Thirty-one years ago, when I was fourteen years old and living in Forest Hills, New York, I had an experience that would forever change the way I think about the basic decency of people.

It was a tough year. It was the Summer of Sam, and his hunting ground was...

Every year around this time, my partner and I pack up the car with too many books, cooking tools, and our very large dog, and we head north to central Vermont. This escape, which has over the years ranged from 1 week (not ideal) to 2 (more ideal, but...

Much has been made over the last week of the Alice-Gone-Down-The-Rabbit-Hole Republican Convention; we had Fred Thompson going on about how great things really, really are. We had Giuliani stealing a magnificent 13 minutes of airtime by going over--way, way over--in a speech that, even for him, was...

I'm sure I'm not alone among like-minded food professionals: watching the Republican Convention has, for me, resulted in a powerful urge to eat the most authentic, pure, simple, interesting, indigenous foods I can lay my hands on. I'm fairly certain that it's directly related to seeing, in all its gorgeous...

I'm sick.
My nose feels like it weighs 87 pounds.
My head is pounding.
My body is aching.
My eyes are burning.
I think I may have a fever.

I never get sick. I really don't. I spent last winter working in a hermetically-sealed...

It's been a bang-up week in the increasingly green world we food professionals inhabit. To start, New York Times contributor Alessandra Staley brilliantly covered Emeril Lagasse's apparent conversion to mindful eating and his subsequent hosting of a new show, Emeril Green, on the Discovery Network's channel, Planet Green. During...

I have to say, right off the bat, that I'm not too big a fan of weird food trends. I hate foam, for example, and have written about my fear and loathing of it extensively. The problem is that when some trends, which are best kept to the confines of...

Round about the time that Eliot Spitzer was doing up his fly after being publicly flogged for committing the same sort of sordid atrocity that he beat his breasts about over the years, I was busy, as usual, thinking about my life as a professional eater.

I'm not...

Anyone who picked up the weekend section of the Wall Street Journal last Friday most likely read the revelatory piece by wine writers extraordinaire, John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter: straying from their usual reportage on the latest (and always delicious) wine find, they instead wrote a review of...

It's been an interesting week in the food world, as most of us know.

We like to do things really big in America, and so, on the one hand, we've witnessed an historical event in the recall of exactly 143,383,823 pounds of raw and frozen beef products...

Not to sound overly simplistic or anything, but I'm not sure what it is about conflict and personal trial that compels food writers of most stripes to beat a hasty retreat to their home kitchens.

Okay, fine. I lied.

I know what it is, and I'm sure you...

"Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.''

-- Benjamin Franklin

If any rule of thumb applies to holiday entertaining etiquette, be it Thanksgiving, Hannukah, or Christmas, this would be it: If you're someone else's house guest during the holidays, make yourself scarce after three days for both their...

My first experience with Alice Waters, the founder of the ground-breaking Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, took place back in 1987; I was the cookbook buyer at the original Dean & Deluca in Manhattan, and one day, the door was flung open wide by a panting, petite...

Many years ago, when Johnson was in office and our news was littered with tales of war and woe, I tasted my first fresh greens. Up until that moment, my diet as a child of the 1960s consisted primarily of frozen dinners and stringy asparagus -- the one canned green...

Seven years ago, when I at long last fell in love on what I consider to surely be a permanent basis, I not only had the pleasure of keeping regular company with the travel-loving, Italophile partner of my dreams, but her large, black, curl-laden dog as well. And just...

When I first went away to camp in 1972, my mother, in typically hysterical fashion, came down with a raging case of stress-related shingles. A dyed-in-the-wool city girl, that's how my being at sleepaway camp affected her.

At nine years old, and away from home for the first time in...

Food writers can be, by nature, a hoity-toity lot, and frankly, we've done much to inflate the down-home prices of what has heretofore been nothing but old-fashioned, country-style American food. In fact, we often take pleasure in glamorizing the fantastically mundane just by being extremely specific about the most...

It is a sorry state of affairs for the gastronome who is faced with the very early middle age fact that her favorite comfort food may be considered by her cardiologist to be along the same healthful and life-giving lines as, say, arsenic.

The poor egg -- so...

The gauntlet is down, the oven mitts are off, the pork confit's been eaten and the sweet butter is gone. Perhaps, for good.

I have long bemoaned the banning of trans fats, but not for the obvious reasons: not because I believe that the government should take the...

My only real fear in life - pyrophobia - can be attributed on the one hand to the part-time magician father of a childhood friend who, on the occasion of my third birthday and for reasons I will never understand, set one of my Airedale's Milkbones on a sterling silver...