Ronni Lundy’s cookbook illuminates a land that was kept far too long from most Americans knowing almost anything about. Some excerpted passages. “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…
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On Fusion Cooking
“The fires of fusion are coming.” —Norman Van Aken, On Fusion Cooking 1988 35 + 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…
Kitchen Cousins: Chefs Nurture Growing Careers
In 1987 a person who’d become so much more than a ‘young cook in my kitchen’ but who’d become my spiritual and culinary ‘brother’ opened up his own restaurant. It was named “Charlie Trotter’s”. He made history there over the next twenty years. This article is about the opening night…
Star Chef Questions
What is American Cuisine? “Take a boy from the Midwest, Have him work in hash house to haute, with Frenchmen, Italian, Japanese, East Philadelphians, Latinos, other American kids and let him sweat for 15 years or so. …now pop him into the oven of your wildest imaginations and then cool…
Student Interview
1. I know that you love to cook and create dishes from a lot of Latin and Caribbean countries, but have you traveled to most of the places that you are inspired by? And which places were the most inspiring? We haven’t been able to travel as much as we’d…
Chocolate Chip Cookies
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…
Mofongo
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….
Sausages
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…
Barbecue Season Is Here!
In Chicago in 1956 one of the welders at Weber Brothers Metal Works named George Stephen, made a grill by cutting a metal buoy in half. The Weber folks were already making grills. They’d begun to do that in 1952. But George Stephen made his with said buoy and a…
An Interview with Norman Van Aken
Tell us about your formative years and how did you find your way into the culinary field to become widely known as ‘the founding father of New World Cuisine’. NVA: My ‘formative years’ eh? I first must tell you that I wrote a memoir on this which goes into some…
Our Lunch at Michel Bras, Laguiole, France
“MICHEL BRAS” It was not originally on the itinerary at all, but as the months drew closer to our going Charlie came to one of his famously resolute decisions and told Steve Greystone, “We’re going to add in Michel Bras. Norman can’t go to France without dining there!” With that…
13 Questions With Norman Van Aken, Founding Father Of New World Cuisine
Written/Posted By Faiyaz Kara When Norman Van Aken talks, people listen. The Illinois-bred and Florida-honed chef’s influence on modern-day cookery is undeniable, but the celebrated “Founding Father of New World Cuisine” isn’t done yet. Van Aken plans to open a yet-to-be-named restaurant in Mount Dora in early 2016, an announcement…
Interview with Norman Van Aken
What inspired you in the search of new flavors? how was your culinary style born? People inspire me. Food is about the love of people and families and the never-ceasing exploration of our globe. My style was born in my childhood in some ways but it took flower in Key…
Miso
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 Egg
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…
The Foods of India
‘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…