A Free Wine Encyclopedia!We have had some really fun wines the past few months, wines that lend themselves well to food. Many sales personnel use the term “this is a food wine” when trying to cover up some unusual characteristic. Most of them probably don’t understand what a “food wine” really is. It is much more than a… read more »
I am excited about this month’s recipe, you see I never get to write them, I just test them before I show them to you. This month, however, I gave our two food editors the month off and set out to complement our imported red wine of the month with an appropriate meal. The wine… read more »
Louis L’Amour, the late writer of westerns, was a family friend. He had a library of books that would knock your socks off. One day as I was admiring his enormous “room of books”, he pointed to a section of about 20 paperbacks and said, “If you read every one of those books, you would… read more »
Here’s a recipe that is a perfect mate to this month’s red wine selection: grilled leg-of-lamb served with a robust, though not piquant, sauce. But please read it all, before starting. Prepare the sauce ahead, reheating before serving. Allow 4 hours for preparation. The sauce is adapted for lamb using leftover bones and a technique… read more »
On my last trip to Williams Sonoma (I needed a few new wooden spoons… so I told my husband), I bought a pizza stone. It’s a large round slab of magical ceramic. When I asked my husband to carry the bag for me, he slyly commented, “I never knew wooden spoons could be so heavy!”… read more »
When I was a little girl, “pasta” meant spaghetti doused with tasteless bright red tomato sauce and sprinkled with some-kind-of-awful, artificial-tasting parmesan cheese. “Pasta” really wasn’t high on my list of childhood favorites. Years later, friends would rave about this fusilli or that pené, and I would simply tune them out. When I finally came… read more »
I am what you would call a “foodie”. Don’t bother looking it up in Webster’s, because it won’t be there. I can give you a brief definition of this word coined by food critics, writers, photographers and chefs: “A foodie is a person who considers food not only vital to his body, but to his… read more »
I love throwing parties, and the bigger, the better. I always start with a theme of some kind, and then go from there. With summer here, I’ll be entertaining a lot, and more important than anything, I need to be organized. I am a list-maker. The first thing I do when I decide to host… read more »
Last month my husband and I went out to dinner for his birthday. It was a cold and rainy night, and even after sitting down in the warm and comfortable restaurant, I was freezing. “Are you sure you want to keep your coat on?”, my husband asked. Not only did I want to keep my… read more »
Let’s face it, every cook has at least a few culinary items they are downright afraid to try to make. I always had a fear of making homemade danish pastry, and rightly so! Never will I forget the disaster of that enterprise. Making danish pastry is a difficult process, a skill that requires a thorough… read more »