Another Halloween has come and gone. As JR said to me on November 1: "Only 364 days 'til next Halloween!" Our house is full of Snickers, KitKat, and Twix, but I thought that what we really needed was some homemade candy. Okay, no. The last thing we need actually is more candy of any kind, but I had some free time and an itch to try something new. ...
Your Best Apple Pie
Are you finzlizing your Thanksgiving menu? Will you make the same foods as last year or will you try to mix it up? My mother and I love to host Thanksgiving together and we have pretty much honed our menu over past the few decades so that it is just how we want it. I did revolutionize the way we cooked the turkey about 7 years ago. (See this ...
October 2014 Chicago Food Swap Recap
The Chicago Food Swap had its October event this past weekend. It was our second event in our new home, the Peterson Garden Project's Fearless Food Kitchen. As is so often the case, the offerings reflected the best of the season, from the tail end of backyard garden produce to Halloween-themed treats. The October swap was smaller than the ...
Chive and Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits
Sometimes what I have made for dinner doesn't feel like it is quite enough. Maybe I made a big pot of delicious soup but something seems to be missing. Maybe we are having an omelet and green salad - one of my favorite desperation dinners -- but I'm still craving carbs. That is when I turn to biscuits. Homemade bread may take hours of preparation, ...
How to Make Kreplach
If you think the matzo ball is the ultimate Jewish soup dumpling, let me quickly disabuse you of that notion. As much as I love a fluffy matzo ball, my heart truly belongs to kreplach, the meat-filled pasta known affectionately as Jewish tortellini and served during the High Holidays. Never heard of kreplach? You are not alone. While matzo ball ...
September Chicago Food Swap Recap
Sunday marked the return of the Chicago Food Swap after a two-month break. The September swap was the first event in the Chicago Food Swap's new, permanent home, the Fearless Food Kitchen in the Broadway Armory field house. This roomy, light-filled teaching kitchen, operated by the community gardening nonprofit Peterson Garden Project, makes a ...
Where to Eat at Pike Place Market
As I mentioned in my last post, I attended the International Food Bloggers Conference last weekend in Seattle. One of the best things about the conference was, of course, its location. Food lovers flock to Seattle for its abundant local ingredients, its world-renowned chefs and for the sprawling, chaotic Pike Place Market. The Pike Place Market ...
How to Buy the Right Cut of Meat – Part 2
This is the continuation of a . While I was at the International Food Bloggers Conference in Seattle last week, I attended an informative session put on by the consumer education organization Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner. I am sharing what I learned at that session with you in the hope that you can approach the meat counter with ...
How to Buy the Right Cut of Meat – Part 1
I attended the International Food Bloggers Conference (IFBC) in Seattle this past weekend. It was a whirlwind of friends, food and great sessions. Later this week, I hope to post some of the pretty pictures I took at the revered Pike Place Market and tell you all about the unique and delicious food I sampled there. (Piroshkies! Crumpets!) But ...
What to Do with Fresh Figs
Dip them in chocolate ganache, of course! Why? What do you do with fresh figs? It is definitely fig season and if you only know figs from the dried kind -- or even worse, Newtons -- you are in for a treat. Fresh figs are sweet, juicy and altogether luscious. Lending themselves to both sweet and savory preparations, fresh figs are the fruit you ...
What to Do with Hatch Chiles
"Is it salsa time," asked the man in the produce section, gesturing toward my bulging bag of green Hatch chiles. "You know you can freeze them," I replied. "Really?" "Sure. You roast them, peel them and then freeze them in bags. That way you have them all year long." "Huh," said the man thinking this over. "Good to know." That exchange happened ...
Two Tropical Drink Recipes
After spending one of the afternoons of our tropical, Costa Rican vacation in a wine-tasting class -- albeit a wine-tasting class in a open lobby overlooking the beach -- you might think we were done with improving ourselves. But no! As soon as my sister-in-law and I heard that our resort also offered a Mixology class, we immediately signed up ...
Wine Tasting in Paradise
My family is on vacation in Costa Rica this week with my mother and my brother and his family. I have traveled to some of the great cities of Europe, Hawaii, Mexico and the Caribbean and I can safely say that Costa Rica is one of the most beautiful places that I have ever been. And the Costa Rican people that we have met have been, to a person, ...
