I just spent seven days among the wild grape vines dancing with a chain saw and fertilizing ancient fields with liberal amounts of money and so - coincidentaly - can report on the state of the Edisto Island tomato crop. The state of the crop is there ain’t one this year. The farmers might plant some soy beans because they can do most of the work with machinery. Vegetables take hand labor and there isn’t any certainty this year that there will be any. Much of the large scale tomato pl...

    A few days ago I went out to the front yard to get some overwintered rosemary for the lamb chops and saw that the herbs were beginning to green up. The sage has gone from dusty grey to bright green and thickened considerably. The mint has surreptitiously expanded out of its bed over the winter and will have to be fought back into place. It's half way across the yard.  The rosemary hasn't really started to do a lot relating to spring. This could be because we kept having war...

    There are four recipes for Deviled crabs in The Charleston Receipts and five more for casseroles, souffles and so on. All four are variations on the following,

    "Quickly prepared and eaten.... Mix 1 pound crab meat with one cup mayonnaise (a commercial brand may be used); season with juice of 1 lemon, 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce, 1 tablespoons chopped parsley, hot sauce, salt and pepper. put in shell, cover with buttered crumbs, bake in 400 degree oven for 30 m...

    This is a tough book. On one hand, I agree with almost - ALMOST - everything it has to say, but on the other, if it had been any part of my early learning experience, I think I might never have started cooking because it is apparently next to impossible to do correctly. Make no mistake, as far as John and Karen Hess are concerned, there is absolutely a correct and an incorrect way to cook. The jacket reviews label it a jeremiad, diatribe and a philippic on American cooking. It...

    Many of us shop at Costco and feel varying degrees of guilt about it.  Meats and produce, while of the highest quality available in a supermarket setting and without buying locally come from Australia, New Zealand, Peru and Brazil. As far as carbon footprints go, that seems pretty heavy. There are those who say that it takes less fuel per piece to move an orchards worth of bananas from Brazil to Yonkers than it does to move a local crop of in-season apples from upstate NY...