When one of your best friends from college has spent most of her life in the intervening years in various countries halfway around the globe, the bad part is that you hardly ever get to see her. The silver lining (other than the part where she pretty much gets to live her dream) is that when …
Gluten free
I tend to think of rhubarb as a fruit, even though, botanically, it’s a vegetable. I make the traditional crisps and crumbles and jams and pies with it. I usually toss it with sugar and cook it until it slumps into a puddle of its own juices (like in this rhubarb crumble or these strawberry …
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 …
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 …