With the feast of our Lady of Guadalupe right around the corner – tomorrow, in fact – I took the opportunity to become acquainted with one of the most important traditions surrounding this sacred festival: tamales. While I’m an avid tamale consumer, I’ve never actually made them. So when I heard the kitchen at Church […]

My ideal bread–the bread I want to have for breakfast every morning, around my sandwiches at lunch, and to sop up the remains of whatever sauce adorned my dinner–is a crisp-crusted, chewy, open-crumbed bread, flecked with bran. This is the kind of bread perfect with a slice of cheese, some large-grained cured sausage and a […]

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. This was the second year in a row in which I was cooking in isolation from my extended family in Michigan since relocating to Minnesota. I miss having my whole family together and all their different contributions to the meal. On the other hand, cooking in Minneapolis for a […]

It’s almost Thanksgiving,which means the various food blogs I read are dissecting every aspect of the annual feast. When the stuffing versus dressing debate came up on Serious Eats, I was taken aback by the certainty with which two authors brushed aside the controversy. First Erin Zimmer, in a post comparing boxed stuffing options, offered the caveat: […]

It’s a cruel irony that heat of the late summer sun that produces perfect tomatoes and fragrant basil also makes our homes so hot that the thought of even turning on the oven – let alone cranking it up all the way for perfect pizzas margherita – is unbearable.  By the time I’m willing to […]

Although there are plenty of delicious steaks, pork chops and sausages routinely on offer at Clancey’s Meats & Fish, it’s the more exotic offerings that keep me going back. For example: the time I got my goat. More recently, I was greeted by the sight of fresh – not frozen – rabbits, curled up in their […]

It was with some sadness (and wistful thoughts of future Saturday mornings spent sleeping in) that Martha and I mounted our noble bicycles and set out on the ride to the last official Midtown Farmers’ Market of the 2009 season. The weather, while generally cloudy, was punctuated by bursts of sunlight and dominated by a […]

Let me start by saying I don’t like squash. I kind of hate it. It’s certainly not an aesthetic objection: nothing brightens up the drear of the fall farmers’ market quite like all the whimsical varieties of winter squash – impossible to resist! This combination of compulsive buying and strong dislike leads me to accumulate squash […]

In its penultimate week the Midtown Farmers’ Market is still loaded with fresh produce: squash, cabbage, peppers, turnips, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, more squash, leafy greens, onions, potatoes, herbs – even some tomatoes of dubious quality. If the above photo doesn’t quite reflect this variety it says more about me than the current state of the […]

After biking to the Midtown Farmers’ Market in the dead of winter last week, I am happy to report that winter seems to be over in Minnesota and we’ve jumped back into fall. With a sunny blue sky and temperatures that require only a light jacket provided you keep moving, this was one of those […]