Food Writing

Food Writing | I’m a regular contributor to  Boston Globe Food and Edible Boston/Edible Worcester. My special areas of interest are food and culture, food justice, food innovations, and people behind the food.

For the Boston Globe, I write a regular Q&A feature with authors, chefs, filmmakers, scholars, food TV hosts, and more. I’ve interviewed dozens of well-known personalities from the worlds of food and media including Michael Pollan, Rene Redzepi, Gabrielle Hamilton, Ina Garten, Ruth Reichl, Andrew Zimmern, Jon Favreau, and Mimi Sheraton. For the Globe and Edible Boston/Edible Worcester, I also write feature and news articles, travel pieces, and recipes.

Boston Globe

Comedian Eugene Mirman on grief, food, and life with a toddler in quarantine
In his Daily Quarantine Routine #32 posted to Instagram, comedian Eugene Mirman recommends beginning the day this way: “7 a.m. Wake up and make tahini.” Mirman’s packed to-do list also includes getting an MBA. It ends with: “Eat ramen and organize a closet, as if that’ll solve things.” The tahini entry might actually have been true. Mirman, who splits his time between Somerville and Cape Cod has a lifelong love of comedy and food. He has been documenting his quarantine cooking on social media.

How your food might be feeding your mental health problems
Some connections between stomach and brain are, frankly, no-brainers. Everyone understands the concepts of a nervous stomach or comfort food. But nutritional psychiatrist Uma Naidoo seeks to explain many more complex connections between what we eat and our mental health in her new book “This is Your Brain on Food: An Indispensable Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, PTSD, ADHD, Anxiety, OCD and More.”

A conversation with Kevin Alexander, author of ‘Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and its End’
It’s hard to remember a time before social media made instant celebrities of the latest bistro, cocktail bar, or fast-casual restaurant, and the heavily tattooed young chef behind them. Or when culinary innovations originated in New York and San Francisco, rather than Portland, Ore.; Pittsburgh; or Nashville. James Beard award-winning writer Kevin Alexander remembers. Alexander traces the seismic shift that occurred in the American food scene between 2006 and 2018 in his new book, “Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and its End.”

Inside Noma’s sleek fermentation lab
COPENHAGEN — “The Noma Guide to Fermentation” details how to build a simple MacGyver-style fermentation chamber using a Styrofoam cooler, terrarium heating mat, humidifier, and hygrometer. With it, home fermenters can create some of the products developed at the Noma fermentation lab. What they won’t be re-creating is the lab itself, a facility that is anything but simple or home-spun.

Looking back on 50 years: A Q & A with Rachael Ray
When it was time to celebrate her 50th birthday last year, Rachael Ray decided to skip a blowout party. Instead, she decided to work more by writing her 26th book. In “Rachael Ray 50: Memories and Meals From a Sweet and Savory Life,” Ray looks back over her first five decades with essays and recipes focused on themes that are important to her: family, friends, and work

Edible Boston/Edible Worcester

A Sweet Taste of History: Cambridge’s Candymaking History Continues Beyond Confectioner’s Row
The picture is the stuff of Kendall Square legend: A handsome young inventor stands at his workbench toiling on a new device that’s about to revolutionize an industry, and make this Cambridge neighborhood an important hub for the next century. The year is 1847. And the artist’s idyllic vision, painted in sepia and cream tones, is of druggist Oliver Chase hard at work on a “curious, homemade apparatus that looked like a clothes wringer with a series of holes cut in the rollers.” The important industry Chase is about to set in motion: candymaking.

Panning for Gold in the Waste Stream: Vanguard Renewables helps farmers harvest energy from their by-products
When Randy Jordan takes part in his local Fourth of July parade these days, he no longer worries about neighbors turning their noses up at him. In the past, they had their reasons. Early July is when Jordan, a fifth-generation dairy farmer, fertilizes the fields of his family’s farms in Spencer and Rutland. For many years, the fertilizer he spread across hundreds of acres was manure from the farms’ lagoons. The olfactory reminder hung in the air longer than any fireworks display. Jordan still treats his fields at the same time of year and he still uses fertilizer produced on the farm, but without the smell. It’s a win for the neighbors, but an even bigger win for the economic health of the farm and for the environment.

