Category: Food and Drink

  • Two Parties

    Most restaurant industry slaves refer to New Year’s Eve as "Amateur Night". Having worked plenty of NYE’s in past, I can’t say that I’m eager to go out and cram myself into a bar with a bunch of sweaty, drunk people. Have fun. I wouldn’t mind tucking into a cozy booth at a favorite restaurant,…

  • A Cratchit Family Christmas

    I read this the morning of every Christmas Eve. It helps remind me of the essential importance of a humble, shared feast. I gift this to all cooks as they start their ovens. Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a…

  • Balls of Bourbon

    Been a bit boozy lately, haven’t I? Well, it is the season of holiday parties, family gatherings, and all manner of cold-weather frolic that can be greatly enhanced by hot cocoa with a "bump"… It’s Nana’s fault. The old girl was a former society debutante who started smoking when she was a Campfire Girl and…

  • Ripeness Is All

    We all, they say, have one book in us. God knows what mine would be. How about Good Wine Needs No Bush: Political Maunderings of an Expatriate Oenophile? Or perhaps Latin Love in a Cold Climate: Memories of a Minnesota Classicist. These are merely titles in the mind. More intriguing are authors who produce one…

  • A Great Big Flip

    He’d been a groom before; I hated the idea of a puffy white dress. So we had a ceremony at the courthouse and left abruptly the next morning for Paris. I’d like to say it was impossibly romantic. But among the magical nighttime moments in the Louvre courtyard, there was plenty of bickering concerning the…

  • Shop n' Nosh

    I am WAY behind on shopping. I know I’ve been writing out gift guides for y’all, but that doesn’t mean that I’m surrounded with foodies in my real life. I have to buy Bionicles and Restoration Hardware tchotchkes like the rest of you. But I generally hate shopping. The only way I can suffer the…