Rhapsodizing about the glories of seasonal produce is de rigueur for food bloggers. Gushing about the superior flavor of a dew-covered strawberry just picked from the field, celebrating the ugly beauty of a lumpy heirloom tomato, buying a dozen ears of sweet corn from a roadside stand and eating them all in one sitting--these moments are set into prose again and again and again because there is a glorious truth to them.
Three years ago, on July 22, 2012, I launched My Mixing Bowl with a recipe for garlic scape pesto. It's become a bit of a tradition for me to post an annual recap on my blog's anniversary (here are...
Starting in Duluth and ending at the Canadian border, Minnesota State Highway 61 (MN 61) hugs Lake Superior's North Shore and offers dozens of scenic views along its 151-mile route. Added bonus: since...
For the sixteen weeks of the year when Minnesota produce is bountiful, I keep a CSA journal to record what arrives in our box each week and what we make with it. I like to page back through the years...
Grand Marais is my kind of small town: beautiful views of Lake Superior, lots to do, and great food. You can breakfast on the World's Best Donuts, drive to Canada and back, try a slice of Uff Da pizza...
Over the past month, I've passed by the culinary signposts marking the beginning of summer: cotton candy and deep-fried cheese curds at a local festival, linguine with asparagus and pine nuts, malted...
I usually cite July 2009 and pasta with fresh sauce as the moment when I learned how to cook. Although that summer did mark the point when I started to step away from packets of instant mashed...
Although you may not have suspected it from my previous posts on iconic New York foods, food destinations, and restaurants, we saw much more on our trip than bagels and gargantuan pieces of cheesecake...
To say that we barely scratched the surface of the New York restaurant scene is overstating things. Our trip was only a week long, and as I mentioned in a previous post, we had a few home-cooked...
When travelling, what I want to eat is almost as important as what I want to see. Happily, New York City offers the best of both worlds, with markets, shops, and neighborhoods that serve up feasts for...
Going to New York City was Mike's idea: he took a memorable trip there as a child, and now he wanted to see the city from an adult perspective. He was eager to take in a Broadway show, walk around...
Sometimes acquaintances label my food choices "interesting." In Minnesota, this can be a passive-aggressive putdown, a way of saying "You eat weird stuff that I wouldn't touch with a proverbial ten...
Tortilla cream cheese pinwheels are a simple little appetizer perfect for any sort of casual gathering: baby showers, church potlucks, backyard barbeques. But for me, they're graduation party food...
I have a minor obsession with Ritter Sport chocolate. I think it has something to do with the colorful wrappers--I have a compulsive urge to collect every single one, stack them in my pantry, and gaze upon my personal chocolate rainbow.
This is a vintage Stacy and Mike recipe, from the days when a handful of handwritten recipes from my mother, Mike's tofu stir technique, and the Betty Crocker Cookbook comprised our entire culinary knowledge. In food writing, there is a well-worn trope about learning how to cook from a wise elder, the grandparent or parent who imparts decades of wisdom about roasting a chicken or canning pickles.
Usually this is the time of year when I post my annual gripe about springtime in Minnesota, a season that is more likely to feature blizzards than blossoming tulips (Mike: "Did you have Easter egg...
As I've moved towards a mostly-vegetarian diet, my dinner repertoire has become more diverse. Since my motivations for going meatless were primarily based on health and environmental concerns...
Breakfast: my most monotonous meal of the day. Since I'm really not an early morning person, I rely on the convenience of cold cereal--Wednesdays and Sundays are reserved for All Bran, and the rest of...
Back in my pre-food blog days, I spent a pleasant four years studying mathematics at a liberal arts college in northern Minnesota. The original plan was to become an actuary, but that scheme died in an unhappy struggle through Probability and Statistics II. Plan number two was graduate school, but by the end of my junior year I realized that wasn't a good fit either.
Sadly, my job as a paralegal has absolutely nothing to do with food: I fill out forms, draft letters, and spend an inordinate amount of time scanning in documents to electronically file them with the federal government. However, my workdays do feature the occasional culinary highlight.
