VIVRE POUR MANGER

In Spring, this young man’s fancy turns to rhubarb. Follow me through this.
I make rhubarb syrup during rhubarb season. It’s simple, and it’s amazing in cocktails. Any cocktail that calls for grenadine can be rhubarbified. The trick to making a good rhubarb syrup is to maximize the rhubarb flavour in as small a volume of [...]

While on vacation in Kenya with my sister, we stumbled upon (and later, because of) a fantastic cocktail. Simple to construct, lots of flavour and extremely refreshing. It’s called Dawa…

Among my many long-term goals is to train a bay laurel into a standard. I want it to look like a child’s drawing of a tree: stick + ball. This year’s seasonal pruning was harsh, and yielded more fresh bay leaves than ever. Given that one man can eat a finite number of pots of [...]

Whether you’re starting with a tin of snails or a batch of beloved shelled and poached garden vermin,  this is the good bit.

Even though they’ve been boiled already, once out of the shell, snails still need to be cooked. There are lots variations on what exactly escargot can be poached in, but the goal is essentially to cheat a court bouillon. It is a matter of preference, but I go for a red wine base.

Last Spring I got frustrated with replacing my herb seedlings weekly, and made an effort to rid my potted garden of the scourge of hungry snails. In a search for the perfect species-directed pesticide, I identified the particular species of nocturnal basil-destroyers as Helix aspersa*. That’s where my poisoning plan took a hard right turn. [...]