Last Bender

  Chanticleer Last fall I bought a stewing rooster from Kingbird Farm at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. Over the years, decades actually, I have been a big fan of the soup chicken. Mostly because a soup chicken costs a lot less than a regular chicken. They are scrawny, tough but flavourful birds. Slow cooking produces [...]

Two years ago, when I was hosting my daughter’s wedding and faced the prospect of feeding a large crowd of friends and relatives, I broke down and bought a gas grill. My preferred fuel for cooking is hardwood, but that takes hours. Next is lump charcoal. That doesn’t take hours but like wood rain puts [...]

The way marketing with food works is this: you either find some obscure, cheap and largely disliked and ignored food, discover it, dust it off, present it with truffles and start charging top dollar for it. Or, you claim some ordinary thing that people never really stopped eating is broadly disliked and is undergoing a [...]

Saturday was the first day of the Ithaca Winter’s Farmer’s Market. It was also the first day of my Winter CSA. I don’t do a summer CSA, because I grow my own vegetables, and I’d rather choose what and how much I’m going to buy. Also, the prices are better when you hunt around farm [...]

Black Eyed Peas I don’t like holidays, but I do like food. My way through holidays is to cook. For Christmas (not my holiday…a savior ain’t in the cards for MAN), I love the Sicilian tradition of seven fishes, even if they aren’t all fish. One of my old dear friends who died too young, [...]

On a fall or winter Sunday there is nothing better than a pot of slow-cooked meat with noodles, greens and root vegetables. Yesterday I made a Chinese version with chicken. It took about two hours total and was perfect after a day of raking leaves, turning the garden beds and chopping a pile of old [...]

We were in the city this weekend packing up the last of my mother’s stuff to bring to Ithaca. While in the city I had meant to go to Xi’an Famous Foods on 8th Street and 2nd Avenue. They have amazing hand-pulled noodles: http://xianfoods.com/ which are served with stewed meats, especially lamb spiced with cumin, [...]

I love to cook and Sunday is the one day of the week I can devote the time and energy to make a good meal without stress. Often on Monday I want to post a recipe for the Sunday meal, since cooking and food are one of my passions, and that’s what this blog is [...]