Damon Lee Fowler

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 

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 

While I was a student at Clemson's center for architectural studies in Genoa more than forty years ago, Ilda, our lovely cook, used to make us something she called an "omeletta." It was really not an omelette in the French sense, nor was it a frittata, but something halfway between. Read More 

Many of us have been indulging ourselves a lot through the pandemic period of quarantine with favorite comfort foods, paying scant attention to saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and other alimentary bad-boys that make eating as worthwhile as they make it dangerous. But it shouldn't follow that the only comfort food is something that is a coronary waiting for a place to happen.

One of my favorite comfort foods is poached eggs. They can be served up any way from simply seasoned with salt and pepper to nestled on a toasted Holland rusk (or English muffin) that's topped with sautéed Canadian bacon or aged ham, then lavishly blanketed under a fluffy, lemony hollandaise. But my hands-down favorite is uova alla fiorentina. Read More 

Big Christmas parties can be a lot of fun, with their crowds of folks filled with holiday cheer (never mind that it came from a bottle), festive decorations, and endless arrays of rich, fancy party food.

But they do require a certain amount of planning and work. And as we come into the last stretch before Christmas, if you’ve not already planned one, it’s a little late to start now. That does not, however, mean that it’s too late to do anything at all.

There’s no perfect-host rule mandating that the only way to entertain your friends at the holidays is in herds. Read More 

Yesterday, a regular reader asked me to devote one of my newspaper columns to the proper way of cooking a sunny-side-up egg. My first reaction was that it’s a very simple process that even a big mouth like me could not stretch out into an entire newspaper story.

My second reaction was to recall that, like all simple things, a properly fried egg does take a little finesse—and finesse is a virtue that is far too often overlooked in the kitchen, especially when the process is a simple one.

Sunny-side up is actually just another name for the classic American-style fried egg. And the real secret to success with it lies in understanding that “fried,” in this instance, is a misleading moniker.  Read More 

A recent poll on my social media author’s page confirmed something that any Southerner already knew: it isn’t Easter dinner down South if it doesn’t begin with deviled eggs. But it also gave away something I’ve long suspected: that the affection for these morsels has no geographical limits. They may come in and out of “fashion,” but they’ve never lost their front and center place on Easter’s table all across the country. Read More