Tea Leaves

I’m probably the only food dork who hasn’t been watching Alton Brown for the last 9 years or so. He became a fixture on the Food Network just about the time that I felt that I had learned everything I needed to learn, for the moment, about the whole food and cooking hobby. So it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago when we were filling the Tivo at random while the flu rampaged through the house that I happened to watch Good Eats for the first time.

And I like it. It’s not so much the content or the recipes themselves I like. After all, he has at least one show where he tells me that brown rice tastes good (bah!). No. What I like is the visual and narrative style. Narrative style in a cooking show? Well, yeah.

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Tonight a simple tip: size matters, so make sure you give the food enough space. This tip comes with a story.
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Those of you following me on Twitter know that I managed to find not just one, but three of the types of booze I’ve been looking for last night. This is one of the nice things about travelling out of state: I get to shop at liquor stores that aren’t run by people who are profoundly uninterested in selling liquor.

Here in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, there are at least two local chains that are worth visiting: the larger Berbiglia, and, my new favorite, Gomer’s. Why I like Gomer’s so much can best be illustrated by a short story. (more…)

The flu hit the household a couple of weeks ago, so just before I was taken down with fever, chills and that whole body ache, I stocked us up on the main defense against this sort of thing: chicken soup.

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