When I came across this Chinatown scene with Lightning Louie (Vic Perry) and Candy (Jean Peters) in the film noir thriller Pickup on South Street (1953), I felt the giddy excitement of an explorer who has come across a hidden treasure by dumb luck. That was more than a year ago.

Since picking up The Breath of a Wok by Grace Young, the current DCCC pick, I’ve been thinking about the scene again. How impressive (and extensively employed) Lightning Louie’s chopstick wielding skills are. How at home he is in his adopted milieu. And how focused on eating he is. Lightning Louie is not about to miss out wok hay to just to do business with Candy. For these reasons, Lightning Louie is my culinary hero.

Without intending to write a follow-up to my last posting on heirloom seeds, I’ve done so with this story, which deals with the other h word—heritage breeds.

A couple of weeks ago, after having done the work of making a double batch of David Leite’s Amped-Up Red Pepper Paste as well as his Piri-Piri Sauce, both in his cookbook The New Portuguese Table, I decided to make two poultry recipes that would highlight their flavors.

I started with Leite’s Quick Weekday Roast Chicken with Potaotes. The chicken is (more…)

If you are running for your life in a landscape infested with zombies, aka “walkers,” and devoid of a modern food distribution system, would you grab your guns or seeds?

In “Seed,” the first episode of this season’s apocolypic zombie series The Walking Dead, Hershel, one-time-farmer now “walker” killer, muses that the caged bit of open green the show’s characters find themselves in could be a planting field for tomatoes, cucumbers, and soy beans.

In this temporary oasis, they have land, symbolized by the dirt Hershel allows to run through his fingers as his imaginary vegetable garden takes shape. But oops! No seeds.

Even if Hershel had the presence of mind to (more…)

While not a typical headline for a food story, shock and horror is what I felt when seeing this grab-and-go packing in the produce section of my local grocery store, while looking for limes for margaritas. (The club is cooking Mexican, after all.)

I rarely shop at supermarkets, though it’s a good idea to go every so often to keep abreast of the latest in food packaging, even if I leave feeling dismayed.

In this particular bit of packaging ingenuity,  a plastic suitcase with a handle allows you to grab about four Mandarin oranges with just one hand.  In contrast, the human hand can only grab one or two Mandarin oranges, depending on the size of the hand. Have the packagers convinced themselves that they are doing humankind a service by using this zippy packaging to promote fruit to consumers that might otherwise be drawn to the zippy packaging used for less healthy food choices? I wonder.

My next post, I promise!, will be about Mexican cooking—so that I can share something that is affirming, beautiful, and sarcasm free with you.