Peter Glatz

I’ve always thought that the phrase “as easy as pie” was confusing. Pie-crust phobia is an affliction that affects many otherwise high-functioning individuals. It is probably the fear of failure and public shaming that fuels this phobia. My late wife, Julianne, was a wonderful pie-maker who mastered her craft at an early age under her […]

Throughout the pandemic, I have been binge-baking, dutifully feeding my sourdough starter every day, and feeling pangs of guilt every time I scrape my extra sourdough starter “discard” into the garbage. Having trained under a Michelin-starred chef who is renowned for her perfect sourdough boules, I struggle constantly to live up to her lofty standards […]

We’ve been traveling and living in our converted school bus since the start of the pandemic, often without Wi-Fi or a decent cellphone signal. For self-amusement (or just wanting to feel I’m doing something purposeful), I’ve probably spent close to 1,000 hours standing at my bus’s kitchen counter engaged in cooking, baking and food preservation […]

It would seem improbable that a soup made with highly perishable shellfish harvested from coastal waters would become a Christmas Eve tradition in the Midwest long before the advent of refrigerated transport. However, oyster stew, a simple preparation of oysters gently poached in milk and butter and seasoned with black pepper, has appeared on our […]

That old Yiddish adage Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht (which translates to Man plans and God Laughs), keeps running through my head these days. It’s ironic that I decided to retire from dentistry to embark on a new career as a chef exactly one year before COVID-19 started shutting down the restaurants. Presumably the pandemic […]

I can’t say that I’m 100% proud of my behavior during this pandemic. I’ve kept a stiff upper lip and maintained a good attitude. That I am proud of. But I have, on occasion, put my dietary values and philosophies into the closet for a while because I felt that I needed an emotional bump. […]

I spent part of the summer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula working for a chef who, whenever feasible, cooked with local and foraged ingredients. For example, our riff on Cajun gumbo substituted Lake Superior whitefish for Acadian redfish and foraged baby milkweed pods for okra. For any dish that normally called for rice, we would opt […]

For months I heard stories about Chef Paul Wang. He’s cooked at Noma in Copenhagen, considered by many to be the best restaurant in the world. He studied Buddhist temple cuisine with Jeong Kwan, a Zen nun and renowned cook who was featured in the Netflix series “Chef’s Table.” He has lived in a different […]

About 12 years ago I started buying sausages and cured meats from Laurence Mate, an amateur charcuterie maker from Champaign. He had found a way around government regulations by selling memberships to a “buyers club” which he called This Little Piggy. The membership fee was one penny and members could obtain his homemade charcuterie by […]

What do you get when you put a Salade Niçoise between two pieces of crusty bread? You get a portable feast known as a Pan Bagnat. Pan Bagnat means “bathed bread” and, like the Salade Niçoise, it is a popular regional dish found around Nice in the French Riviera. Traditionally it was a carry-along meal […]

A year ago could anyone have envisioned a summertime in the Land of Lincoln without the Downhome Music Festival, Muni Opera, International Carillon Festival or the Illinois State Fair? For the first time since 1945, the usually bustling fairground has been silenced. The beer tents are empty. No concerts in the Grandstand. No butter cow. […]