CHEWING THE FAT

The Tastee Inn in Sioux City, Iowa where you can get a Sloppy Joe or Loose Meat Sandwich for $2.00 The Sloppy Joe is hardly anyone’s idea of gourmet food. This may lie in the fact that making one requires virtually no culinary skills of…

The book “Throwdown” has over 100 recipes– but only 33 of them are Bobby’s  Bobby Flay’s “Throwdown” has been around for 9 seasons on Food Network TV.  In case you missed any of the over 100 episodes, they’re rerun on the Cooking Channel often enough…

                    Meatloaf is an intensely personal experience.  Every family has a meatloaf recipe that is so dearly loved, it achieves iconic status.  This family recipe should not be abridged or changed in any way or else…

David Tanis           I wasn’t familiar with David Tanis at all until he started writing the City Kitchen column in Wednesday’s Dining Section in the Times. Clearly, I’d been missing a lot.  While David’s recipes have often peaked my interest, this is the first one…

         Of this year’s cookbooks, “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” by Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubert (Gibbs Smith 2012) is at the top of every list of the year’s best.  I’ve already shared the story of my sideways connection to Ms. Dupree in an…

         Last October, when I was out in California visiting my son Alex’s family, I picked up a freebie publication called California Home Design.  In it was an article about a wine making family in Healdsburg who, with the help of local chef, put together…

There’s something rewarding about having the time to make a really exceptional breakfast. Hopefully, the rush of the last few days before Christmas will yield way to a day off, a time to admire your gifts and sit back and enjoy life. And to enjoy…

The incomparable Joanne Chang Christmas Baking is as much a part of the holiday as decorating the tree or singing songs of Christmas.  And if you have children, it’s great fun to get them into the kitchen and bake a few cookies.  This year, the…

         At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the stir-fry is the savior of every harried home cook.  When you have to get dinner on the table in as short a time as possible, a stir-fry’s hard to beat.  It’s all a matter…

         The bones for this recipe came from a famous English cook and television personality who shall remain nameless.  It’s not that I don’t devour the prose in the cookbooks the chef’s written.  It’s beautiful and seductive.  But when it comes to the recipes I’ve…

         No matter how gray a day it’s been, coming home to a dinner of beautifully pink and gold shrimp paired with sweet peas, fresh scallions and ginger medallions is a visual treat.  The simple salting and rinsing of the raw shrimp gives them a…

            Just before Thanksgiving, Andrew heard from a friend from his college days requesting a dessert recipe using raspberries.  Well it took all of two minutes to remember a spectacular cheesecake he made earlier in the season.  But why it has…

         Nathalie Dupree has just published “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” (Gibbs Smith 2012), an immense compendium of Southern cuisine, which runs 720 pages and contains some 650 recipes. Amazingly, Nathalie writes in her introduction that 300 pages and 100 photographs never saw…

        I don’t think it constitutes a trend but two of my food magazines published recipes for basically the same dish this month.  The magazines in question hardly rival Gourmet.  “Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food” is geared to the home cook and one who…