‘Love, Charlie’. Now on Netflix

For those who have yet to know the background let me give it as briefly as I can. Charlie graduated from college in Madison, Wisconsin and took a job working as a busboy in a restaurant in Lake Forest, Illinois where I was the Executive Chef. It was the fall…

Smoking Fish and Listening to ‘Layla’

Last week my good friend Amy Drew Thompson … who also is the Food Editor of the Orlando Sentinel asked me if I had a memories of smoked fish I’d like to share with her readers. Amy a.k.a. ‘AD’ is person of journalistic energy like few I’ve known. She loves…

Miami. A Poem for Her

Miami. You and I meet each daybreak with Café con Leche and a vow of silence. We are old Lovers who became old Friends too. You and this dark brew fire my engines as I conjure the next recipe I dedicate to life lived in your warm arms… of so…

On Fusion Cooking

“The fires of fusion are coming.” —Norman Van Aken, On Fusion Cooking 1988 Thirty years ago I wrote the words above sitting in a small, unpainted wooden building in Key West, our southernmost of the contiguous forty-eight states. The building had most recently housed a woman’s hair parlor. It was…

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