Peter Glatz

Over my five-year career as a chef, I’ve made thousands of ravioli. I was once the pasta maker at Spoon and Stable in Minneapolis and Pastaria in Nashville. A raviolo (the singular of ravioli) is a type of dumpling with a filling sealed between two thin layers of pasta dough. At both restaurants, I made […]

I am the designated pickler and fermenter at my current restaurant job. Because we are a farm-to-table restaurant with a full-time gardener, our menu changes weekly, inspired by what’s coming out of our kitchen garden. This summer’s weather has been extremely kind to our garden, and our tomatoes are beautiful and prolific. With such abundance, […]

I will remember the summer of 2024 as my Summer of the Goat. I’ve been boondocking in my converted school bus beside a goat barn and working at Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery’s farm-to-table restaurant Caprae in Champaign. This job has been like a Willy Wonka golden ticket for a cheese lover. Our chèvre (which […]

I started cooking at an early age and one of my first cookbooks was the Bantam paperback edition of Craig Claiborne’s An Herb and Spice Cookbook (which sold for only 95 cents in 1965). Claiborne was the food editor of the New York Times and is credited, along with Julia Child, with making ethnic cuisines […]

After three months of nurturing and coaxing the vegetable garden in my tiny backyard, I’m finally rewarded by a bounty of produce. Throughout the summer, I’ve been snipping and rooting basil sprigs. Now the progeny of my original basil plant has grown into a lush and verdant patch of a dozen plants. The days are […]

I’ve been spending my summer as a chef at Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery in Champaign. I consider myself to be in pretty good shape, but by the end of my workweek, my 71-year-old butt is dragging! When I drive back home to Springfield after my last shift, I count on my two days off […]

The origin story of the potato goes back 7,000-10,000 years to the Andes mountain region of southern Peru and northwestern Bolivia. Spanish conquistadors encountered potatoes in Peru in 1536 and brought them back to Europe. Leave it to the gastronomic creativity of the French to transform this humble tuber into a decadent and delicious dish […]

I’m back on my bus this summer, living on a farm in rural Champaign and working at Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery. Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery is about 5 miles northeast of the campus of the University of Illinois, my alma mater. My bus is parked next to a goat barn surrounded by a […]

Of all the plants in my vegetable garden, I have a special fondness for Swiss chard. Unlike asparagus, which makes an early spring appearance and then quietly goes to seed, or Brussels sprouts, whose tasty orbs do not come to maturity until the fall, Swiss chard graces my garden from late spring through the long, […]

We all have nostalgic taste memories from our childhoods. It might be for things like our Mom’s brownies or our grandmother’s lemon meringue pie. Any discussion we might have about the best way to make a particular dish will ultimately be evaluated and compared against what you grew up with. If I were to tell […]

I am very passionate about both food and music and few things bring me more pleasure than dining al fresco at a musical performance. Al fresco in Italian translates to “in the cool,” and has come to refer to dining in the fresh air. The combination of delicious food, live music and a beautiful outdoor […]

I’ve been hearing that Panama is one of the best places in the world for Americans to retire. It’s a tropical destination with incredibly beautiful scenery and is less than a three-hour flight from Miami. Panama is warm and humid at sea level and cool in the mountains. It lies southwest of the hurricane belt, […]