Right now I am in a small town in Illinois, along the Mississippi in a very strange hotel on a very wide highway eating very hot chicken wings and drinking a very large strawberry mojito.
All of this traveling is well... making me miss my own things and my own familiar faces. And making me think…
Quick! Take to the front yard. Or the back yard if you prefer.
It's wild garlic season, and in another month it will be much too hard to pull up.
They look vaguely like a bunch of chives, though decidedly more hearty.
There's something woody looking about them at the base. They will smell faintly like garlic…
As you well know, I have a thing for hot sauce. At one point I thought I had tried all of the bottles in the store. Then I made this whiskey hot sauce for my book Food Heroes. I felt it was my job to preach hot sauce to the world.
Then I found one more recipe to try... it was magical.
Lots 'o fresh ingredients like cilantro, cherry tomatoes, onion, garlic, and eight habaneros. Are you ready for this?
Can you handle the heat?
"You can't handle the heat!"
Name that movie.
Once they're all roasted in a lovely kind of way, you blend everything together.
It's yellow and sublime. It tastes like... the sun.
Actually it's mildly addictive and flavorful, despite the burning lips.
How about you? Do you like hot sauce? Or are you a wimp? I'm just wondering...
I used to think of it as the strange stuff I'd see in strange gas stations on my strange cross country road trips. It was usually in stick form, a long tubular stick, wrapped in a coating of plastic, with a peculiar name like... Slim Jim, not because it made you slim, but because it…
Here's the thing about Valentines Day. I think it's strange.
It is impossible to get into a restaurant. Flowers double in price. Bad quality chocolate makes the rounds. Lots of pink lacy undergarments abound in various store windows.
Saint Valentine, was a Christian martyr. I don't think he thought very often about Victoria's Secret's latest line.
I…
I did it. I made homemade English Muffins. I can stop cooking now, my life's task is complete.
The best part? The recipe uses a skillet... my best friend, my savior, my no-wash skillet. God's antidote to dirty dishes I say.
They are full of nooks and crannies that would make Thomas proud.
You can check out the…
I spent Labor Day weekend cruising the cotton fields of the Arkansas Delta. By the end of it, there were more doves than any one person could consume.
This lead me to invent all kinds of recipes to keep it interesting, as well as churn out some classic recipes from the Italians in the region –…
In some parts of the country, the summer albacore run is in its prime. But even where tuna isn’t plentiful, this preserving technique is a must have. It falls somewhere between fresh and canned tuna, the Italians called it "conservata," the old tradition of preserving protein in olive oil.
It is usually imported from Spain or…
If I was sent to that proverbial island and there was one food I could take, it would be liver mousse. I can hear your collective gasp. Most people are reviled by the stuff, but I call it God’s pudding. It’s slightly sweet and very rich and I could eat it endlessly.
It serves as the…