For the last few months, more of my life than I would like to admit has been consumed with managing our dog, Inka. She’s a sweet pup, but so many little things common to city living scare her. Construction season has started, along with lawn-mowing season, motorcycle season, thunderstorm season, and kids-running-around-outside season. (And we …
Special diet
When it comes to springtime foraged vegetables, ramps (also known as wild leeks), have gotten the bulk of the chef and food world attention. I like ramps as much as the next tedious food geek droning on about the pungent wonders of spring’s first local seasonal edible green thing, but there’s some concern that the …
April Bloomfield’s first book, A Girl and Her Pig, was a big deal in the food world when it came out a couple of years ago. I heard plenty about it, but because I was vegetarian at the time, I mentally added it to the stack of meat-centric books that just weren’t for me and …
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a cookbook great. Deb just wrote about what makes a recipe great, and, as usual, she articulates with aplomb thoughts that have rattled around aimlessly in my brain. But my favorite cookbooks are more than collections of great recipes. They give me entree into the mind …
For a number of years in my late twenties and early thirties, Dan and I and a group of friends took turns hosting fortnightly dinner parties where we cooked a meal and played board games and enjoyed each other’s company. (We also passed around an infamous set of poorly made, tangled chimes that had originally …
It is officially spring. But official spring never feels like the spring that exists in my imagination. The mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful spring with green shoots and sun peaking through rain and warm breezes and new beginnings. Official spring in Chicago is something altogether different. It is one day in a series of false starts. It is …