Getting the job done when your oven isn't so hot

January 7, 2009

How do you cook without an oven? Creatively at first, and then you start visiting the neighbors.

Recent columns

• Cheese can please at holiday gatherings

  December 24, 2008

  What to serve after Christmas dinner? Clark Wolf says cheese. "A nice blue cheese, a Maytag or a Rogue River, with walnuts and port. Cheese tastes better with walnuts, and walnuts are in season. Also, blue cheese makes port taste better, so you don't have to spend a lot of money on port," Wolf says.

• Managing a large-scale party

  December 17, 2008

  Bob and Suzie Thieblot know how to throw a holiday party. They have been inviting crowds of merrymakers into their home for 47 years for a feast that consumes cases of wine, 25 pounds of cheese, plates of smoked turkey and seafood, and hundreds of homemade sugar cookies. For a time, they put on two holiday events: one for their neighbors, one for members of Bob's law firm, Thieblot Ryan.

• Sampling citrus for his stocking

  December 10, 2008

  For some of us, it is not Christmas morning without a tangerine in our stocking. The trouble is that nowadays choosing seasonal citrus, like many parts of the holiday, has become more complicated.

• Holiday beers: something to celebrate

  November 26, 2008

  Now that Thanksgiving is upon us, it is OK to drink holiday beers.

• Pie fans want no substitutes on the big day

  November 19, 2008

  On Thanksgiving, the pies are plural, and that reason alone makes the day the best holiday of the year.

• Carving turkey can be electric experience

  November 12, 2008

  For most guys, Thanksgiving is the day we have a tango with a turkey, an exercise known as carving the bird. Every year as the big meal approaches, I get the urge to buy an electric knife. This would be a purchase fueled by nostalgia, not culinary motives.

• Polishing off last of tomatoes

  November 5, 2008

  Late-season tomatoes are a difficult sell. They are not gorgeous. Spotty, misshapen, with fissures on their skin, they would be described, if they were children, as having faces that only their mothers could love.

• Seasoned oysters wrapped in bacon: what a grand union

  October 29, 2008

  As soon as weather forecasters mention "frost on the pumpkin," I crave oysters.

• Marcella Hazan and her muses

  October 22, 2008

  She was an immigrant, uncertain of her English, marooned all day in a New York apartment while her husband was at work. So, by paging through an old Italian cookbook and by tapping an "intuitive understanding" of Italian food, she taught herself to cook. That is how Marcella Hazan, 84, describes the beginnings of her highly successful career as the cookbook author who became known as the queen of Italian cooking in America.

• Cassoulet has its day

  October 15, 2008

  I was surprised by the number of people, a little more than 100, who had gathered to eat cassoulet.

• Ahh, September

  August 27, 2008

  What is the best month to chow down in Maryland?

• Thankful for those leftovers

  November 21, 2007

  Tomorrow, as I dig into the roast turkey, the corn-bread stuffing, the hominy casserole, the mashed potatoes and gravy, I also will be thinking about how good these dishes will taste at the many eating opportunities stretched over the weekend.

• Beyond wine for holiday dinner

  November 14, 2007

  Once you have answered the sticky Thanksgiving questions - what type of turkey stuffing and what set of relatives you are going to spend the day with - the next issue to solve is, what are you going to be sipping?

• Crunch time: Crisp critters prove hard to swallow

  May 19, 2004

  THE KEY TO enjoying cooked cicadas -- if that is possible -- is to eat them with your eyes closed.

• These events leave a cloud over our city

  July 21, 2001

  IHAVE NOT had much luck thinking up a new slogan for Baltimore. But after the events of this week, I do have a new candidate for the city's mascot. That would be Joe Bfstplk the Li'l Abner comic strip character who walked around with a rain cloud over his head. Joe Bfstplk was a human jinx, wherever he went, calamity followed.

• Toning down thoughts on phone repair

  February 17, 2001

  TRYING TO FIX a telephone these days is frustrating.

• 'A piece of the action' makes things a bit nutty

  February 7, 2001

  THE SIEGE OF the pine nuts began a few weeks ago, shortly after we got a late-night phone call from James "Buzzy" Cusack, a friend and neighbor. Buzzy said something like " Psssst, wanna buy some pine nuts?"