Or, let’s say it isn’t a cure for all epileptics. Parents of children with seizure disorders are not encouraged to emulate my example. Nor, for that matter, ought adults prone to “the sacred disease” necessarily to follow my example. But after a seizure brought on by too much amaro, too many parties, and too much high living at the New York Wine and Food Festival, I was in sad shape earlier this week. I wrote about it on The Feedbag, but my wryly self-deprecating post didn’t begin to get at the ennui, the fatigue, and the general gnarliness of my...

Thanks to some poor planning on my part, there is no food in the house this weekend. Look in my refrigerator, and you’ll find only some dried Italian sweet sausage, a piece of dried Katz’s salami, some diet iced tea, and various bottles. There is, however, a large white bag of hamburger meat on the bottom shelf, with the familiar “happy cow” logo on it that indicates its contents as coming from La Frieda beef. This is is the best hamburger you can buy, and I have a ten pound bag of it. This isn’t the first time; you may...

Well, it finally happened. I got fat. What do mean, “It finally happened,” I can hear you saying. You were fat from the get-go! And it’s true. But there’s a difference, as a food writer, between toting around an oversized carcass reminiscent of a ex-linebackers, and really letting yourself go. The first is livable and likable; the second is merely tragic. I stood on the preciplce and had to turn back. Actually, my girlfriend had me turn back. “What are we going to do about your weight?” she asked me one day a couple of weeks ago. It was couched as...

Well, here I am in Fenwick Island, Delaware, or rather just outside of it, in a rented house near the highway. I’m with my girlfriend’s family, whom I’m cooking for for the first time. I have a ten-pound piece of prime Creekstone rib, boned but otherwise untrimmed, some salt, some oil, one good knife and no grill. So what the hell am I going to do? Here is how I thought out the problem. Here I am with this meat and this knife, I said to myself. I can’t cook steaks for everybody, since it would take too long, and everybody has...

I found myself in LA last week on business, and naturally one thing came to mind: hamburgers! Yes, it’s the world capital of movies, TV, seedy rock clubs, beautiful women, and surgical-grade cocaine, but all I wanted was a great hamburger. It shouldn’t have been that hard. L.A. is generally held, by hamburger heads, to be the nation’s capital hamburger city. It was in Southern California that the McDonald brothers launched their immortal operation; where Bob Wian created the Big Boy, and all subsequent double-decker hamburgers; where In and Out got its start and still flourishes; and where a thousand stillborn...

You may not know this, but every year I have a big birthday party. I mean, big. It’s called Meatopia, and it’s an unspeakable orgy of meat-cookery, the Altamont of edible animals. Each year there’s a different theme. One year was “Slaughter of the Innocent,” and featured an all-baby program: veal, poussain, kid goat, etc. Another year was “Baconalia” and was all bellies. This year it’s “Lamb Bam Thank You Ma’am.” Six whole lambs. Six chefs.  The two best pitmasters in the Northeast. And lots of free beer. And you, if you can tell me with sufficent force and eloquence,...

My friend Eddie Glasses is an odd sort of fellow. He’s the leading expert on Chinese restaurant cooking in America, and has forgotten more about the restaurant business that I will ever know. He’s also one of the greatest home cooks in America. So how did I know he was going to destroy my precious Rustichella d’Abruzzo spaghetti? Simply stated, I don’t know. But I knew he was going to kill it, and he did kill it, and here is the sad story of how it happened. Last week, I invited Eddie Glasses and his wife to my house, to eat...

I spoke with my friend Eddie Glasses the other day, and he said what he always does: “when are you going to come get your pan?” I left my cast-iron pan there when I made hamburgers at a Japanese BBQ. Eddie, and you, might think that I just don’t care about the pan; on the contrary. I love it and it is a part of me. Like Sauron’s ring, wherever I go, it thinks of me and wants to be back in my possession. And like Sauron’s ring, it’s indestructable; its Mount Doom is in some ironworks in Pennsylvania that...

I guess I must have though I was a real wiseguy, aping Rachael and trying to have a Burger Bash of my own. And for a while, it looked pretty good. 18 of the greatest burger men and women in the world were assembled in Summit New Jersey, this past weekend, all vying to be crowned King of Burgers. And what a sight they were to see! Arrayed geometrically out across the parking lot of the Grand Summit Hotel were all the great burgers from the gastronomic capital of the world: the Black Label burger from Minetta Tavern, redolent of...