Author: Ann Bauer

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the contractor who worked on my own tiny St. Louis Park house — doing everything from renovating the kitchen to replacing the automatic garage door when my teenage son backed the car through it — is also the person who’s helping Kim Bartmann — the innovative, blur-the-lines…

(Pulitzer prize-winning author, William Styron) I finished another novel last week. But this means little. It means I awakened at 6:30 a.m. for two years or so — on holidays, my birthday, every morning but the one my husband and I camped on our honeymoon — went immediately to the computer while my saturated dream…

It must be nerve-wracking to provide a birthday cake for one of the area’s top food critics. But some mysterious baker’s wife did a bang-up job. At my esteemed co-blogger’s party the other night, we were served a towering creation from A Baker’s Wife Pastry Shop. Now, I’m not a dessert person. Fine wine, five-dollar-a-cup…

And I do mean everything. My friend and colleague, Jeremy Iggers, is successful, well-traveled, profoundly ethical, and endlessly curious about food, culture, and life. He has a lovely house, a huge following, and an absolutely beautiful wife, Carol, who’s wickedly smart to boot. So what does one get a fortunate man like this on the…

Earlier this week, I received a note from a reader who wanted me to recommend a German Riesling for her office Oktoberfest celebration. I was stumped. If you lined up all the varietals in the world from goal post to goal post on a football field — jammy, dark, South American Malbecs at one end…

It started with Don Lee, my colleague in the English department at Macalester. Don is new to the Twin Cities, author of the novel Country of Origin, and we’re very pleased to have him. So when he told me he was mostly happy with Minnesota but disappointed in the small number of restaurants serving authentic…