Damon Lee Fowler

Over the more than three decades that I've been teaching and writing about cooking, the biggest challenge has been coming up with fresh ways to talk about coping with our big cook's holiday, Thanksgiving. In all that time, the focus, both in my work and most everyone else's, has been on tackling a feast for a crowd without killing ourselves.

It never occurred to me—or apparently anyone else—that, as challenging as cooking for that crowd might be, it's nothing to the challenge of The Dwindling Thanksgiving Table. That, I had to learn the hard way.

When we moved to Virginia, I happily imagined our dining room table at Thanksgiving, Read More 

Tomorrow is my birthday, and ushers in the last year of my sixties.

It's a milestone I suspect none of us is ever ready to face, and is coming at an especially difficult time for my family and for our country. Consequently, that need for comforting soup in my household hasn't lessened; if anything, it's only gotten more pronounced.

Whenever that need becomes acute, the soup that provides it best isn't, oddly enough, one I grew up on, but a classic Italian minestrone. True, it's a kissing cousin of my grandmother's vegetable soup, but its comfort isn't rooted in childhood memories as are most other "comfort foods." When I was traveling to teach a lot, Read More 

Usually Autumn is a season that fills me with hope, a time of golden light, of doors opening on new beginnings, and of joyful anticipation as we look forward to the winter holidays. But this one has been dark, a season of endings, sadness, and anxiety, of doors not just closed but slammed in our faces. We've needed comfort in large, hefty doses, and while it's been tempting, not all those doses could take the form of ice cream and bourbon.

Yesterday's comfort came in the form of a velvety butternut squash and leek puree. Of all the winter squash, butternuts produce Read More 

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 

In my later years, the end of summer has become bittersweet. Not because I love it so much that I hate seeing it pass; actually, autumn is my favorite time of year and by the end of July I'm eager for it to come. What's bittersweet about summer's waning is that it makes me keenly aware that my own life's summer is waning—and a lot faster than I'd like.

I'm not, of course, alone in this. Recently an email newsletter landed in my in-box with a link to an article warning of twenty-five things we should NEVER eat once we pass our fiftieth birthday.

Yes, they said never. The lion's share of the list was processed food, which ought not to be the dominant part of anyone's diet. Predictably, the bad-boy contents of most of the foods and drinks on this list were Read More 

If we're paying attention, every venture into the kitchen is an opportunity for us to learn and improve.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I had a chilled cucumber soup recipe that I could share. It was funny that she would ask just then, because I'd been craving that very thing for several days. And as it happened, there was a recipe for it in my book Essentials of Southern Cooking. I sent it along to her, then toddled off to the store to buy the ingredients for a batch of my own.

But while I was making it, I found myself dissatisfied with that recipe as it was published.  Read More 

There's not a day, nor a time within them, that I don't miss my maternal grandparents, but mid-summer is when I always miss them most. Not because that's the time of year that, twenty-one years apart, they left us, but because the summer school holidays were when my brothers and I each got to visit them all on our own for two whole weeks.

The lion's share of those visits was spent in the kitchen with MaMa Read More 

The best cooking is always the simplest. When the ingredients are first rate, a wise cook knows to do no more than is absolutely necessary to bring out their flavor. This is especially true in summer, when produce is at its peak and the heat, even when the air-conditioner is going full blast, makes spending time in the kitchen deeply unappealing.

And when we go back to Savannah and are lucky enough to come home with a pound cake from Mollie Stone Read More 

It's funny how our palates will sometimes latch onto something and stir a craving that often borders on obsession. This spring, what mine latched onto was the mild yet distinctive flavor and buttery texture of avocados. I've always liked them, but lately haven't been able to get enough of them—tossed in a salad, smashed into countless batches of guacamole, smeared on toast, sandwiched with bacon between slabs of sourdough bread, halved and used as a cup to hold scoops of chicken, ham, or tuna salad.

But while all of those things have their charms, arguably the most perfect mate for this unusual savory fruit is eggs, especially when the eggs have been poached. Though each is wonderful on its own, when they come together they're downright transcendent.

Far too many cooks are intimidated about poaching eggs, Read More 

My introduction to Savannah, where I spent four decades of my life, was a preservation internship in the summer of 1980. It was one of the hottest summers on record, and we met the heat with weekends on Tybee trying to catch a sea breeze, gallons of ice, chilled white wine and gin kept in the freezer, and windows that were perpetually frosted—on the outside. The heavy, damp air rang with a steady soundtrack of whirring air conditioner condensers and ceiling fans.

