More and more bars now serve "cocktails for carnivores," a.k.a. fleshy refreshers, a.k.a. alcoholic drinks containing meat. These vegan-repellers bring a whole new meaning to the term "bloody Mary."

1. The Duck Duck Duck, served at Chicago's Storefront Company:

Chef Bryan Moscatello makes this poultry-ific pleaser with...

I'm always the last one eating at every shared meal -- not because I eat a lot, but because I take really small bites and cut everything up in order to make it all last as long as possible. At Thanksgiving, I cut up the pecans from my slice of...

It came to me last week, like a bolt from the blue: My favorite food is chili mac.

You know that stuff -- macaroni, onion, garlic, kidney beans, tomato sauce, tomatoes, oregano, chili powder and ground beef or faux ground beef, mixed up together in a pot?

In a sense, eating seeds feels wrong.

It feels criminal. Sinful, physically and metaphysically -- because every seed holds the literal potential for not only the next generation of plants but the next and the next and the next: That is, for future plants in perpetuity, which is to...

Mom used to ask Dad sometimes whether he wanted a highball.

When I was small, this made me squirm. I knew "ball" was a nasty word among grownups, but not what it meant. Dad always declined. He wanted no highballs. It was decades before I learned that highballs are...

A friend once told me that she and her siblings had spent the previous day at Disneyland.

I was jealous.

"We spent hours there," she said, "eating chocolate."

I was sooo jealous.

"White chocolate," she said. Suddenly I wasn't jealous anymore. The very thought of white chocolate drained from my...

Encountering a macaron tower at San Francisco's Hakkasan recently ...

... I overheard two women calling them macaroons. I wanted to correct them, to say No -- macaroons are chewy, heavy pyramidal cookies composed almost entirely of coconut flesh ...

Forks up, party people! It's fenugreek season!

After acquiring some free fenugreek seeds at a neighborhood seed exchange, we planted them -- recognizing their name only vaguely as some component of curry. Now they're a bumper crop. We decided to investigate and eat our new slender-stemmed friends.

Passover seders, as a concept, are supposed to conjure happy family memories and the solemnity and joy of the holiday itself, as symbolized by the traditional seder foods: fresh greens and hard-boiled eggs evoking springtime; bitter herbs evoking the pain of slavery; lamb shank representing the lambs' blood daubed on...

When Hostess went belly-up last November, everyone wondered what would take its place. Because surely something would, because ever since Twinkies were introduced in the 1930s by the same industrial Illinois bakery that produced Wonder Bread, generations of Americans grew up craving these largely unnatural little logs along with Ding...

What was the main course of a gala wine dinner crafted by an award-winning chef at a highly acclaimed Napa, California restaurant last Thursday night?

Three guesses. No, not brisket. Not bass. Hint: Australopithecus might like it. Rhymes with "Guantanamero."

Yes! Bone marrow!

At...

Although potato chips topped the list of favorite comfort foods in one recent Cornell University-affiliated survey, chewy, gooey, sticky things -- caramels, grilled cheese, taffy, mochi -- are emotional game-changers for good reason.

Although our bodies have specific sensory receptors for color and flavor, we...

Pistachios may improve erectile function. They're the nuts for the nuts. The nut nuts.

In a recent study, which was published in the International Journal of Impotence Research and employed such no-nonsense identifiers as International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF) scores and penile color Doppler ultrasound (PCDU) parameters,...

If beer is the new wine, we need to start doing some of the same things with beer that we do with wine. Pairing cheese with it and making sauces with it are too easy. Raise your game, guys: Let's cook with hops!

Challenged by celebrity Chef

Dining in Las Vegas used to be about wolfing down all the pancakes and mashed potatoes you could eat amidst bright lights, clown art and sticky linoleum before heading back out to the slot machines. These days, it's about dizzying luxury, unbelievably exotic ingredients (dragonfruit! wild boar!), globe-spanning diversity, eye-popping...

They were making ice cream with liquid nitrogen last night at San Francisco's One Market, as the glamorous Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Handed parfait glasses piled high with heavenly, fluffily satiny white deliciousness as our fellow party-goers delved into sunchoke risotto, swirly meringues...

I ate pork desserts.

They were delicious.

In so doing, I entered the Forbidden Food Zone several times over, through at least three different gateways. One: I was raised in a kosher household where pork was reviled, except the barbecued spare ribs that we secretly bought from a Chinese restaurant...

When a 12,000-square foot, 300-seat beer hall opens in Silicon Valley, you know beer's time has come.

When dark chocolate and salt-water taffy are manufactured in beer flavors, when beer is paired with caramels at trendy urban bars, you really know beer's...

Wednesday-night dinner turned into a big surprise and a super-big score for folks lucky enough to be eating theirs at Bocanova Pan-American Grill in Oakland, Calif. Between the fourth course and dessert, officials from LAN Airlines -- the main carrier in Chile, Ecuador, Peru and other...

Here is my latest creation, a ham-and-cheese cocktail that I can't decide whether to call a Manhamtan, a Cheesy Mary or a Hamlet. It comprises whiskey, half-and-half, a dash of simple syrup (because I like jam or chutney on ham-and-cheese sandwiches), aged cheddar cheese and a prosciutto chunk. And yes,...