Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches– William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” Spring comes to Chicago in fits and starts. We swing from freezing temperatures to upward of 70-degrees and back again, sometimes within the same day. The sun teases us into thinking we barely need jackets, but the wind off the lake reminds …
Posts from: March 2007
When I lived in Italy, the one meal that became a repeated source of disappointment was breakfast. Don’t get me wrong, I was entranced by the dainty cups and spoons, the mysterious drink requests (caffe normale con un cubetto di ghiaccio [espresso with one ice cube?]), the sometimes oddly tetrahedral or cylindrical sugar packets, and …
Dan raised a quizzical eyebrow when he heard me say “barley salad.” It’s tough to make barley sound sexy. It tends to sneak into our diets unnoticed, flavoring our beers and bagels and scotch whiskies and malted milk balls, lingering in the background but seldom taking center stage. Basho, the seventeenth century Japanese master of …
When I mentioned to a few people that I was planning to make Armenian tahini bread, the most common response was, “Where exactly is Armenia?” This landlocked country in Transcaucasia, bound by Georgia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran and Turkey to to the south and west, has had a rough go …