10 Restaurant Trends for 2012

November 28, 2011

At my old day job, I survived on food trends. 2006 was the year of burrata, 2007 the year of the gastropub, and 2008 the year of the fro-yo wars. 2009’s fascination with burgers and cupcakes gave way to 2010’s meatless Mondays and gluten-free everything. My fellow staffers and I witnessed curbside pick-up become eclipsed [...]

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Wines to drink with turkey + fixings

November 21, 2011

There are so many helpful posts about what to cook for Thanksgiving. So instead, I thought I’d address the other side of the equation: what to drink with Thanksgiving (and with other holiday festivities). I’ll start with wine. For a rich meal, I prefer lighter, lower-alcohol choices. There is nothing wrong with a big, juicy [...]

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A trip to an Italian grocery store

November 16, 2011

Ah, Italy.  A place where markets with baskets of perfect tomatoes spill out of every piazza and the sun always shines. La vita è bella. Except when it isn’t. Torrential rain led to mudslides in Liguria and northern Tuscany, with devastating consequences. In Friuli, hail storms ruined the grape harvest in the Collio. And when [...]

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Mexican Chocolate Tapioca Pudding

November 11, 2011

Chocolate pudding was a big part of my dessert repertoire, if you could call it that, when I was in elementary school. I’d open up a package of chocolate pudding mix, follow the instructions on the box, and then refrigerate the pudding until set. Sometimes it would develop a skin on top, which I secretly [...]

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How to Write a Recipe

November 4, 2011

I don’t write perfect recipes on the first draft (or the second, for that matter). Like any kind of writing, there’s the inevitable moment when you go back and read what you have written only to find that it makes no sense at all. So you revise. But writing recipes is, in one sense, easier [...]

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Feeding Nostalgia

October 26, 2011

Last Friday, I had the good fortune of tagging along to a friends-and-family preview of the new menu at Next. As it’s been well-documented elsewhere, Grant Achatz’s idea incubator of a restaurant composes one tasting menu based on a theme. Where it gets interesting is that these themes are more likely to emerge from episodes [...]

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What did the Romans eat, anyway?

October 20, 2011

Ever since we crawled out of the Dark Ages, the legend of the Roman Empire has enthralled and enchanted us. (They irrigated their fields and built aqueducts! They engineered bridges and roads that lasted long after the Empire crumbled! They had mile markers on their highways! They were democratic!) So even though the western half [...]

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Eggplant, Meatball-Style

October 11, 2011

Lately it’s felt like summer in Chicago—probably for the last time this year—and I still want summer flavors. Cue eggplant, presented here in the form of “meatballs.” I usually cede the impulse to use quotations around dishes to the likes of Thomas Keller. But this recipe felt like it needed them. Eggplant balls on their [...]

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That’s a wrap: final shoot for the Vie cookbook

September 19, 2011

Whew. Three days of photo shoots for the Vie Cookbook, three days of running around with food, props, and people, not to mention goats, chickens, and bees. Our photo team, comprising Jeff and Susie Kauck, their daughter, Dana, and Jeff’s photo assistant, Aaron Corey, worked hard to capture the final plated food shots while Paul [...]

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Crazy. Busy.

September 10, 2011

I just finished a conference call this Saturday morning. At 7AM. The day is only just beginning and already I can feel anxiety rising in the pit of my stomach, my jaw clench. It’s about the work load for the month. It’s massive. It’s also massive for all of the people I’m working with, though [...]

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