Do It Yourself Pizza Oven

At work the other day, a fellow food lover brought in his brick pizza oven. Only it wasn’t like any pizza oven I’ve ever seen before. It was a do-it-yourself brick pizza oven made out of an old barbecue grill. I think a picture here will be helpful (more pics available in the Flickr feed [...]

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Menu for El Puerco de Julio

Once again, I’ve surprised myself by how long it’s taken me to post. I have been so busy I can hardly see straight. Somewhere in the chaos of daily life, I’ve come up with the menu for our second annual El Puerco de Julio Fiesta. Here ’tis:

Watermelon
Cole Slaw
Pulled Pork
The Man’s World Famous Gluten-free Mac and [...]

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Growing My Dinner Salad

Look, Look, LOOK at this!!!
It’s my first garden salad of the year! By that I mean that I grew everything in this bowl. Well, I didn’t grow it, I put the seeds in the ground and they grew themselves, like great little children. And now, I must eat them!
What we have here are: spinach, rouge [...]

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Best Food Writers, or, Even More Fun with Food Metaphors

I have my home page set to Poetry Daily. It’s awesome to get a new poem every day and to learn about poets I’ve never heard of. But TODAY’S poem, “Elizabeth Sloughter’s Heart,” by Sarah Kennedy, really knocked me out! Why? Because it’s about food, history, and women, three of my favorite topics.  I’m off [...]

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The Melon-Eye

When I was a kid, my parents would often take my older sisters, brother, and I back to their small hometown in California’s Central Valley. Think cotton fields, dust, unbelievable heat, drive-in movie theaters, strawberry soda, and the smell of alfalfa everywhere. One of my uncles, whom I’ll call Floyd Owens, was a real character. [...]

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Oxtail Pate

My apologies for taking so long to post once again. I got busy with moving NS and getting the chicken feet. The feet handoff went very smoothly and included freshly picked strawberries and a jalapeno plant from my sister’s garden. The strawberries were spectacular and may have inspired me to actually try planting some myself [...]

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Chicken Feet Text Message

It’s not every day that oldest my sister texts me with this message: “Do you like chicken feet?” Hmmm. Where could this question possibly be leading? I text back: “Maybe?”
Her text: “We are slaughtering chickens today. Do you want the feet?”
My text, following a mad Web scramble for chicken feet recipes: “Sure!”
So now we are [...]

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Seriously Good Crackers

Most of the recipes I post here are pretty good. But these crackers are REALLY good! In fact, I have to stop making them because they are really TOO good (i.e., addictive). The problem is that they are crunchy, which is something one sorely lacks when one is not eating grains. These are a riff [...]

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Kitchen Gratitude

My Okie father has a saying for when things go wrong, which is, “Things could be a lot worse.” I think this is the Okie way of saying, “Count your blessings,” “Practice gratitude,” etc. So I’m sitting here this Sunday morning practicing Kitchen Gratitude, which goes something like this:
I’m grateful for:

Key limes, which are amazingly [...]

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Easter Finale

I think half of my joy in this blog is getting to mess around so much with my digital camera. I bought it last year before I embarked on this blog. Honestly, I think the blog was more how I justified buying the camera. See! I am using my new camera!
Easter, which we’re now going [...]

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