But of all the ways we dealt with the heat, the most memorable was Jean Soderlind's, who was my big-hearted landlady. I lived on the top floor of her grand Victorian house  Read More 

Early in April, a hacker got into my author's page on the popular social media platform Facebook, changed the profile and wallpaper pictures, and then changed the name to "We Added Suspended Issue See Why." After immediately resetting my password, I was able to block the person who hacked in (yup, they left fingerprints) and restored the pictures. Unhappily, I was stuck with that name for two months. Despite repeated attempts to report the hack and get help, Facebook not only never responded, its "help" tutorials were absolutely no help at all. Worst of all, it wouldn't allow me to change the name of the page back because the rule is that it can only be changed every sixty days—even if you weren't the one who changed it.

I'll still be using Facebook, but with the knowledge that a service that's offered as "free" rarely is: Usually it comes with a price of some kind. The price in that case is that it's all too easy for hackers to violate your space in that medium and it won't offer you any help when they do. Also, if you are "reported" for violating a community standard, even and especially when you haven't done any such thing, God help you.

But I digress (what else is new?):  Read More 

We're finally having autumnal weather in our corner of Virginia: chilly nights and mild days, enough rain to bring out the color of the leaves and holly berries in our garden, and lots of sunshine giving that golden light that only happens as the year winds its way to a close.

It's perfect weather for the hearty, warming soups that are made with dried beans and peas, especially split green peas. Split pea with ham is a long-time favorite cold weather comfort in our household, and yet I'd actually not made it since we moved.

It was past time to seek out a couple of meaty ham hocks, dig out my favorite bean soup pot, and stir up a batch. Read More 

16 March 2023: Comfort Casserole

It's funny how we all talk about "comfort food" as if it's a simple, clearly defined thing. From time to time we even see stories about an "ultimate" comfort food such as mashed potatoes. But the reality is that the concept is among the most complicated and ill-defined in all cooking, mainly because it's completely subjective.

What we find comforting is wrapped up in our individual taste preferences (which often defy everything else) and our experiences: where we were born, where we were raised, what the cooking of our family was like, how often and far we have traveled, what the climate was like at the homes of our formative years, and even what the climate is like in the places we call home now.

There are people for whom—shock of shocks—mashed potatoes would not be a comfort at all, never mind an "ultimate" one.

Likewise, there are undoubtedly a lot of people for whom a casserole of any kind would not even appeal.  Read More 

While I've been out in the jungle we call the back garden, hacking away at the briars that have surrounded our sadly neglected greenhouse like Sleeping Beauty's castle, Lent has crept up on me.

For those who don't observe the Christian calendar, Lent is a penitential season of spiritual fasting modeled on the forty day fast that Jesus took to prepare for his ministry. Well, since he retreated to the wilderness for that one, in a way it seems appropriate that my Lenten observance began out in our own little wilderness.

Many who observe Lent focus on what they're not doing (most often what they're not eating and drinking). But a proper spiritual fast is less about the abstinence that marks it outwardly than the introspection and contemplation that ought to be going on inwardly. To that end, there's been a trend over the last few years to shift the focus from "giving things up" to "taking things on" as a spiritual discipline.

Perhaps rescuing our sadly neglected garden could be thought of as spiritual, but then again, so can everything we do. With that idea in mind, these days  Read More 

The weather here in Virginia has been unusually mild, cool enough to invigorate, but not too warm to make working in the garden uncomfortable. Since there are only a few weeks left in the dormant season, I've been back out in it, trying to get as much as possible under control before spring.

I'm doing the work mostly alone, with limited tools, which would be daunting for someone half my age. And as the masses of yard waste, pruned limbs, felled trees, cut bamboo, and tangles of cut vines continue to pile up, what remains to be done is a little overwhelming. It's probably to be expected that my cooking has been basic and heavy on winter comfort food that I've shared too often to revisit on this page.

But every now and again inspiration strikes. It may be an unexpected discovery Read More 

In the late seventies and early eighties, the airwaves of public radio were graced with the homespun wit and wisdom of Kim Williams, a naturalist and writer from Missoula, Montana. Her commentary covered just about every aspect of life, but the one that has stayed with me, and is inevitably brought to mind by this time of year, extolled the virtues of joyfully abandoning our self-control for a season of unchecked feasting.

Taking a cue from the oft-quoted beginning of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, "To everything there is a season," she believed that periods of unreserved celebrating were essential Read More 

If your Christmas tree is lying at the curb, the decorations are already packed away, and you've started your New Year's resolution to cut back and lose weight, that's too bad. Because today—not December 26, is the actual end of Christmas—its last hurrah, if you will.

That means we've got at least one more day of Christmas feasting, two if, like me, you let it linger into Epiphany Read More 

Let's begin with a full disclosure that what you are about to read outlines a not-terribly-stellar moment in my life in the kitchen.

Last week, I decided to make a batch of homemade fudge for Christmas, basing it on one of my own recipes for a dark chocolate fudge frosting. Most chocolate fudge gets its flavor from cocoa powder, but that rich, dark frosting contained both cocoa and bittersweet chocolate. It seemed like just the thing for a little Christmas indulgence.

