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NEXT TIME ON OKRA

I’ve gotta admit, I’m not as experimental as I’d like to be in the cooking department. Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s the all-too-real time limits that occur when failure means dinner doesn’t hit the table right in the narrow window after work and before bedtime, bath, mandatory book reading, ...

THE WHOLE POINT OF LIVING…

I find myself thinking a lot about death lately. Looking to nature, it is the time of year when the natural cycle of things is winding down—I recently ripped out my summer garden, which caused some odd feelings of shame and guilt even though the plants had become completely dormant (it’s an odd thing getting attached ...

SUNDAY MORNING

This morning, sometime after Sesame Street, I’ll ask The Wolf if she wants to go to the garden. She will stand up, leave whatever we’re currently busy with, grab her favorite tomato bowl and head for the door. We step out, time expands, the early morning humidity sets in as we pick fruit, water herbs, kill leaf footed ...

20 MINUTES AWAY FROM THE BUG HOUSE

Yesterday morning my day began with what I can only imagine to be raccoon diarrhea covering my porch. Literally. My lovely wife was walking my infant daughter out the door and nearly fell down the cement steps, slipping on the raccoon shit.  I’ve spoken before about the realities of my burgeoning fatherhood and its various ...

SUMMER’S BEST DESSERT: GRILLED FARMSTAND PEACHES

There are certain flavors that seem to live within summer air. Certain things that on a good day, away from any landfills or traffic, you can almost taste on the breeze. For me, peaches have always been one of them.  To bite into a ripe peach at its peak is to taste the memory of the best summer you ever had: Hitting rope ...

CANNELLONI DI MELANZANE: AN APPRECIATION OF THE UNDER APPRECIATED

I feel like eggplants get a bad rap. I feel like even the people who like them or plant them in their home garden sometimes do so simply because they feel they should. On certain restaurant menus eggplant dishes can come across as either obligatory homages to immigrant roots or oddly shaped stakes in the ground for militant ...

A FINE SIMPLICITY: TOMATOES, ONIONS, GARLIC AND HERBS

I love my wife. She gives me a reason for many, many things, not the least of which is cooking for two on a pretty regular basis. Which, no matter what anyone tells you, is always a much more fulfilling and rewarding activity than cooking for one. In addition to her many other fine qualities, she’s my principal food ...