The Green City Market is finally back outside, which means my Wednesday mornings are occupied with shopping for local produce. It’s been a late spring rendering the early markets a little more sparse than usual. The first week there were almost more storage apples and overwintered potatoes and frozen berries and pickles and preserves than new crops …
Season
It’s five o’clock somewhere. It’s Friday. And sometimes, at the end of a long cold week, you just want a drink. For me, nothing hits the spot quite like a well balanced cocktail. Dan and I are big fans of the craft cocktail movement that’s taken hold in Chicago. Our liquor cabinet is actually two …
It is apple season again. Time for pie and cider and eating out of hand. Time for wondering where these variously charming and exotic names of these heirlooms and hybrids came from: cox orange pippin, jonafree, fameuse, sunrise. I think of apples as a comfort fruit. I like them prepared simply. A bit of sugar, …
September is back. And I find, still, that I miss school. I miss the stuff of it. It’s been too many years since I’ve bought school supplies. No crisp clean notebooks, no colored pencils, no folders, no protractors, no scientific calculators. No Trapper Keepers. There is hardly any Velcro in my life. I miss the …
The market has been full of beautiful peppers. The usual bell peppers in red, orange, yellow and green, jalapeños, Hungarian wax, Trinidadian perfume, poblanos, and fiery habañeros. They are bright and inviting, but to be honest, I hardly know what to do with most of them. Oh, I use bell peppers in all sorts of …
It’s been a hot summer in Chicago. This July and August we’ve watched the mercury climb into the nineties more days than I care to count. Too many. I’m not a hot weather kind of girl, give me seventies and a light breeze along the lake, and I’ll take eighties with a cool drink, but …