Category Archives: Uncategorized

The pudding family tree has many cousins— summer puddings, Christmas puddings, red puddings, and white puddings. There is hog’s pudding and it’s Scottish ancestor: Haggis. I’m not sure what Cheshire Pudding is, but it reminds me of a cat, so I have always stayed away from it. Yorkshire Pudding is a hit in England, butContinue reading “Bread Puddings”

Fresh is always better than frozen, canned, or freeze-dried. A pea picked straight from the garden, a tomato off of the vine, a fruit pulled from the tree, or a fish fresh from the water are always preferred to their counterparts in cans, bags, or freezer-proof boxes. At our restaurants we always use fresh, localContinue reading “Peaches”

Had my high school yearbook had the designation, “Least Likely to Succeed,” I probably would have been a shoe-in for that distinction. My photograph, with overly bow-dried hair and an opened-to-the-third-button large-collared shirt, would have been posted directly across the page from Lynn and Chris who were awarded “Best School Spirit” or “Friendliest” or someContinue reading “Easter”

My family doesn’t vacation consistently. We spend a lot of time together as a group on a daily basis, though we are very sporadic when it comes to out-of-town trips. It’s how we are wired. Something strikes us as “fun” or an “adventure” and we head out. I know families that take the same twoContinue reading “Seagrove Beach, FL”

Life is full of choices. Grape jelly or strawberry? Crunchy peanut butter or smooth? Waffles or pancakes?  White or wheat? Beatles or Stones? Keith Moon or John Bonham? Jeff Tweedy or Jay Farrar? From the moment we can crawl we are faced with thousands of choices, and we are told that those choices we makeContinue reading “Choices”

I had to make a run to Sam’s Club yesterday morning to purchase 75 pounds of flour for one of our restaurants to get us through the day until the supply-truck delivery the next morning. I find myself in Sam’s Club about once a year, and that’s enough. We do all of our purchasing forContinue reading “Sam's Club”

I dozed off for a minute and ice chests became valuable commodities. A couple of years ago I was stopped at an intersection in my truck and saw a Yeti window decal on the vehicle in front of me. I asked my wife if she knew what that was and she didn’t have a clue.Continue reading “Ice, Ice Baby”

Families fall into one or two categories: Dining-in families or dining-out families. I grew up in a dining-in family. My mother, a widowed schoolteacher, was able to accomplish everything she did during the day and then get home in the afternoon to prepare supper for my brother and me. Her specialties were seafood gumbo, potContinue reading “Eat In or Carry Out?”

Today marks the 17th anniversary of this weekly column. A frequent question I am asked is, “How did all of this column writing and book publishing start?” As with many things in my life, I fell into it in a backwards and unintended way. I got lucky here and there, was helped along the wayContinue reading “884 Weekly Columns and Still Typing Using Only Three Fingers”