The ability to chug a whole bottle of PBR in one mighty draught only impresses your peers for so long. What was formerly an athletic display of swilling prowess becomes something sad, a little desperate. It is a sign of the need to grow up, difficult as that can be to accept. So how is […]
Iowa City food
Posted inFood & Drink
Morel Me, Please
A walk in the woods in the heartland’s early spring is intrinsically rewarding, but while you are enjoying those first few sunny days after a nourishing spring rain, why not look for things that can feed your belly as well as your soul? The woodlands of the upper Midwest are teeming with gourmet goodies in […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Hoagies & Grinders
Lunch-lady-land cafeterias in the U.S. public school system conjure dreams of Early Cuising Education. It’s early in the morning the day after a very busy Valentine’s weekend in the restaurant. I’m grumpy and sore and cleaning out the walk-in refrigerator while feeding a nasty NPR jones I’ve been contending with for a couple decades – […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Growing Excitement
Just about everyone I know has been pouring over seed catalogs for the last month. Eagerness to plant supplants many other priorities and they begin rifling through each newly arrived issue like a 12-year-old boy with a lingerie catalog. Plans for this year’s garden become an obsession that quickly grows out of all reasonable proportions, […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Spoils from the Soil
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, […]
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Tofu: The Other Holiday Meat
While traveling West on my way to can salmon in Alaska, I stopped in Tacoma, Washington, to stay the night with my aunt and uncle. My cousin had just graduated high school and the graduation party spread was available for post-driving snacks. I excitedly munched the baby carrots and dipped the cut cauliflower and broccoli […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Hog Haven
As local officials responded to the threat of floods in southeastern Iowa with repeated appeals for help with sandbagging, I jumped at the chance—to bury my head in the sand, or a sandbag, whatever could be spared. The last time I volunteered during a disaster, the results were disastrous. I’d been part of a mission […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Three Days on One Chicken
The economy is in shambles. Prices of everything are going up. K-Mart has brought back layaway plans. KFC is advertising that you can’t make their seven-piece “meal deal” at home for as cheap as you can get it at their place. I beg to differ. As I recently told my children as they headed off […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Food: It's Not Just for Elites
It’s going to take me a long time to fully understand the effects and implications of the first Slow Food Nation, held in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend. The brain power on display was impressive enough: Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, Winona LaDuke, Carlo Petrini, Raj Patel, Eric Schlosser, and other luminaries took […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Border Dispute
Since 1992, Panchero’s Mexican Grill in downtown Iowa City has been serving burritos and other south-of-the-border foods to customers ranging from homegrown Iowa City residents to drunken college kids. It’s the flagship location for a restaurant that has branched into 17 states across the country. A year ago, a new “hombre” rolled into town—one with […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Free Rice and Ennui
Can’t seem to focus on work today and wish you could feed the hungry and test your vocabulary at the same time? Then check out FreeRice.com, prove you know what an “eland” is, and get 20 grains of rice donated to the United Nations World Food Program for each correct answer. Oh, and, if vocabulary […]
Posted inFood & Drink
The Real Food Supercenter
This is the time of year that we flatlanders pine for during the snows of January, when it’s a full 100 degrees colder than it is right now, and all the humidity is frozen to our windshields. September in Iowa is what makes things grow so well here – the hot, sticky dog days that […]
