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…
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CAL PEP: Memories of Spain
We were told this place was tiny and would be packed. It took no reservations and seated 20. So we hustled over to be at the door when they turned the key. But to our surprise and dismay they had inexplicably opened up about five minutes before we got there…
Cookbooks
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…
Faiyaz Kara’s 55 Best Restaurants in Orlando
Courtesy: Faiyaz Kara (Orlando Weekly)
Explore the Orlando Weekly restaurant critic’s essential places to eat in 2018 2. Norman’s Fine dining is indeed alive and well, and at this perennial stalwart within the gilded walls of the Ritz-Carlton Grande Lakes, so is fusion cuisine – thanks to celebrated chef Norman Van Aken, who leaves the…
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by Annie Dillard “Then one day, walking along Tinker Creek, thinking of nothing at all, I saw it —- the tree with the lights in it. It was the same backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost, only charged and transfigured, etc cell buzzing with flame … It was less…
Look Homeward Angel
by Thomas Wolfe I was saved from what fate I shall never know when a woman came to live with us when I was ten years old. She was my maternal grandmother. “Nana” was what we knew her name to be. It was ordained by others in the family long…
Ninety Two in the Shade
by Thomas Mc Guane I returned to live in Key West in the very year another resident of Key West released this book. I originally arrived to the last island out of America in ’71 and fell under it’s spell. It was like falling in love with a woman. But…
Peruvian Causas
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…
Songs On My Turntable Now
I’ve loved music even longer than I’ve loved words. I think most of us have. We don’t need to learn anything to listen to music it could be reasoned. But… you actually do need to learn to listen. The world around us is filled with music. The sound of the…
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…
Egg Sandwiches
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…
Norman’s Fifteenth Anniversary Dinner To Be A Star-Studded Celebration
Courtesy: Faiyaz Kara (Orlando Weekly)
Written/Posted by Faiyaz Kara For some, like orange-hued braggarts who “reject the idea of globalism,” the term “fusion cuisine” is worthy of scorn and revulsion. But like it or not, the term is a celebration of diversity, a celebration of “immigrant food” and a celebration of our ever-evolving palates. Our…
Food Touristas
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…
Aguachile
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…
Victuals: An Appalachian Journey
Excerpted from “Victuals. Say it the way my people have for centuries: vidls. Maybe you’ve seen it spelled “vittles” in a cartoon balloon coming from the mouth of Mammy Yokum. Or heard it as the punch line delivered before Granny Clampett clogs off to “roast up a mess of possum.”…
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…