recipes
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Simple cooking can produce delicious results — like old-fashioned Austrian pancakes
Get cooking, sonny. Too many people in this country have been sold a bill of goods. They’ve been tricked, flim-flammed, conned, and hustled. They’ve been bamboozled into believing that food comes wrapped in plastic from the freezer at the nearest Walmart. They’ve learned to believe that cooking is a chore — like laundry or washing […]
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Three guidebooks for a dream vacation at your dining-room table
Eat your way around the world, without leaving home. If you had to choose one place in the world to go for a summer break, where would it be? For me, it would be a place I stayed once in Puglia, at the heel of Italy’s boot. In 2003, my friends and I spent a […]
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Iowa’s chefs and their farmer-suppliers get busy recovering from disaster
Roads and restaurants may be closed, but Iowa is getting back on its feet. Photo: Kurt Michael Friese The weather here in Iowa City has been gorgeous for more than a week. Is Mother Nature trying to make amends? While she smiles on us, she’s still causing trouble for our friends to the south. The […]
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Now’s the time for scapes and green garlic
Food headlines hardly bring comfort these days: tales of lost harvests, hunger riots, agrichemical runoff, tainted pork and tomatoes. A society’s foodways surely reveal something about its quality of life. From studying the industrial-food system, as I do, it’s easy to conclude that we live in a brutal culture: content to destroy the ecosystem, exploit […]
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As storms rage on the prairie, strawberries and rhubarb bring comfort
A bright spot in the storm. Gaia has been hard on us prairie-dwellers lately. A dear friend who’s the director of the area’s largest CSA lost her 102-year-old barn to a storm this weekend. Swelled with recent rains, the Iowa River has been raging, sloshing toward levels never seen before. Fortunately, my restaurant sits on […]
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Toward a civil, inclusive national conversation on food — over a savory tart
As the date for Slow Food Nation — the big sustainable-food conference scheduled in San Francisco this coming August — draws near, I’ve been thinking about attitudes toward food in the erstwhile Fast Food Nation. Like a big pot of water that’s been on high heat seemingly forever, our national conversation on food seems to […]
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Got weeds? Reach for the food processor, not the lawnmower
Around this time of year, all the foodies in my neck of the woods are, well, in the woods. Spring and fall are the best wild food foraging times around here, and as if ol’ Mother Nature knew our food prices were going through the roof and transportation costs skyrocketing, she’s brought us a cornucopia […]
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CSAs can transform Iowa’s farm economy — and take its sandwiches to the next level
Getting fresh. Here in Iowa, the farmers markets are just emerging from hibernation, and with them the CSAs. Community-supported agriculture is not a new idea, but it certainly has been gaining ground over the past few years as ideas such as “local” and “sustainable” migrate from the fringes to the center. For the uninitiated, CSAs […]
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An earthy recipe for treading lightly on earth and pocketbook alike
As Earth Day approaches this year, it seems that people are thinking more about food’s price than its ecological footprint. A simple trip to the grocery store tells the same story we’ve been hearing on the news: it’s getting more and more expensive to feed ourselves. The morel of the story. I’ve been thinking a […]