Saturday was our fifth annual Big Fat Greek Party, and our biggest ever: At least 85 people showed up to eat, drink and watch me set a roasted goat on fire with ouzo.

An offhanded remark leads me down the rabbit hole in search of the mysterious – yet ubiquitous – mallow plant. Who knew how important this weed was to the Eastern Mediterranean?

Year after year in my new home here in Northern California, I feel myself sinking down roots and developing new traditions. One of them is curing my own olives, which begins for me in early October. On some crisp autumn day, I will head out into one of the many public parks near my home [...]

I have been making a lot of sausages lately, and as each batch will typically give me some new insight into this craft, I have much to tell from my recent adventures. You can learn all kinds of things from books on the subject; I recently went through a quick review of my sausage-making library. But [...]

I have become a big fan of goat. Don’t get me wrong, I never shied away from eating it — hell, I ate stewed goat necks several times a month back in graduate school because it was one of the few meat items I could afford. But last week’s goat extravaganza taught me quite a [...]