The most striking feature of Wood Lake Nature Center in Richfield is the wetland that sits at its center. Even in winter – if you want to call this winter – when the pond is iced over and almost everything is dead, it brings a certain thrill of being an explorer or a pirate to […]

In a world where many people don’t get enough to eat, the fact that Americans waste nearly half their food represents a moral failure. What’s more, with the economic crisis in this country family food budgets are stretched tighter than ever; American families can ill-afford to waste so much. A lot of this waste results […]

“They just don’t make cocks like they used to.” So laments just about every modern recipe for coq au vin, the venerable French braise of rooster in wine. The story goes that the dish was developed as a way to use the meat of tough old roosters past their prime; only a long braise could […]

Fellow Twin Citizens are probably familiar with Surly’s CynicAle, a saison/farmhouse style ale available year-round from Surly. Cynic will always occupy a special place in my heart: it was the first Surly beer I ever tried, one adventurous afternoon at Common Roots when I was taken in by its name’s affinity for my natural disposition. […]

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 […]

Cooking in a modern kitchen is all about control: I have implements for cutting food into pieces of exacting dimensions; I can measure volume and mass;  I apply precise amounts of heat to pans that have been engineered to have efficient and predictable conductivity. Sous vide and molecular gastronomy take control to the extreme. As […]

Tom pairs bière de garde with 40 cloves of garlic chicken in this daring foray into mixing the unmixable: food and beer.