A reader of a previous post asked if I would share again the HT column I wrote on a summer trip to Provence, with its accompanying ratouille recipe.  All things equal, I’d rather revisit Provence itself but as that’s not to be this summer, here’s the article instead.  Thanks, Gillian! This originally appeared as a…

So, okay, the olives didn’t come from the Farmers Market, but just about everything else I had for lunch did. It was a great morning for shopping – not too hot, not too crowded, lots of good music and gorgeous produce that seems to have made the transition from spring to summer. Just about everyone…

I’m having potato salad for breakfast. Mom’s recipe — the one thing I found myself really craving when I went away to college. Because I loved it, she always made it to welcome me back and to send me on my way again. Eating it makes me feel like I’m 19, embracing the heady adventure…

The twinkling blue eyes under the camouflage baseball cap were perplexed. “You want what, now?” he asked. “I’ll have to check.” He turned to the lanky cook behind him. “She wants a tenderloin sandwich, without the tenderloin. Can we do that?” They conferred a minute and came up with a way to charge me for…

Start a blog and suddenly your world is full of bloggers.  Last week, of course, I wrote about Scott Hutcheson (who blogs at hungryhoosier.com.) On Monday I met an Indianapolis food blogger and we had an excellent lunch (well the gossip was excellent, the food, regrettably, less so.) If you want the inside scoop on…

Well, here’s a belated report on a magnificent event last Sunday – the third annual Slow Food Chefs of Bloomington Dinner. I’ll try to keep this post shorter than the meal itself, which was as long and leisurely as a Slow Food dinner should be. Just quickly, for those who don’t know, Slow Food is…

What I chiefly remember about my grandmother’s Los Angeles kitchen was that she was always in it. Lebanese cooking is labor intensive. There’s lamb to be freshly ground for kibbe, all those grape leaves to be stuffed and rolled, bread to be kneaded and baked, vegetables to be pickled, meat pies to be shaped. Grandma…

This Column originally appeared in the Bloomington Herald Times on June 14, 2006 For the Web-savvy, blogs are commonplace; for others maybe not so much. So here’s a quick primer: a “blog” is short for “Web log,” an online journal that chronicles whatever the blogger wants to talk about – essentially a diary for all…

Sometimes, when we go out to eat, the food my husband orders looks so good that I don’t know where to start. “Hmm, honey, my plate or yours?” I think, as my fork hovers between them. He’s a great sport about sharing though, and that’s where all great food experiences begin. This blog is all…

This post was originally published as a column in the Bloomington Herald Times on May 31, 2006 There is nothing like cooking with professionals to instill a little humility in the amateur chef. Since I’ve been writing this food column, nearly four years now, I have found myself in the kitchen with the experts several…

This post originally appeared in the Bloomington Herald Times on May 17, 2006Back before the advent of all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets (yes, hard to believe there was once a time when proprietors of a cuisine famous for fast, healthy, last minute cooking didn’t let food sit around forever on steam tables), eggrolls were truly a splendid…

This post originally appeared in the Bloomington Herald Times on May 3, 2006 Benjamin Franklin had something to say about asparagus, as he did about so many things: “A few stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a Disagreeable Odour,” he wrote in 1781, in a discourse on ways to make noxious bodily discharges…