Despite the facts that it was a humid day (not the best conditions for making candy) and I had not made fudge in years, it began well. The sugar, cocoa, and milk mixture came to its rolling boil Read More 

One of the most challenging and irksome things about writing recipes is that they, like their authors, are imperfect. But unlike their authors, once they hit print, they're static. We humans aren't: We're constantly learning and evolving—and that includes what we do in the kitchen.

The truth is, not one of us is ever completely educated. The only ways we stop learning are by either willfully refusing new information or dying. If we're breathing and paying attention, we're always coming into contact with something we've never seen, thought about, or imagined.

A good cook never stops learning—that's why they are good.  Read More 

As we move into our first almost-normal holiday season in three years, I've been thinking about something the late Marcella Hazan once said of her American cooking students. Whenever she taught a dish that was new, at least one of them was sure to say that he or she was going to make it for a dinner party the following weekend.

She admired that adventurous spirit because such a notion would never even occur to most Italians. A meal offered to guests outside the family would be one they'd made hundreds of times—even if that was how often it had been served to those same guests in the past.

Well, admirable it may be, but there's a fine line between being adventurous and foolhardy.  Read More 

Two of my favorite things about cooking Thanksgiving dinner are the broth pots that begin and end it. Not only does that wonderful aroma fill the house twice, that second batch of broth squeezes out every ounce of goodness the bird had to offer, and extends the holiday feasting into the weekend and beyond.

By Thanksgiving night, since we had a small bird and a large crowd, Read More 

It's none of my business what kind of gravy you serve today. Whether you add wine, include the giblets and add chopped boiled eggs, or thicken it with a roux or butter is up to you. But here's how to make that gravy silky-smooth and delicious. Read More 

As we begin our second year living in Virginia, we're also enjoying our second full Autumn. This has always been my favorite time of the year. Maybe it's the invigorating coolness in the air, the golden light and brightly colored leaves, or the fact that it's harvest time, but this inward-turning season always seems more hopeful. It's also when I'm happiest in my kitchen.

For four decades, we lived in a place where the only hint of the season before November was that golden light. The warmth and autumnal aromas that filled my kitchen often did not go with what was happening outdoors: The frost on the windows was on the outside, where the still-warm, humid air collided with glass chilled by the air conditioner.

So it's a blessing to once again be living in a place where we have real autumn weather and my kitchen's warmth is actually welcome. It's been fragrant with Read More 

As we close in on our first year of living full time in Petersburg, we love it here, and are growing more attached to it as the months pass. But it would be a bald-faced lie to say that we aren't sometimes more than a little homesick for Savannah.

One of the things I miss most (aside from people) is Russo's fish market and the fresh local brown creek shrimp and blue crab that we so took for granted. There are a few fish markets here, but  Read More 

Perhaps it's the monotonously regular summer menu of salads and cold or room temperature food, but even in the warmest of days, there are times when a hot soup is not only welcome, but the only thing that really satisfies us. There's rarely a summer day, however, when venturing into a hot kitchen to make soup, even a cold one, is welcome.

Luckily, most soups don't take a lot of the cook's time, nor necessarily have to simmer for hours to be good.  Read More 

One of the great ironies of summer is that it's the very time of year when vegetable soups are at their best, since all the ingredients are at peak season, just when the last thing one wants to do is stand over a hot stove.

Luckily, these soups really don't require the cook to stand over them for more than a few minutes. You put it together before the kitchen is heated up, hang around only as long as it takes for it to come to a simmer, then just walk away Read More 

Because I was late putting in our little herb garden, the basil is only just now full enough for the first batch of pesto. But clipping the tips back to make it fuller has given nice little handfuls for stirring into things like pasta with zucchini or filling in for lettuce in a BLT.

The best, however, is always  Read More 

Summer in the South (or, for that matter, anywhere) is full of irony for cooks. The bounty of produce inspires us at the very moment that the heat and humidity kill off any interest in being in front of a hot stove. The compensation is of course that summer is when the ingredients need the least amount of help from the cook. Indeed, they often don't need any help at all.

There's not much one can do to improve on a good peach or tomato that has been allowed to ripen to peak flavor on its tree or vine. If you doubt that, then you've never plucked one of either, given it a wipe or rinse, and bitten into it on the spot.

You might call it lazy, but there's wisdom (not to mention less chance of heatstroke) in knowing when to leave things alone. Read More 

The beginning of our first full summer in Virginia found me out in the yard, still trying to beat into submission the overgrowth that had taken over the garden. It hasn't been without rewards:   beneath the wisteria, brambles, wild grapes, and poison ivy (that I swear sprout new growth the instant one's back is turned) lie the remains of a garden that was once a showplace.

Still, it's been hard not to get overwhelmed, so as the heat increases and my stamina lags, my focus has turned to small projects close to the house. One such project has been the filling of three barren planting beds on the back terrace.

The first order of business for this cook of course was an herb garden.  Read More