Dick Stein

I confess that though I've chewed my way through enough chicken wings to levitate a dumpster I've never had the official Buffalo Wing.   And now I may never bother.  Here's why:

Let's post lunch.   Take your best shot.  After all, who wouldn't want to see a picture of what you're eating?  Not surprisingly, some restaurateurs -- and some restaurant customers -- are not amused. 

Daisuke Nakazawa was featured in the sushi documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.  

I am made wary when servers ask "Have you dined with us before?"   Why do they want to know? 

In this week's Food for Thought my unindicted co-conspirator Nancy Leson attempts to answer the question.  Along the way I also curmudgify on the topic of sleep wear in public.  And I'm not the only diner 'round here with a beef. 

Nancy calls it a granita.  But really it's just a fancy snow cone.  In her latest article on oyster ingestion Seattle Times food writer Nancy Leson shares three granita recipes that go very well with oysters.

Except we didn't explode.  We should have, though.  Included in the dinners we discuss is the Caraway-crusted roast pork I made from from the "Remembering Labuznik" chapter in  Tom Douglas' Tom's Big Dinners.  Here's how to make it.

"Every hair on Dave Matschina's head was drenched in sweat.  It crept into his eyes and dripped off his nose."   So begins Twincities.com  tale of a feast of hot wings made made with the fearsome Naga Bhut Jolokia or Indian Ghost Pepper -- a chili that makes the formerly top dog habenero taste like a slug of Milk of Magnesia. 

I knew going in that I knew next to nothing about sake. As it turned out I didn't even know that much.

It's not the three cookbooks pictured above, though Nancy really loves them and recommends them swooningly and from a great height.  Nope, this is an enjoyable DIY project.  Click "Listen" and all will be revealed.  Now let's talk about saffron,

As you might imagine my Food for Thought co-conspirator Seattle Times Food writer Nancy Leson collects lots of stuff to do with food.  Menus, old recipe cards, handwritten notes, the works. 

When she mentioned to me that she had recipes from "King's Queen Bea" I admit I had no idea who that was.  But I should have.

Sure,  I love to play the philistine in my encounters with Nancy Leson on Food for Thought but it's time to reveal that I have been Velveeta-free for almost four years.   One more year and I get my pin. 

Meantime, I've been enjoying some of the wonderful locally made stuff and so has Nancy.   We had a lot of fun on this one.  Hear all about it with a click on the audio gizmo under the
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You go nuts all day long with the cooking and the cleaning and the worrying and the will  this or won't that and did I remember to and does the house look and will they even show up  and what was I thinking when I decided to do this they could have had their lousy corn flake stuffed pork chops and gone the hell home by now... and waitasecond is that cat-box I smell? 

Or you could be like my Food for Thought pal,  Seattle Times food writer  Nancy Leson.

Pro chefs have their kitchen grunts to handle the cleanup but we home cooks have to do it ourselves.  And the way to do it is as you go.  I think the clean-up is as much a part of the cooking process as the mixing and chopping, the slaughtering of the ox, all that kind of stuff.

Every good home cook has had the dream of opening his or her own restaurant.  But we've also heard the dire warning: "90% of restaurants fail in the first year of operation."   It isn't true.

For years I assumed that the word caramel came from the name of the first celebrity chef, Marie-Antoine Careme, A.K.A the King of Chefs and the Chef of Kings. 

But no, it's just a corruption of the medieval Latin for sugar cane, cannamellis. Though I love them dearly I've never attempted to make my own caramels. But I know someone who has ...