Damon Lee Fowler

We're having our first hint of autumn here in Virginia, but in the Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry where I spent four decades of my life, summer lingers well into October. And even though autumn is whispering in our ears and we're now more than four hundred miles away from the Lowcountry, this is still when we begin to crave one of the lovely staples of the region's late-summer tables: butterbeans over rice.

Actually, beans or field peas with rice are staples down there throughout the year, but mid-to-late summer is when butterbeans (both the pale green and brown speckled varieties) are seasonal.

You may, by the way, call these broad, flat beans "limas" out of a Southerner's hearing, but don't do it in front of us. Read More 

If you're looking for capriciousness and absurdity (and all-too-often, even when you aren't), there's no better place to find them than food blogs.

Never content to simply relay how a thing is done well, far too many of my colleagues are instead eager to (one can only suppose) make a name for themselves with a quest for "the ultimate," "the perfect," or, worst of all, "the reinvented." Even if the ultimate or perfect was obtainable and a reinvention was needed, the real focus of such essays is but rarely, if ever, on the food: It's all about how much more clever the author is than you are.

What brought all this to mind was an essay someone shared Read More