How to Bake with Yeast
Once, a dozen years ago, when I was a young bride living in a hip Chicago neighborhood -- I wasn't always west of the Loop, you know -- I tried to make challah from scratch for Shabbat dinner. The dough never rose and, when baked, my loaf was so dense that I could have hit my husband over the head with it and knocked him out cold. Scarred by ...
July Chicago Food Swap Recap
The Chicago Food Swap returned to Wicker Park, and the funky confines of co-working loft Free Range Office, for its July swap. It was a small but lively gathering peopled mostly by returning swappers with a few new faces scattered here and there. Located on the second floor of a converted glove factory, Free Range Office is filled with light and ...
Scenes from the Farmers Market
At least once every year, I like to bring my camera with me on one of my early Saturday morning trips to the Oak Park Farmers Market to capture the abundance. Mid-July is a heady time at the farmers market. The tables are groaning with fruit from the Michigan orchards. Stone fruits of all kinds, from cherries to apricots to peaches and plum, ...
Farmers Market Find: Gooseberries
I freely admit that I am a sucker for the most unusual item at the market or on a menu. Sometimes my instinct to try that new-to-me food can backfire, such as the bitter and grassy corn shoots in my salad at the Zingerman's Roadhouse. (Some things are just not for eating, folks.) But nevertheless, I press on. So it was that I passed by all the ...
A Weekend in Ann Arbor
It had been just over twenty-four hours since we arrived in Ann Arbor and I simply could not eat or drink another thing. Clearly, I had failed as a professional eater. Bon Appétit has a feature called The Big Fat Weekend where one of the editors spends a weekend eating and drinking his or her way through a city and then writes an article filled ...
Grilled Vegetables with Balsamic-Lime Reduction
It's the lazy days of summer and I am feeling lazy too. I barely want to lift a finger, let alone make dinner. Luckily, it is also grilling season. That means that I can enlist my husband to make dinner. Thank heavens. Here is what we ate for dinner the past two nights. Saturday: grilled chicken sausage, grilled vegetables and tabbouleh. ...
June Chicago Food Swap Recap
For a foodie event, there is hardly a more prestigious location than Sur La Table, the beloved kitchenwares emporium. So when Ali Banks, the resident chef at Chicago's swanky Sur La Table store on Michigan Avenue, reached out to me about hosting a food swap in her kitchen, I was falling over myself to say yes. While Michigan Avenue is inevitably ...
Strawberry Balsamic Basil Ice Cream
It's high strawberry season in the Midwest. Farmers market tables display row upon row of ruby-red berries capped with jolly green stems. At my house, we've already indulged in strawberry shortcake, strawberry rhubarb pie and I've put up nine jars of a strawberry-rhubarb- jalapeño jam. While I am certain that my husband would not have objected to ...
Culinary Tour of Devon Avenue
Does your city have ethnic neighborhoods filled with markets, shops and restaurants where recent and not-so-recent immigrants can recreate a little of their homeland here in the United States? Most cities do. All over America there are Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Greektowns, Little Saigons, Little Odessas and Little Italies. Some of these neighborhoods ...
Mariano’s Makes Summertime Living Easier
This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. #MyMarianos #Collective Bias Summertime and the living is easy. Nowhere is that more true than Chicago. Winter is brutal and spring inevitably a wet, cold disappointment, but summer in Chicago is glorious. The days are warm and sunny; every weekend boasts a different ...
Summer Cooking: Spicy Caprese Pasta
I'm hot. You're hot. She's hot. We're hot! Sounds like a bad wedding band, right? As fond as I am of party hits from the 80's, today I am actually just talking about the weather. It went from cold and rainy to sweltering and humid overnight in Chicago. Yesterday was the first day of the year where I had absolutely no interest in eating hot food. ...
Elegant First Course: Cold Pea Soup with Mint
The appearance of shelling peas at the Oak Park Farmers Market on Saturday meant that I could make one of my all-time favorite recipes this weekend. A recipe that is only in play for a few weeks each year: cold pea soup with mint. Luckily, this recipe is also a favorite with my soup-loving husband, so when I put it on the menu for Father's Day, he ...