Essay in Southern Cultures' Documentary Arts Issue, Spring 2016
Read on in Southern Cultures
Essay in Southern Cultures' Documentary Arts Issue, Spring 2016
Read on in Southern Cultures
Travis Milton greets me at the door of his Richmond, Virginia, house, bearded and burly in a plaid shirt, horn-rimmed glasses, and a “Virginia is for lovers” ball cap. Peeking out from his rolled-up shirt sleeve is a tattoo of his great-grandfather’s farm logo surrounded by vegetables. He offers me whiskey before I’m through the door, and I spy his collection of Star Wars and Ghostbusters action figures in the next room. As we cross the hall, he reverently points out his grandmother’s last written recipe hanging in a small wooden frame among family photos and album covers—Rick James, Hank Williams, and Thin Lizzy.
In the living room, he’s piled at least a dozen notebooks of varying sizes on the coffee table, their open pages revealing scrawled handwriting and sketches of kitchen layouts. I’ve heard about these notebooks before. When I first met Travis at Comfort, where he was executive chef, he told me that he keeps 19 journals in various locations—restaurant kitchen, home kitchen, glove compartment, and nightstand. When ideas strike, he records them before they flit away.
Read on in Gravy
Cover story and recipe feature for King Arthur Flour's Sift magazine, Fall 2015 issue.
For a brief moment, LP released a series of 45 rpm 7-inch records under the auspices of the Lucky Peach Record Club. Installment #2 was a thematic accompaniment to our All You Can Eat issue, a disc of two anti-Monsanto songs, one by Michael Hurley and another by Wes Buckley.
Hurley is one of America’s great folk singers, with a discography that reaches back to the sixties and includes a wheelbarrow’s worth of records that have a habit of staying on the turntable once they get there. He’s also a visual artist, a painter and drawer and comic-book-maker, with a distinct and compelling style and cosmology of characters that are always on his album covers and sometimes even in his songs.
Read on in Lucky Peach
Canadian songwriter Tamara Lindeman’s songs each offer a vivid yet fleeting mise en scène. Her specific, detailed visuals are not opaque, but rather offer a portal for the exploration of enigmatic emotional relationships: parabolas and possibilities and perspectives. They show, don’t tell.
Lindeman, who performs under the name The Weather Station, first found her creative footing as an actor. After playing in a number of bands in Toronto, she released her first solo album All Of It Was Mine in 2011 on Canadian label You’ve Changed Records, followed by What Am I Going To Do With Everything I Know in 2014.
Read on via Bandwidth
Growing up, soft pretzels were one of the few junk foods my brother and I were allowed to eat. On the rare occasion that we went to the mall, my mom would treat us both to a soft, hot, overly-salted pretzel, pulled with tongs from spinning warming racks by some ambivalent high school teen at the Hot Sam Pretzels stand.
Read on via Food52
Read my entries on Cotton Candy, Nutella, and Oreos in The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, edited by Darra Goldstein.
This Saturday, seven new D.C. bands with names like King Donut and the Road Sodas, IRL Stine and Jerkhole will take the stage at St. Stephen’s Church. For all the bands on the lineup, it’ll be their first gig, and probably also their last.
The randomly formed groups — composed of both seasoned musicians and newbies — have been playing together for a little more than two months as part of Hat Band, a project devised by Shira Mario, a library associate at D.C. Public Library.
Read on in Bandwidth
In spring when we're craving the taste of fresh fruit, but still waiting for early strawberries and rhubarb to ripen, I like to opt for desserts made with jam. They offer a great opportunity to use up the stock of last summer's preserves, work well with frozen berries and, if you are lucky enough to get your hands on some spring fruit, you can use it in a quick jam. Baked goods with jam are also perfect for the tea party occasions spring offers: Easter, Mother's Day and Mem`orial Day. Though earlier in the season, the featured dessert of Purim–hamentashen–also features the pairing of pastry and preserves.
Read on in Edible DC
On Saturday evening, I found myself in a white-out blizzard, driving up steep and curvy West Virginia back roads. Normally, I would have admitted defeat and turned back. But I kept going, propelled up the mountain by thoughts of the unique Mardi Gras foods and festivities that awaited me in an improbable-seeming Swiss village at top.
Helvetia, population 59, is an incongruous place — an Alpine village nestled in the isolated wilderness of West Virginia. It was settled in 1869 by Swiss craftsmen drawn by the large tracts of cheap land, beautiful mountains and plentiful forests of game. The town is situated along the Buckhannon River in a high mountain valley, and as I was reminded on my drive, is not very easy to get to.
Read on via NPR