Food & Drink

About 10 years ago, I was camping at Summer Camp Music Festival at Three Sisters Park in Chillicothe near Peoria. Summer Camp is a four-day event over Memorial Day weekend featuring over 100 bands and attended by over 20,000 people. Back then my camping set-up consisted of my van, tent and E-Z Up canopy. That […]

There is not much that I enjoy more than packing a picnic and curling up on a thick blanket to watch a show under the stars. Be it a movie in the park, a concert or community theatre, it’s a lovely way to spend an evening.   Some of my favorite childhood memories of summer […]

My obsession with cooking outdoors over fire must have been carried forth in the DNA from my primal ancestors. Grilling adds depth and complexity to vegetables in a way that can’t be achieved by steaming or boiling. I challenge my vegetable-hating friends who were brought up eating bland and insipid canned or frozen veggies to […]

Despite the old-fashioned expression, making a pie from scratch intimidates many. It is another culinary skill that has atrophied in our culture over the years, a casualty of convenience and frozen food technology. The saddest part about this is that most folks today clearly have no idea what good pie tastes like. We’ve become so […]

Thirty-four years ago I heard about a little coffee shop in the parking lot of a shabby motel on Springfield’s north side that had unlikely pairing of corndogs and Thai food on the menu. Even though I had spent the last four years in Chicago and had dined in dozens of Asian restaurants, I had […]

It’s been a busy few weeks. For a while now my daily agenda has felt full to bursting on a regular basis, and I find myself yearning for a little TLC. The healthful surge of energy that accompanied the New Year began to fade about the same time that the flowers (and weeds!) started to […]

I recognized the look. I see it every time I walk in the back door of a new restaurant. “I’m Peter, and I’m here to stage.” (A stage is an unpaid, short-term internship when a cook works in another chef’s kitchen to learn and be exposed to new techniques and cuisines.) From someone expecting a […]

This weekend is the grand opening of the Old Capitol Farmers Market (OCFM), one of my favorite times of the year because it marks the return of our beloved Saturday morning market routine. The first stop is always coffee from Custom Cup, then croissants and crepes before getting down to the serious business of shopping. […]

In 1970, when I was 17 years old, I bought a book entitled Living on the Earth by Alicia Bay Laurel. It was illustrated with beautiful line drawings and the text was handwritten in cursive. Alicia Bay Laurel was a 21-year-old hippie living at Wheeler Ranch, a commune in Sonoma County. Intended to be a […]

Approximately 40 percent of the food produced in the United States, approximately 133 billion pounds, will end up in the trash. That’s roughly equivalent to buying five bags of groceries, then pitching two of those bags in the trash on the way out of the store. In a country where 42 million people suffer from […]

I was in Montreal for my annual trip with my son Robb. We were in a quiet gallery in the Marc Chagall exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts when the loud call of a hunting horn emanated from my shirt pocket and shattered the silence. I had just received a message on my […]

Loren Shanle is living the dream. Sell the business, move to the sunny coast, start a winery…except, he hasn’t moved to the sunny coast. He’s still in Rochester, accepting all four seasons like the rest of us. But the other parts are true; he sold his business and started a winery in his former office. […]