Category: Food
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Vacation in Prague, Day 3
On Tuesday the 16th we slept until nine and breakfasted on croissants and scrambled eggs, then set out to see the sights of the Jewish Quarter. This meant much less walking, as our flat was right in the middle of that part of town. We began at the Old New Synagogue, which follows the international…
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Vacation in Prague, Day 1
A note to the reader: because I am too lazy to hunt around the option keys on my laptop to find the right characters, I am spelling all Czech words without accents or other diacritical marks. We flew to Prague via Philadelphia, with a five-hour wait between landing in the hometown of W.C. Fields and…
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Culinary/Literary Notes
I can usually eat something without telling the world about it, but tonight I made a grilled marinated Porterhouse steak with an heirloom tomato salad, followed by fresh-picked ripe strawberries and ice cream. All served up on the porch on a perfect evening. But that's not what I actually intended to post about today. Lately…
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The Baristiary
For more than twenty years now I've done a lot of my writing in coffee shops. It gets me out of the house, I can observe my fellow pseudointellectuals and blowhards, and I don't have to answer the phone or walk the dog. In that time I've seen a lot of coffee shop employees. A…
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New Year’s Dinner
I made the traditional New Orleans dinner for New Year's Day: Hoppin' John (=black-eyed peas and rice), Brown Cabbage, and sausage. It came out very well: the Hoppin' John was wonderfully rich, thanks to the goodness of a smoked pork hock, while the sausage was a pretty decent facsimile of andouille (as decent as one…
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Post-Thanksgiving Food Bragging Post
This year we had two and a half guests for Thanksgiving1and so decided to really pull out all the stops for an epic meal. The menu: Hors d'Oeuvres Pickled Herring in Sour Cream Oyster Patties Cremant de Bourgogne Viandes Roast Stuffed Breast of Turkey Sous-Vide Breast Turkey en Mole Juliénas Beaujolais Legumes Oyster Stuffing Tamales Roasted Brussels Sprouts Roasted…
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There’s No Pleasing Some People
I do most of the grocery shopping for my family. Yesterday I went on my usual big monthly run to the discount club, to stock up on stuff that comes in large packages. One of the items my talented wife asked me to pick up was cereal. So I bought cereal. Was my return with…
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Kitchen Report: Chinese Braised Pork Belly
Warning: if you are interested in healthy, low-fat recipes, GET OUT NOW! I discovered this dish, or something very like it, at the Ginger Garden restaurant in Amherst. When I first moved to the area at the dawn of the new millennium, Ginger Garden was a very ordinary Chinese food joint, with a big all-you-can-eat buffet…
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An Ancient Dessert
In the course of a recent bookstore raid I got a copy of Arcana Mundi by Georg Luck. The bulk of it is a compilation of writings by classical authors on occult topics. While reading it I stumbled across a passage translated from Homer, describing how the enchantress Circe turned Odysseus's men into swine. To…
The Cambias Digression 