I comfort myself by believing in chaos theory, that seemingly unrelated events are linked. A garden in Milwaukee can have consequences for a girl in Miami. There is a great shiny matrix of connection, something that binds us all. You just have to be open to the signs. There’s the rub. But I’ve been seeing…
The Eating of the Green
To celebrate today, I wanted to create a new recipe that’s beyond green. Sure, you’re wearing green because it’s St. Patrick’s Day and that’s what one does. That’s lovely, but even better is the green you wear inside. I’m talking about the eating of the green — green as in environmentally aware and green as…
Banana Bread and the Theory of Relativity
Fabulous art courtesy of the fabulous Philip Brooker. I got thinking about banana bread this morning when I saw the bananas on the kitchen counter had gone all black and gnarly. This is a good thing — tired, past-their-prime bananas are what distinguish a superior banana bread from its pale, dry imitations. My grandmother’s…
Heretical Vegetable Tagine With Turnips
What you’ll probably never see on a Gourmet cover — “Our top ten turnip recipes!” Face it, turnips are no one’s favorite vegetable (are they yours? Talk to me.). And yet they’re as much a part of the vegetable kingdom as the more popular potato, they’re almost indestructible, they last for ages, the staple of…
When Life Offers You Lemons
With the stock market in freefall and joblessness at a 25-year high, it helps to remember attitude is everything. If you’re going to eat humble pie, make it tasty. Some of our most exciting culinary times have grown from poor soil. During the worst of food shortages and ration cards, M.F.K. Fisher taught us How…
Ital Vital Farmers Market Caribbean Stew
In his poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) wrote, “Had we but world enough and time/My vegetable love would grow/Vast as empires and more slow.” By this, he meant in a perfect world, we’d have the luxury of time and a love that would grow exponentially, organically, unfolding and revealing itself…
Naked Broccoli
Harry Crews once told me that when he writes, “I want to get as naked as I possibly can, to strip my mind, my emotional stuff, whatever I work out of, and say, Here it is, ladies and gentlmen, this is all I’m bringing.” I love that attitude. I try to be naked, too, to…
Dinner, Slowly
This was not my date at last night’s Slow Food Miami’s dinner at Creek 28. This is a Galapagos Tortoise and for the sake the of this post, a visual pun — slow, get it? Of course you do, you clever soul. None of us were tortoises but many of us were strangers when the…
Lovely for Lent Black-Eyed Peas With Fennel and Kale
Some people (and you know who you are) do not share recipes. It’s time to give, darlings. Wouldn’t you rather be known as a big-hearted person who shares the wealth? And even if you write out your prized recipe in painstaking detail, your friend’s version will come out different. Different stove, different cookware,…
Still Life With Food
I always liked the idea of ceviche, fresh-as-hell seafood that “cooks” in its citrus marinade. It’s the fish part that lost me. Creating veggie ceviche had a bonus — a still life shot that had nothing to do with the photographer and everything to do with produce’s intrinsic beauty. Lovely round purple onion, green jalapeno,…
