cookbooks

how to make mayonnaise

time to plant garlic

On the last day of summer we ate the last of our tomatoes — and they didn’t taste as good as they did in July. They were a little crunchy and mealy and not as juicy, but we ate them (slathered in pesto sauce), because we knew our next tomato would be ten months from […]

Our bees are really, really angry and who could blame them. Today, we took away from them their whole summer’s work, so we could enjoy the fruits of their labor — honey. The late, hard frost in April damaged our bees because they could not feast on their favorite food: cherries, apples, and other beautiful […]

Today we dug up our potatoes. Cut a freshly-dug potato and they crackle and snap like a crisp apple. The taste of a fresh potato will spoil your taste buds against the commercial potatoes held in storage for months. Fresh potatoes, boiled until tender, are so creamy they hardly need butter, but, of course, I […]

People who are passionate about food, often called foodies, are a thrill to meet. Today, I was fortunate to meet Justin Rashid, the founder of American Spoon, who produces a stunning variety of fruit-based condiments. He took us on a tour of his production facility in Petoskey, Michigan. American Spoon uses all kinds of fruits […]

How to get the freshest fish? Go fishing. I fished last night in Lake Michigan at sunset. The water was calm and the full moon rose as the sun was setting in the opposite sky. The first fish we caught were lake trout, which we will bake on cedar planks and serve with new potatoes […]

In other days, I made pub crawls, now I crawl sushi bars. A proper pub crawl is alphabetical: start with a bar beginning with the letter A and progress as far as possible. Last Saturday night saw 5 sushi bars (with 5 nigiri sushi pieces each) in 5 hours, traversing St. Louis from east to […]

potato gaufrettes