If you’re fortunate, you wake rested, the kids aren’t bouncing on your bed (your kids, your bed, not the neighbor’s), the dog hasn’t peed/thrown up on the comforter, and faithful spouse did not give up and go in the spare room leaving you alone snoring! You lay there, drifting in and out of that nice dream, not the scary one about high school, tests, and nakedness at speech day! I had a peaceful awakening this morning. I could hear the birds twittering outside: real birds twittering for real, in the real world. I drifted in and out of a dream about our beach cities ‘encouraging’ the replacement of all plastic bags, plastic and Styrofoam takeout containers with recyclable, biodegradable, and compostable options. Imagine the environmental shift, the support of many small businesses developing...

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Last posting, I introduced an ongoing culinary series exploring the origins of much of the food we take for granted, but rarely experience in its true artisan form. I mentioned pasta and threatened semolina. In the pattern of beginnings, I’ll be focusing on semolina this post, for it is the starting point of one of the world’s favorite foods: Pasta. The thought of semolina makes me shudder. You see when I was a bachgen (little boy) in Wales, our school lunch program would inflict semolina on us in the worst possible way: a lukewarm slimy off-white pudding, with a dollop of strawberry jam in the middle. What culinary genius came up with this dish for us I know not? I do know I was too scared to say no to the, “Dinner Lady.” Now there were many little boys who delighted in mixing the jam into...

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We have lots to thank the Italians for, especially from a culinary perspective. I also thank the Italians for their perspective on life: family, food, the sensual appreciation of life itself, but also hard work. Pleasure does not come without hard work. To combine hard work with 6 weeks annual (paid) vacation, that’s living! Enough of the wishing, back to the working. This week I introduce an ongoing culinary series that will appear here periodically. I’ll be exploring the origins of much of the food we take for granted, but rarely experience in its true artisan form. I’ve been working hard at sourcing pasta for G4U Market: starting with dried and expanding into the texture variations offered by fresh. It seems that, just like cheese, there’s a lot of OK pasta out there, but few great pasta...

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