Like millions of Americans, I traveled to my hometown this past Thanksgiving to visit friends and indulge in the foods of my youth.  Growing up in the former steel town of New Castle, Penn., I was raised on the cuisines of the immigrants who had staffed the now-defunct, suburban Pittsburgh mills.  Italian wedding soup, cheese-stuffed ravioli and spumoni ice cream. Polish pierogies, ham and cabbage and nut-filled kolache.  A tad naive as a child, I assumed that everyone in the nation consumed these foods. My assumptions about cuisine extended to some unusual, local offerings.  With a name like “city chicken,” I guessed that these bread crumb-coated squares of meat were served in every major urban center.  After all, this meal featured city-dwelling poultry.  A junior high school trip to New York dispelled that notion.  Not once did city chicken appear on a restaurant menu, a sure sign that I had been duped on the origins of this entree.  An article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette ended my belief that the dish contained any chicken.  City chicken is, in fact, made from cubed pork …

Ever wonder how to add some excitement to a bowl of bland carrots?  Oddly enough, I have.  In fact, that very quandary landed me in Chef David Kamen’s flavor dynamics class at the Culinary Institute of America last weekend.  Through lectures, tastings, and hands-on cooking sessions I learned the “physiology of taste and development of flavor.”  I also found out how frying, grilling, roasting, sauteing and poaching can alter a food’s flavor and change my humdrum carrots into a sexy side dish.  This was neither my first food enthusiast’s class nor my first encounter with Chef Kamen.  Last spring I had taken Chef Kamen’s day-long “Food Affinities” session.   There the students delved into what foods and flavors complimented and paired well with one another.   We also got clued into a fantastic resource, Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page’s “Culinary Artistry.”  My secret weapon when conjuring up recipes, it devotes hundreds of pages to what foods work well together.    After a 2-hour classroom lecture, complete with tastings and discussions, our 15-member class had broken up into teams of three.  Each group was assigned a food basket filled with ingredients from which it …

Unwittingly I have become a maven of mushrooms.   In less than 18 months I have raised my own oyster and shiitake mushrooms, hosted a “feast of fungus” dinner party, penned four articles and signed up for a foraging club.  All this from the person who grew up eating button mushrooms from a jar.  Hardly the origins of a connoisseur. Although my mavenhood has been a recent development, I first learned of “better” cultivated mushrooms from my father.  While home on Christmas break in the early ’90s, I joined him and my uncle for a pre-holiday dinner at Boardman, Ohio’s Springfield Grille.  Always an experimental eater, my father ordered an appetizer of Portobello mushrooms.  My initial reaction to his daring was “Yuck!  I’m not touching that weird stuff.” A persuasive man, he eventually convinced me to take a small bite.  I still recall my astonishment over how rich and delicious edible fungus could be. Sliced then sauteed in olive oil, salt and pepper, they possessed an earthy, meaty yet wholesome taste.     Years passed.  My food choices changed.  Almost overnight mushrooms switched their role as a pre-dinner snack to a fundamental part of my menus.   Wild mushrooms …

I fell in love with crepes on a cold, late December evening in Paris.  Famished as well as jet-lagged, I roamed the 1st arrondissement in search of something warm, filling and quick to eat.  On a sex shop-lined street near our rented apartment on Rue Saint Denise Impasse I spotted a stout, middle-aged man standing on a street corner, cooking paper thin pancakes on an oversized, portable hot plate.  After flipping them once, he filled his crepes with fresh, sliced bananas, the chocolate-hazelnut spread Nutella, strawberry preserves or a combination of the three.  He then rolled up the griddle cakes, sprinkled them with granulated sugar, wrapped them in sheets of waxed paper and handed them out to the hungry. Mesmerized by the honeyed fragrance and simple artfulness of his creations, I slid into line and awaited my turn for a confiture d’fraise, or strawberry jam, crepe.  In less than five minutes I had in my hand a warm, otherworldly meal.  Tender to the tooth and with a delicate sweet touch, they were like nothing I …

  Meatballs.  Vodka.  Pickled herring.  Lox.  Not the best of Sweden’s cuisine but what came to my friends’ minds when invited for ”a night of Swedish delights. ”  Quirky and authentic were what they had learned to expect when dining with me.     In recent years this daring group has endured countless recipe testing sessions, including “Dessert Night Number One” with its soupy lime-and-mint granita and “An Evening of Three Tajines.”  On that cold winter night my tajine-testing friends were transported to sunny, sandy Morocco. Zeye Mayel’s “Nass Marrakech” blared from the stereo.  Hot mint tea spilled out of tall, silver teapots and into painted, filigreed glasses.  A red, silk blanket, purchased at a souk in the seaside town of Essaouira, covered the dining room table. Lined up on the green Formica kitchen counter were tagines of chicken, preserved lemons and olives, charmoula-covered cod and chickpeas and root vegetables.   Prior to setting foot in my house, not one person had seen, much less heard of, these clay, conical-lidded pots.  Yet, this bold quintet — Connie, Sharon, Mike, John …

When planning a global cuisine-themed party, I can think of no better land to honor than Great Britain.   No doubt some will assume that I am joking, displaying a wicked sense of humor.  British cuisine?  Does the United Kingdom even have culinary customs beyond dry tea sandwiches, the ubiquitous fish, peas and chips and standard “meat and two veg” dinners which the previous meal so aptly represents?  After five trips through the UK and more than a few meals consumed in this region, I can attest that British fine dining is alive, well and worth celebrating.  Have doubts?  Recall Fergus Henderson, founder of London’s St. John restaurant and author of the seminal “Nose to Tail Eating.”  An advocate of using the whole animal when cooking, the bespectacled Henderson has made consuming offal cool.  Then there are the celebrated British food writers and chefs.  Elizabeth David.  Delia Smith.  Jamie Oliver.  Nigella Lawson.  Their consumer-friendly cookery books have sold millions in the UK as well as the U.S. Let’s not forget Gordon Ramsey.  Along with his riotous reality shows “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares,” and “The F-Word,” Ramsey has 3 Michelin stars to his name.   Last year he took Manhattan …

Long before I wrote about food, I cooked it.  Not in a pull-down-a-weekly-paycheck sense but as in stand-over-a-cutting-board-covered-with-minced-shallots-feeling-remarkably-at-peace-with-the-world way.  For years cooking has served as an escape from the trials of everyday life.  Consumed by the tribulations of ill family member?  Stressed out over a looming deadline?   Worried about upcoming exams?   Pick up an onion and start chopping. I am both calmed and rewarded by the strike of the knife blade as it bears down on my wood cutting board, the sizzle of white onions as they carmelize in a hot, olive oil-coated saute pan.   Nothing — not yoga, walking, hiking, biking, reading, stroking a beloved pet or “drinking like a mad eejit” — can surpass the tranquility derived from working in a kitchen. My fondness for cooking is not intuitive.  My mother had been a serviceable but unenthusiastic cook.  Her standard repertoire included many delightful dishes — beef stroganoff, braciola, chicken cacciatore, French onion soup –none of which she relished making or eating.  To her, cooking was a chore, an onus taken on at marriage and borne until death.      Her lack of culinary ardor extended to my education.  When asked to teach me how to poach an egg or bake …