There’s certainly been no shortage of posts about tomatoes to this blog over the summer. But if talk around summer’s quintessential fruit is any indiction, we haven’t worn out the topic yet, particularly with this week’s A la Carte story, which offered a dissenting opinion on the concept of “good” tomatoes. A detractor to the [...]
Murphy’s law of gardening ensures that you’ll have too few of the vegetables you really want and too many of the ones you don’t. Victim of this phenomenon, I debated this morning whether to add two tomatoes to the allotment of produce due a friend who watered over a critical, 100-some-degree weekend when we were [...]
A chef’s life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, judging by everything I’ve heard from food-industry professionals. Combine long (and usually late) hours with cramped and physically uncomfortable working conditions made even less glamorous by a general lack of recognition among diners. To top it all off, a chef often shoulders cooking for family [...]
Above-average splurging on restaurant meals is only to be expected in the big city. I knew that last weekend spent in Los Angeles would see my husband and me dining out for most every meal, likely to the tune of more than we would pay in the Rogue Valley. Major-league baseball parks, of course, are [...]
If you’re anything like me and resist recipes that require cooks to peel tomatoes using the score-blanch-and-chill process, you should love the oven-roasted tomato sauces included with this week’s A Fresh Approach column. I’ve been eschewing peeling tomatoes in preparation for sauces since last year’s considerable crop that left me short on time. My food [...]
“I don’t know anybody who deeply loves food who doesn’t have a Julia Child story.” So ran the reassurance I received from Mary Shaw, Ashland Food Co-op’s culinary educator, when I was still searching for local anecdotes to anchor a spread on Julia Child in Sunday’s newspaper. By the end of a week, I had [...]
Readers of this week’s food section should have seen the first installment of what promises to be a new Mail Tribune tradition: Since You Asked A la Carte edition. Because Since You Asked is among the newspaper’s most popular features, the powers that be decided we should extend it beyond the daily local news section [...]
The first time I looked for Old Bay seasoning in my favorite grocery store, I was perplexed. It wasn’t on the spice aisle. It wasn’t near the seafood. Doesn’t anyone like Old Bay in Rogue Valley? Apparently customers of Food 4 Less either really, really like Old Bay, or the spice company cut an exclusive [...]
