I was out walking Bounder, the little dog our son Justin brought home from a shelter a few years ago, and almost back home when I spotted a McArthur Dairy milk crate brimming over with a harvest of 20 or more backyard grown avocados on the edge a neighbor’s lawn….
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Cut Up: A Key West Gem
A gathering of Conchs surrounded me. No. I was not skin-diving in The Bahamas. I was having dinner in Key West at a beautiful home. And I was happily encircled by some of the smartest, funniest people I have come to call friends. As many of our South Florida listeners…
Happy Fourth of July! Happy Hot Dogs!
You may be making plans to celebrate our day of “National Independence” from the once “Tax Mad” English by having friends and family over for backyard parties. Possibly your menu will be featuring one of the all-time icons of American gastronomy, “The Great American Hot Dog”. When most of us…
How To Make Killer Fried Green Tomatoes
Have you seen that now classic commercial where a bunch of cowboys get all freaked out about a salsa that is produced in NEW YORK CITY?! Well, I found it similarly amusing to be in an elegant restaurant in NEW YORK CITY! recently where they were offering me a menu which…
Get Yourself Some Loving
“Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean. So get yourself some loving in between.” — Langston Hughes Almost everything in life seems to have two sides. Its ups and downs. Love almost inevitably suffers loss. Salt finds its way into the sugar bowl. Men are from…
Mother’s Day (Reprise)
Tall Food. One of the cooking shows was on one morning back when my Mother was still with us. I was hurrying around, as usual, looking for some papers I needed before I could jump in my car and get to the restaurant. She exhaled a long column of cigarette…
Sweet Corn (PG Rated)
Corn is native to the New World. Pueblan Indians speak of corn as the fifth element; there was earth, air, fire, water—and corn. That last sentence should be read slowly. We are keenly appreciative of how central rice is to the Asian diet. Perhaps we take more for granted that…
In The Houses Of Pancakes
An ascending spring sun played a gentle game of tag with a retreating winter wind the morning I left my home. But as the day darkened the game turned rougher and the wind kicked the yellow ball like a schoolyard bully. Off it rolled, into some hole and the forest…
Coffee
Given my ‘druthers’ I enjoy a properly made cappuccino or a café con leche in the morning. But there are times when we are on the road and the means are not easily found to have those delicious ways to break from a night of heavy slumber. Our hosts for…
By What We Love
“You don’t want to look like your heroes you want to see like your heroes”. — Austin Kleon, “Steal Like An Artist”. Though I’m only 1/3 of the way through Austin Kleon’s book I’m recommending it to everyone around me. The subtitle is “10 Things Nobody Told You About Being…
Daddy’s Coffee
When I was a young child our home was a solid, two story, wooden structure perched on a sloping, gentle hill near a lake in Northern Illinois. We had all four seasons and we had them in full measure in that geography. Equal to them was my father. His nature…
Julia and Me
I didn’t grow up watching Julia Child on television the way many chefs of my generation did. My television hours were not inclined toward any aspects of cooking though we did cook in our home. My mother was a Girl Scout leader and part of the ‘arts and crafts’ of…
First Scents
Three scents wake me. Not wake me initially. An alarm did that. These are the wakings of an appetite as they are touched by the brewing coffee, the emanations of ripening mangoes…but the third scent is more subtle than the first two. It comes from the tomato my knife and…
Father’s Day, Rolling Along
The small, neat houses of Little Haiti, the colors of pastel tropical ice creams, A visitor on a 2-wheeled conveyance rolls along. It is Sunday. Father’s Day. Morning. A Triple Blessing. An elderly man in black, stern clothing, ancient Preacher’s cap, graying Fu Manchu marches past the ‘Little Haiti Hardware…
Key West with Justin
It is the ‘Monday morning after’ now. The Cuban coffee swirls in my blood as the Ocean gently rocks the shore of ‘The Southernmost Point’ I passed not an hour ago. We arrived in Key West Saturday to make the final preparations for our “battle” at The Hog’s Breath Saloon….
Pig Paint
One of my best selling dishes of all time is called “The Rhum and Pepper Painted Grouper”. I started making that reduction I named a “paint” in 1985. Essentially a “paint” is a reduction of liquid along with spices, aromatics etc. as well as some sugar of some sort that…