Food & Drink

In the fall of 1971 I was a skinny, pimply-faced, pathologically shy college freshman at the University of Illinois in Urbana. I desired female companionship, but was too timid to ask anyone out on a date. The weekends were long and lonely and, with nothing better to do, I ended up studying. I got straight A’s […]

After weeks of rich wintery fare, nature has a way of offering her own elixir. Citrus fruits are in peak season now through early spring, arriving just in time to pull us out of our butter-laden holiday haze. Bright, refreshing and packed with nutrients, these sunny fruits liven up savory and sweet dishes alike. The […]

The first anniversary of my wife (and Illinois Times food writer) Julianne’s passing is approaching. When she died, she left me with four decades of memories and two freezers full of homemade soups, stocks, stews and sauces. Over the past year I have been eating my way through the freezer while I work my way […]

We know that eating fresh, simple, home-cooked food is one of the best ways to foster our health and overall well-being. Many of you, like me, will be entering the New Year with a renewed commitment to health and to improving order and efficiency in our lives and households. As you well know, it’s typically […]

I’ve always been a morning person. As a child, this meant that I was left to my own devices on weekends until about 9:30, when the rest of the house would finally begin to stir. I grew up learning to cook at my mother’s elbow, but it was in these quiet early mornings that I […]

I have vivid memories of years ago answering a knock on my door the week before Christmas. We were experiencing snow showers and my wife’s friend was standing outside my kitchen door with a stressed-out countenance and icy wet hair. My wife was running a catering business at the time and her friend had commissioned […]

’Tis the season for braising! This hands-off cooking method, in which foods are covered and slow-cooked at a lower temperature with a small amount of liquid, transforms tough, cheaper cuts of meat and hard, fiber-rich vegetables into sumptuous one-pot meals. Not only do these dishes pair well with a blustery December night, they can be […]

In his book Dave Barry’s Bad Habits, humorist Dave Barry describes his mother’s approach to a balanced diet: “For every food she served you that you could stand to eat, she served you another kind of food you could not stand to eat…if she served us something we really liked, such as hamburgers, she made […]

Many of us dream of hosting a Rockwell-esque Thanksgiving. Happy children playing board games as they patiently await dinner, contented guests allowing the host to calmly finish up the meal, glass of wine in hand. In reality though, putting on the Thanksgiving meal can be an incredibly stressful experience. Having multiple dishes ready at the […]

My father was of Austro-Hungarian descent so when I was a kid growing up in the 50s and 60s, we enjoyed goulash the way folks around here enjoy chili. Goulash is a beef stew seasoned with caraway seeds and paprika. Goulash was once a very popular dish in North America; a 1969 Gallup Poll found […]

There is a certain type of satisfaction that comes from cooking a pot of beans from scratch. I always catch myself meditatively stirring at some point in the process, once again amazed that a $1.39 bag of beans and some veggies could turn into a huge pot of utter deliciousness. We grew up eating variations […]