Kitchen Witch

When I left home, I moved from New York to Oakland, Calif., where I shared a warehouse with three other East Coast transplants. To all of us, California was still the frontier, and the Bay Area’s notoriously crunchy vibe both intrigued us and drove us crazy. We made fun of the California lifestyle, joking about […]

In another life, my name was Lulu. I worked as a waitress in a stainless-steel diner in Philadelphia, manning a 20-seat counter that required the nerves of an air traffic controller and the wit of a standup comic. Weekend brunch was the busiest shift, with customers jamming the aisles and demanding coffee faster than you […]

Have you tried to host a dinner party lately? Long gone is the no-nonsense process of entertaining, when the only thing that mattered was a wholesome square meal consisting of a meat, a starch, and a vegetable. These days, forget about planning a menu without consulting your guests. The world of the privileged has become […]

Of the seemingly infinite possibilities at summer produce stands, the eggplant is among the trickiest. She’s a real looker, all right, showing off her shiny, buxom bosom that comes in shades of majestic purple, light green, or ecru. “It’s so gorgeous, I just have to get one,” is a line I’ve heard at the farmers’ […]

Blood orange and burnt caramel, crème fraîche and Meyer lemon, brandy-macerated peach. These were the ice cream flavors I had come to hear about over the phone with my friend, the former pastry chef-turned-restaurant critic (and my former editor). He’d rattle them off nonchalantly, as if I knew what he was talking about, and surely […]

I was telling a friend about some of the restaurants and ethnic and specialty food shops we’ve discovered in St. Louis, and she sniffed: “St. Louis is nothing compared to Chicago.” “And Chicago is nothing compared to New York,” I shot back. “Get over it!” My chauvinist friend, a native Chicagoan, was correct in one sense. […]

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 […]