The names given to recipes can be more or less a part of the recipe’s charisma. The name of a cake can be just a name or have the impact of food-inspired poetry. Restaurants per force use the same ingredients and same methods of preparation. There is only so much to work with and so many ways to wo…
Feature articles in magazines present us with professionally snapped photographs of celebrities who cook, politicians who cook, and people with very nice houses who cook and take it seriously. It seems we are a nation of budding amateur chefs. Have we all been hypnotized by the Food Channel into thi…
The past week has been an entirely new experience. I was enchanted by my first time driving through a desert, and so I got off the interstate to be able to drive more slowly on the state highways. The difference between the roads of New England and the roads of New Mexico are vast, and one of the ma…
In the United States, restaurant recipes are all the buzz. We Americans talk about cooking as if it were either fine art or rocket science. We have turned television chefs into celebrities. We play them off against each other recipe by recipe, and we do the same with our restaurants. We buy cookbook…
Traveling through Texas, I had planned for the next addition to my file of restaurant recipes to be about barbecue. This still might be a good idea, but I have come to realize that barbecue in Texas is special. Texans don’t need sauce to enjoy a good piece of barbecue. They have sauce, and use it (…
I live in a small New Hampshire town that is about an hour’s drive from the nearest large city. We have several very good restaurants in our town, and it is nice to know the owner (and frequently, also the chef) when I go out to eat. I wanted to spend the summer collecting new recipes, restaurant r…
New York is one of the best places in the world to find great food, but it is not a good place to easily find a parking spot. I am slowly driving across several states, looking for interesting restaurant recipes to bring back to my small hometown in New England. There are so many wonderful places to…
My summer trip is about half over, and I am driving through Arkansas on my way to Texas and the West. I have been eating at dozens of restaurants, and am collecting restaurant recipes to bring back a bit of each of these different places to my hometown in New Hampshire. The particular restaurant rec…
My adventure in collecting restaurant recipes from across America has come to an end. It has been more than a month of driving, eating, walking my dog Ralph, and enough exercising to avoid putting on a lot of weight. Resisting delicious food is difficult enough, and even more so when the goal is to …
When I planned this trip to collect restaurant recipes, I planned to drive through Texas and pick up a barbecue tip or two, and continue west. However, Texas is bigger than I had expected, friendlier, and more varied. So I have detoured to San Antonio, maybe to see the Alamo, but really to experienc…