Good Things Grow in Forests: Boston Food Forest Coalition Nourishes Neighborhoods As Well As Bellies
Community gardens, those mini-oases of abundance lovingly tended by city dwellers, have sprouted up all over the Boston area in the past decades. The nonprofit Boston Food Forest Coalition is looking to make another kind of shared garden a thriving part of Boston’s urban landscape: food forests.  “A food forest is a very poetic concept,” says Orion Kriegman, the group’s executive director. “It’s not a traditional community garden. It’s not an urban farm. And it’s not an urban wild or a park. It’s sort of all of those things.”

Women Chefs Pass It On: Each Generation Nourishes the Next
Making our way to the back corner of Flour Bakery + Café in Back Bay, chef-restaurateur-all-around culinary powerhouse Jody Adams reminds me, “We have legacy, you know.” Waiting to join us for a long, lively and laugh-filled discussion are the rest of that three-generation legacy: Joanne Chang, who worked for Adams as pastry chef at Rialto early in her career, and Karen Akunowicz, who until earlier this year was executive chef at Myers + Chang. The three share a culinary family tree that stretches back to Boston’s modern culinary “Founding Mothers”: Karen to Joanne to Jody to Lydia to Julia. It’s likely that only in Boston could you trace a lineage of female chefs so influential that no last names are needed.

From Menace to Moeche
A Nonprofit Group Looks to Venice for Culinary Inspiration to Control Destructive and Invasive Green Crabs in New England
The European green crab is a tough and voracious little crustacean. Just one of these invasive creatures can devour 40 native New England soft shell clams in a day while also eating mussels and oysters and destroying vegetation in important intertidal areas. But if the nonprofit Green Crab R&D Project has its way, the crabs will soon begin meeting a fitting end: on New England dinner plates.

Branch Venture Group: Boston Food Startups Get a Boost
Marcia Hooper recalls a conversation with business partner Lauren Abda that illuminates an important truth about building a successful food company. “I meet these incredible entrepreneurs every day who have everything right, but money,” Hooper remembers Abda saying. As founder of Branchfood, a Boston-based group that connects food entrepreneurs, industry experts, corporate leaders and others who are interested in improving the food system, Abda comes across many entrepreneurs who fit that description.

Playing with Fire: Backyard Smoking for the Standard Grill
The magic that happens when food meets fire and smoke might well be primal, a lingering memory passed on from some early ancestor who was led nose-first to feast on a smoldering mastodon. Maybe it’s more recent, the memory of hot dogs and marshmallows roasting over the embers of a campfire. Probably, it’s even simpler: Food kissed by fire and smoke tastes amazing. Taste is the reason I’ll go with to explain why I cook most meals outdoors and over a fire from the first warm day of spring and until it becomes too cold and rainy in the fall.

Diner en Blanc
Pop-up event draws 1,500 diners dressed in white

Craft brewing
Tapping the Thirsty…and Patient: Tree House Brewing Keeps Drawing a Crowd

La Laboratoire Cambridge opening
At a scientist’s cafe, food is the next frontier

Food and Travel
In New Orleans, a museum devoted to food of the South

Fictional Foods
This might be served in ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Game of Thrones’

Food and Film
Chefs see themselves in ‘Chef’
The director-actor of ‘Chef’ trained in a kitchen

Recipes
Smoked Bluefish Salad
Smoked Rosemary Lamb
Smoked Farro & Herb Salad
Hake Poached in Spicy Tomato-Eggplant Sauce
Baked Risotto with Chorizo and Kale
Recipe for Dad’s double-vanilla ice cream