Category

essays

  • Hot Coffee Drink vs. Cold Coffee Drink

    Hot Coffee Drink vs. Cold Coffee Drink

    There’s a funny website called “Is It Iced Coffee Weather?” that determines, based on your location, whether it’s iced coffee weather. The current prognosis for me is: “No. Try it hot.” This is a question I’m often asking myself because I enjoy drinking coffee every day, so much so that I drink tea in the…

  • What’s Stopping Me From Becoming A Vegetarian?

    What’s Stopping Me From Becoming A Vegetarian?

    I’m on the edge. This story got me there, this one (which I could only read part of) almost pushed me over. Superbugs and industrial slaughterhouses are facts that live in my brain now and they reside there with images from Food Inc., essays by Michael Pollan, and all the other tracts and screeds I’ve…

  • Planning A Dinner Menu

    Planning A Dinner Menu

    Good morning! Like my bed-head? That’s me at this very moment trying to plan tonight’s dinner menu. I’m having a few friends over this evening and I’m in Phase One of the process: figuring out what I’m going to make. Usually I keep this process to myself but today I’ve decided to share it with…

  • Don’t Throw Out That Chicken Skin (Also: A Meditation on Self-Control vs. Self-Denial)

    Don’t Throw Out That Chicken Skin (Also: A Meditation on Self-Control vs. Self-Denial)

    At the grocery store, you may have noticed, you can’t buy skinless chicken thighs that have bones. You can buy boneless, skinless chicken thighs or you can buy chicken thighs with the skin and bones still attached. If you want your chicken thighs to have bones and no skin, you’ll have to remove the skin…

  • You Really Ought To See Babette’s Feast

    You Really Ought To See Babette’s Feast

    Watching a movie is tricky business when you’re dating a filmmaker. It’s never just a casual, “Let’s just throw something in the DVD player” kind of deal; it’s usually a: “Would you rather watch Wild Strawberries or Piranha 3-D?” Luckily, my resident filmmaker is in New York editing his own movie and I have total…

  • Salad on the Same Plate as Dinner

    Salad on the Same Plate as Dinner

    There are three kinds of people in this world: people who eat salad before dinner, people who eat salad after dinner (aka: the French) and the strangest group of all, people who eat salad on the same plate as dinner. I grew up in a “salad before dinner” family. On those rare occasions when we’d…

  • Say Hello To Our New Bakelite Flatware

    Say Hello To Our New Bakelite Flatware

    I’m 33 years-old, soon to be 34 (get your gifts ready, we’re talking 2/18), but no moment has made me feel older than the moment I found myself, on a Friday night, spending hours on E-Bay looking at flatware. “How did this happen?” I asked myself when I realized what I was doing. “I used…

  • 10 Food Blog Posts That’ll Get You Traffic

    10 Food Blog Posts That’ll Get You Traffic

    This past weekend I gave a lecture at Food Blog South in Birmingham, Alabama. The title of my speech was “10 Food Blog Posts That’ll Get You Traffic” and though I was slightly nervous going in–this was my first time both attending and speaking at a food blog conference–I felt validated, after it was over,…

  • Fear of Mayo

    Fear of Mayo

    Jimmy Fallon likens it to pus. Last night at dinner, the idea of it made Craig’s cousin Katie scrunch up her face in disgust. And me? I used to have nightmares about this female camp counsellor with a hairy lip who ate an egg salad sandwich with dabs of mayo stuck all along the perimeter…

  • Down With Communal Tables!

    Down With Communal Tables!

    [Image via I’m Only Here For The Food] At long last, after weeks of waiting, we’re going to that great restaurant everyone’s been talking up. We’ve pinched pennies, we’ve cleared calendars, we’ve read the reviews online and the menu and strategized endlessly about how and what we’ll order. Only: this place doesn’t take reservations, so…