Last spring, I was honored to be an artist in residence in the Pullman neighborhood in our beautiful city of Chicago. I initially had made plans to map the many blocks around my space as I considered the ravages of the built environment in the …
Happy Valentine’s Day! This Onion Dip for Breakfast pair had an early start in celebrating Valentine’s Day by having afternoon tea at the Drake Hotel over the past weekend. In the Palm Court, the hotel’s strikingly opulent and beautiful restaurant, we sipped tea, champagne, ate …
What are you having? The Super Bowl is this Sunday and we’re getting our menu together. We can’t help but think of our family favorite, chicken wings, whenever we get together for the big game! Here’s a look back to a great day.
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The game starts at 6:30 in the evening, yet in my excitement, I wake up in the wee hours of the morning. I hurry to the kitchen to start preparing for our game-day festivities. Never mind that it’ll be just the two of us, it’s still a super bowl party, and the main event is the wings! Trying out a new recipe, I start with my dry rub: dried garlic, onion powder, smoked paprika, cumin, chili powder, cayenne, salt, and pepper. As I add each ingredient, I imagine the layers of flavor. While I marinated mine for several hours, an hour is sufficient to pack in flavor. It will be a while before the big game starts and my anticipation heightens.
There’s turkey for Thanksgiving,black-eyed peas for New Years, BBQ for the 4th of July, and then…there’s wings for Super Bowl! It was estimated that 1.42 billion wings would be eaten on Super Bowl Sunday. Even though I love and look forward to watching the game between two teams who have played valiantly to become contenders, I’m just as excited about the menu. Shall we have pizza or guacamole or any number of other foods? Perhaps. However, when it comes to wings, the answer is always a resounding YES!
We have no idea who’ll be the teams at the Super Bowl next year, we do know that there will be lots of parties with food galore and more than a generous amount of chicken wings.
Cheers everyone!
[The second time around🎶🎶] We love Barcelona so much that we’re back drooling over these images. Shall we return to this vibrant city? Yes! “Ooooh, what’s over there?” That question has been my mom’s mantra for as long as I can remember. She’s the one …
We just returned from an eight day trip to El Salvador. There was so much to see and do in this Central American country which we’ve never visited before, but are already making plans to return. This post will concentrate on our time in San …
We never miss an opportunity to enjoy art in the galleries and on the table. How wonderful was it to engage with both! First, there was a terrific retrospective of Faith Ringgold’s body of work.
And then there was the art of the table. Chicago Restaurant Week is in grand fashion with the museum’s Marisol delighting us with delicious courses. The cod was my hands-down favorite. Courses included a zesty hummus with lovely crackers, radicchio and citrus salad, an extraordinary bouillabaisse-style cod, and a parsnip-cardamom cake.
We all were in favor of a relaxing holiday week with plenty of food, drink, conversation, and song. After almost three weeks of travel and landing in Chicago on Christmas Day, being still was a gift itself. Half of Onion Dip had been in the …
This morning’s family media club discussion focused on a special episode of High on the Hog, “Defiance”, that features my hometown of Atlanta. Public history is always personal history. In this case, the episode highlighted places and people near and dear to my heart: the …
Back in high school, my love for history was fed by many but especially by one teacher. Her knowledge spanned millennia and she shared it with us through literature, music, art, her stories, and even food. Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, and more. Eventually, we made it to the Dutch and their dominance in trade of all types. I was most fascinated by the “Tulip Mania” period in 17th century Netherlands.
An entire country went absolutely mad for tulips. This was a wild time of speculation: a bundle of bulbs was a prince’s ransom. At its peak in early 1637, the most precious single bulbs sold for more than ten times the salary of an experienced artisan. My sixteen-year old self could think of little else for days. How could people get so caught up in the ephemeral moment of plants?
Ten years ago in a Georgian restaurant in Moscow, I had my own plant mania. After multiple courses of some of the most delicious food, I ordered sea buckthorn tea. Expecting a cup of black tea infused with an unknown ingredient, I was completely entranced when a glass teapot filled with a golden elixir was placed in front of me. It was like the color of Meyer lemons, marigolds, kumquats, and the sun; it tasted like that, too.
On and off over the next ten years, I searched in vain for this drink. Nothing lived up to that promise. Where did it grow? Near the sea? Could it grow in Chicago?
When I headed to Central Asia last month to convene with other artists from around the world, little did I expect to rekindle my love of this nectar in Kyrgyzstan. Hours after arriving in Bishkek, I was reunited with this extraordinary tea. It was glorious. This time, however, I wasn’t alone. Each person who shared a pot with me, fell hard. We dreamt of growing it back here and laughed as our interest hit a fevered pitch. There was the simple brew that I had first encountered in Russia a decade ago. Every day was different, though. Sometimes there was the surprise of fresh raspberries, mint, orange slices, tiny strawberries or even rosemary. Here’s to enjoying something fanatically with others!
Who tells the stories? Legend has it that the Greek god of the Underworld, Hades, desired the young Persephone, goddess of Spring. So he asked his brother, Zeus, if he could have her as his ”bride”. Will it surprise you to know that Persephone was …
