Ginger and I celebrated the thirty-second anniversary of our first meeting this week. Not too long after that, she came over to my apartment for dinner and I had made peanut butter cookies—my mom’s recipe. I offered her one and she said, “You can make these?” I assured her the Nutter Butter people weren’t the…
Saturday morning means I get to have some fun making breakfast. The day starts early because I drive to Madison, Connecticut (once East Guilford) to meet a group of guys for coffee around 6:30. They have been meeting for twenty years and were kind enough to let me join in. For some reason, as I…
Sometimes I cook things because I really want to cook something and I go get the ingredients I need. At other times, I come across ingredients and then figure out what to cook with them. This recipe falls into the second category, which is more fun for me in many ways because it is more…
One of the things I learned along the way is curry is not the name of an actual dish but a description of a kind of dish. A curry can be pretty much what you want it to be. I feel the same way about chili. From region to region in this fair land of…
One of the things I learned when we moved to Durham, North Carolina is that making a good biscuit is a practiced art form. I worked in restaurants there alongside of some amazing biscuit makers before I felt like I could say I knew how to make a good biscuit. In particular, I want to…
In my book Keeping the Feast: Metaphors for the Meal, the chapter called “Signature Dish” begins with these words: My first date with Ginger, who is now my wife, was a Lyle Lovett concert in a tiny club in Fort Worth, Texas. On our second date, I cooked dinner for her. It was a Saturday…
When I worked at the Roobar restaurant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, I learned how to make a marinara sauce from Tim Miller, the executive chef and one of the best people I ever worked for. I learned a lot of things from him. One summer Saturday after we moved to Durham, North Carolina, I came home…
When my parents married, they knew they were moving to Africa less than a year later. My father did not have much when it came to family. His mother died a month after he was born and his father was an itinerant minister and church planter, so his grandmother, Ma, raised him. His father remarried…
I know. It’s been a while. It’s not so much that I have had nothing to say as I have felt it was not my time to speak. I needed to listen and learn. I needed to help amplify voices that were speaking to me. Teaching me. Inviting me to a larger, more loving world….
I grew up eating scones in Africa because of the British colonial influence. For the most part, they came with afternoon tea–and they were pronounced like the word gone. I’m not sure what got lost in translation when they made it to this side of the ocean, but not only did we change the pronunciation…