My wife and I love a good steak, and when it comes to Filet Mignon, I must admit with a heavy heart that it is difficult to find it done well in restaurants.   As such, we find ourselves (or more to the point, me) breaking down whole tenders at home to ensure that we… Read more »

Forgetting that I had asked my amazing wife for books (I am somewhat of a broken record when it comes to wish lists), I once again received volumes of letter with an assortment of texts of culinary lore for Christmas. Also in the stack was a wonderful non-culinary novel, a Pulitzer Prize winner of 1981,… Read more »

I had an offal weekend; an awfully offal weekend. Finding myself in Frederick at Mick’s New American Bistro where my nephew is doing his internship for culinary school, the chef gave me course after course of his favorite foods; snout to tail. It started with lamb’s heart tartare, served with a pullet egg yolk and… Read more »

“Cooking is messy, dirty work.  The work involves bare hands, sticky fingers, licks of this and that, whacks on fleshy lumps, hissing lids and miscellaneous smells.  It is also dangerous, the basic tools being either very sharp or very hot.” So wrote Michael Symons, an Australian food historian a dozen years ago when delving into… Read more »

I must confess that sometimes it would be nice to live a bit closer to the D.C. museums or other parts of the city life that I miss on occasion. Now that the cold season is upon us, I have to get creative on how to keep my brain occupied, dreaming of world-class dining and… Read more »

The turkey hath been stuffed and so hath I. It’s time to take to the track again, in defense against the onslaught of grub and grape this past week and in preparation for that which is to come. I can only imagine what is going to happen in the next month.  As I tend to… Read more »

The leaves are raked for the first time in three years, the grass has been mowed perhaps a month or so overdue and the chores are done. That doesn’t happen very often around these parts, so I am fairly pleased with myself. On the flip side, I am exhausted, and the last thing that I… Read more »

There’s nothing like a 45 degree windy day on the shore to remind us of the time of year. And to think that I was going to go to the park in a pair of shorts and flip flops. As my neck has been paining me since I awoke, I hadn’t gone outside until the… Read more »