Food & Drink

Nine months of the year, I’m a wine drinker, with an occasional foray into Bourbon-Nightcap Land. But when sultry breezes, late sunsets, and humidity come to town, my beverage choices veer from the cerebral to the coquettish. Summer sipping is all about cocktails, and in my opinion that means rum. Sure, I know the school […]

I embarrassed my husband at a restaurant recently. It wasn’t the first time, and it probably won’t be the last. After the server described the appetizer special, I interrupted him before he could move on to the entrees. “You know,” I said nicely (I’m always nice when I do this), “It’s actually pronounced brusketta, not […]

Modern-day calendar-keepers may tell us that summer begins with Memorial Day weekend, but if you’re an astronomical diehard you know it really didn’t kick off until June 21, when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. The day was long, the night was short, and some of earthlings acted crazy. If you […]

The menu board listed them as “Garbage Trucks,” which was a pretty fair description. The place was Abe’s, a dingy, grungy dive a few steps down from the street in the University of Illinois campus town in Champaign-Urbana. The walls at Abe’s were covered with graffiti, and every surface was stained with oily smoke from […]

Cooks are a pain in the ass to cook for. I should know — I’m one of them. Friends tell me all the time that even the thought of cooking for me is intimidating, and I have been naïve enough to believe that my expertise is the barrier between me and those dinner invitations. Yeah, […]

Have you ever eaten new potatoes — potatoes with skins so thin they scrub off easily with a vegetable brush, with flesh so lusciously creamy, it’s almost decadent? You might be surprised to learn that potatoes labeled “new” in the supermarket usually aren’t. Real new potatoes should be recently dug — anything more than a few […]

It really was my fault, but I blame it on the potato. Preparations for a Memorial Day get-together with friends were sailing along. I was embroiled in side-dish duty and dessert detail; he was working on a rack of ribs. We were both in a kitchen groove, staying out of each other’s way, listening to […]

Every May, there’s a big homecoming in Alaska, and everyone and his mother in the lower 48 wants an invitation. From now until the kids go back to school, the cold waters of the Copper River are chockfull of returning salmon preparing for their upstream spawning and egg-laying ritual. Meanwhile, we mere mortals in places […]

Years ago the only places Americans ate outdoors were in back yards, picnic areas, fairgrounds, and campsites. To eat and drink at an outdoor cafe or restaurant, you had to cross an ocean. Al fresco dining was foreign, exotic, romantic, and oh so sophisticated. That’s exactly why I was determined to experience it on my […]

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise, but somehow it always does. The first seasonal local produce arrives, and the intensity of its flavor shows us just what pale substitutes we’ve been settling for. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad such things as lettuce, scallions (a.k.a. green onions), radishes, and fresh herbs are available at […]

As summer makes its debut, cowboy wannabes across America are pulling out their grills, great and small, for a season of smoke, fire, and, alas, the same old underwhelming steaks. Why must we turn to the same cuts of cow every time? To paraphrase my pal Ralph Waldo Emerson, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of […]