It’s ironic that I spend no small amount of time each week selecting and formatting recipes for use in the Mail Tribune’s A la Carte section when I rarely use them myself. Let me clarify: I borrow some of the newspaper’s recipes when they offer an intriguing new flavor combination or means for learning a [...]
My food-hoarding ways have long been something of a family joke. Sales sway me to stock up big-time, and nearly every trip to the grocery store deserves a gleeful report on some frugal purchase or the pantry’s swollen state. I like to think I inherited this trait from my great-grandmother, who was an avid gardener [...]
Working in a newsroom, I’ve learned to tune out distractions — between the police scanner’s constant litany, ringing telephones as varied in tone as in volume and a beeping microwave that’s enslaved to heat up cups of coffee from 8 a.m. until after midnight. It wasn’t all those sounds yesterday but a particular aroma that [...]
Typically, I’d use this post to relate some additional aspect of the food or business featured in this week’s A la Carte. Nothing this week seemed as exciting, though, as my purchase of Vortex wines for as little as $2.50 per bottle. As mentioned in Cleve Twitchell’s latest Wine Talk column, Vortex wines are made [...]
Readers can expect two weeks of A la Carte coverage coinciding with THRIVE’s Eat Local Challenge Sept. 5-14. But we’ve already made strides to get the word out, which include beefing up the newspaper’s eat local Web page and asking readers to take the challenge and keep a diary of their efforts. Although we set [...]
When I proposed finding the finest fruit specimens to grace the cover of this week’s A la Carte section, Mail Tribune photo editor Bob Pennell was already over peach season. His son and daughter-in-law, visiting from France, had been devouring peaches since their arrival a week earlier. Bowl after bowl of sliced peaches topped with [...]
It’s about time that chefs and food-industry celebrities embraced frozen fish. Yet the endorsement, reported in this week’s A la Carte, comes off as almost apologetic with eco-consciousness being cited as the primary reason. Delving deeper into Wednesday’s Washington Post article, readers will learn that there’s little — if any — discernible difference between fish [...]
From cooking classes at local venues featured in this week’s A la Carte, Dutch oven guru Will McLaughlin plans to take his cast-iron cast statewide next year for Oregon’s 150th anniversary. Camp essentials for anyone traveling the Oregon Trail, Dutch ovens are likely participants in statehood festivities planned for 2009. But cookware preferences aside, more [...]
After a relatively mild month or so, the outdoor temperatures are heating up again — just another reason to take the kitchen’s heat outdoors. My friend with whom I’d recently mastered the art of starting coals provided the location for our most recent culinary triumph: grilled pizza. If you’re like me, and you love a [...]
