in a neatly kept home across the creek from us. Back at our house I was the single male between two girls. The much needed boyish shenanigans were calling…

A number of years ago we were in Italy for a long delayed and much needed family vacation. I’m sure I probably looked just like so many others I was amidst as we ambled around the markets and then ate in the cafés and trattorias. iPhones had yet to be…

There’s no secret to aguachile. The name, chile water, translated describes the dish just about perfectly. It is a study in simplicity … pulverized chiles in liquid, a few cut up vegetables … enough lime to pucker your lips and pickle some shrimp. Its creation is generally credited to the…

To hell with history here! When it comes to things like Chocolate Chip Cookies there are memories that are much more indelible than the shifting and … floury in this case … ‘footprints’ of time. My first memories of chocolate chip cookies came within months of my first awakenings of…

The first time I heard the word mofongo I knew I wanted to use it on one of my menus! I didn’t even know what the dish was and … I almost didn’t care. I simply loved the word and wanted to use it for our guests to enjoy too….

It was the best of time it was the wurst of times… That might be funny if you could read it… wurst being spelled w-u-r-s-t in this case. But I digress. The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto reportedly had 13 pigs aboard when he arrived to the new world and…

Despite our (we thought!), carefully planned strategy for a lunch of divine sushi… we were in for a shock as we slowed to pull on to the side street off the 79th street causeway. The shock was due to the line of even more prepared folks lined outside the still…

The summer I became a golf caddie was one filled with suddenly unfamiliar routines and the deep lows and soaring highs of messy adolescence. I was 14 years of age and not skipping smoothly along the surface of life’s waters. My childhood pals, the Harris boys seemed to suffer no…

‘A Word on Food’ is done with … words … of course. Where would I be without them? Our blonde-haired, blue-eyed granddaughter Audrey is not yet two… yet she is teaching me to try more communication … with the hand language known as ‘signing’. She has been taking lessons to…

We were in the Miami International Airport joined in a shuffling line of other travelers at ‘La Carreta’ …  the famously successful Miami restaurant chain that also boasts ‘Versailles’ and ‘Casa Juancho’ in its culinary stable. It is one of our common stops in that airport despite the lines. They…

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,  wrote in “Ode to Salt” “I know you won’t believe me, but it sings, salt sings… Dust of the sea, in you the tongue receives a kiss from ocean night… in it, … we taste infinitude.” ‘Elizabeth the Beautiful’s’ face lit up. She said it…

When I was 19, 20 and 21 years of age … I seemed to be on a yo-yo between my boyhood home in Illinois and the place I was seeking. I wanted sunlight. I wanted music. I wanted good books. I didn’t know I wanted … Fried Chicken too! I…

I walked into our restaurant kitchen and I inhaled an aroma I’d known before I knew it’s name. It was blood. It spiraled me back in time to a grocery store where my mother shopped. She carried me in there before the age of three and slung me from hip…

I learn words in many ways… but the best may be in eating. The words on the menus and in the cookbooks I have from around the world have helped me conquer at least ‘parts’ of foreign languages. I have a good knowledge of French, Italian and even some Japanese…if…

I was near a small sandwich stand in an open-air market. It was like many you could see almost anywhere in the world. A radio was playing a vaguely familiar tune. Soft drink cans and cigarette packs lined the windows inside the stand where a lady was stuffing soft buns…

I’ve been making Souse. Right? Got that? Know what I’m talkin’ bout? You might be confused. You might stay that way. Let me unravel a bit. Here’s souse as defined by the Wikipedia geniuses: “1. to plunge (something or oneself) into water…or other liquid. 2. to drench or to be…