Passive pleasure: Sun tea
My mom always said, with the kind of certainty used by parents relaying wisdom to half-listening children, that iced tea is more thirst quenching than water. I don’t know if this is fact or belief, and I’ve never bothered to look it up – because my mom said so, and it certainly feels that way, […]
Maple: The sugar harvest
The first food. This is how I once heard a Vermont Public Radio guest expert, on sugaring, maybe, describe maple syrup years ago as I maneuvered the Outback down some unpaved Green Mountain back road on the way to who-knows-where. And that simple, pregnant phrase has stuck with me ever since. Long before the snowpack […]
Fermented turmeric: Pop for pain relief
Some things are a bit hippie, even for even me. This is one of them. But when ibuprofen becomes known as “vitamin I” in your house, it’s time to look at other ways to calm the joints and muscles we’ve been habitually riling up 3-5 times per week through our various athletic pursuits. ‘Cause old-ish […]
DIY fruit on the bottom
I’m the kind of woman who becomes a whirling dervish of organization on January 1. Christmas is over, it’s time to undecorate, my energy is restored from some good ass-sitting at Christmas, and damn – there’s usually a lot of extraneous shit and mung all over this house from our busiest work months of the […]
From kimmelweck to kimchi
How immigrants and refugees continue to shape Buffalo’s foodscape Like many former industrial cities in the northern United States, Buffalo’s food roots are deeply entrenched in the soils of other countries. Several of the dishes we now claim as this city’s signatures came here in the minds and hearts of first the Germans, who left […]
What’s in a name?
We don’t have leftovers. We have tapas, bento bowls, cold plates, and sampling menus. Sure, the ingredients are mostly small servings of “leftovers” that would be insufficient or strange as a full meal (four spears of asparagus, lunchmeat, half a can of cannellini beans, and a hardboiled egg, for instance). But when you look at […]
Grocery time machine: A 78-year-old circular
My mother-in-law recently found this newspaper circular from Danahy-Faxon grocery stores in Buffalo, NY. The date: August 6, 1936. The copy, illustrations, and prices: fascinating. From what I could find, the 130 Buffalo-area Danahy-Faxon stores were the result of a July 1929 merger of two local family enterprises – a series of meat packing plants and […]
Tea, please.
After Christmas, Kevin’s birthday, New Years, and all the parties in between, I’m pretty much ready to run my liver through a deep soak cycle or two in the washer when January rolls around. By now I’ve consumed a small vineyard’s worth of wine, several varieties of bacon-wrapped-cheese-stuffed-what-have-yous, and one metric ton of sugar (and […]
Getting rid of the fear
Wanna know what? I started writing this blog, on and off, two years ago. And I never shared it with anyone until now. Why? I’m still not sure. Probably a combination of fear (what if it sucks?) and reality. A little too much reality, really. In time since I started secretly writing here, I lost […]
Taste tests: discovering new foods
Do you remember the first time you tasted something that had you instantly hooked? Or, sometimes more viscerally, the first time you tasted something that was the worst thing you ever put in your mouth? My first “holy crap, this is amazing” taste moment was raw oysters. I got a job as an oyster shucker […]
Learn it, love it, pass it on
Don’t be afraid. Cooking is a friendly auntie, inviting you into her kitchen and giving you permission to play as you will. Take her up on the offer. Short of 1) burning something to a crisp and setting off all the smoke alarms in your house; 2) ignoring common sense and sickening your guests with […]
A love-love relationship with food
I’m often asked why I get so worked up about food. Particularly by my mom and sister, who candidly suggest that I might find something else to talk about once in a while that doesn’t involve something I tasted, pickled, or plucked from my garden. Some people go so far as to use over-wrought words […]
