Hand over the grease and nobody gets hurt.

Seems the ethanol bubble has created yet another unintended side effect: a black market for used restaurant oil. Most people who’ve worked in restaurants know that food operations generate a lot of waste oil and grease, especially if they have a fryer. My doughnut fryer produced more than a little every month, which I’d deposit […]

READ ON

What was wrong with my Maytag again?

Owning a brick oven ain’t no picnic, friends. As the months have passed since its completion I’ve received increasing numbers of emails inquiring what’s going on with it and where the blasted pictures are. All I can say is the completion of the oven was just the first step in my evolution into an active […]

READ ON

The Flan Indians

Did you know that there’s a French-descended, custard-loving tribe in Central America called the “Quiche”? It’s true! They wear berets, love Jean Genet plays, practice mime and… OK, no there’s isn’t. The name of the tribe is pronounced “kee-chay”, even though the spelling’s the same. It was a fun idea while it lasted.

READ ON

Whence the quiche?

So where does quiche come from? Quiche as we know it is from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France, rich farming and dairy country that France and Germany have fought over for centuries. These days Alsace resides in France, for how long no one can say (those Germans really dig quiche). What about before that? Most […]

READ ON

A quiche is not a pie.

Say it with me. A quiche is not a pie. A quiche is not a pie. A quiche is not a pie. A real quiche is round, flat and with squared corners. None of this American slope-sided pie-plate stuff. That’s not Euro-food elitism talking, it’s simple science. A flat, cylindrical shape heats far more evenly, […]

READ ON

The Numbers Don’t Lie

If you really want to see how far quiche has fallen in popularity over the years, try running a recipe search on your favorite food site. I just tried it over at the Food Network and 52 recipes came up for “quiche”. Compare that to “pizza” which yields 604, and “pasta” that comes in at […]

READ ON

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the freaks.

It seems Chicago Mayor Daley has been attracting the attention of, shall we say, some “diverse” personalities lately. It seems some lone nut, angry about the police shooting of a wild cougar near my old neighborhood (yes that’s right a 150-pound wild cougar…and were I, my 105-pound wife, and 35 and 25-pound daughters still living […]

READ ON

Big Brown does it again.

For those of you not keeping up with the spring horse racing, Big Brown won the Preakness on Saturday — big. He coasted to victory by some 7 lengths, his jockey Kent Desormeaux didn’t even use the whip (in fact I’m pretty sure I saw an open copy of Audition by Barbara Walters in his […]

READ ON

Light Lunch of Fear

No pastry poses a more fundamental threat to American masculinity than the quiche. This thanks to one Mr. Bruce Feirstein whose 1982 book on the subject made every quiche-loving man subject to cheap cracks and jibes, the dining equivalent of the guy who showers in his shorts after basketball practice. But then it’s unfair to […]

READ ON