Chad Chandler

Like so many houses from the post-war era, our place has a huge hole in the hallway floor where an old oil furnace vent used to be. The furnace has long been drained and filled with sand, but the grate was never removed or replaced.

The old vent was depressed to the point that it seemed unsound, but we eventually learned to walk around it without even noticing it was there. It wasn’t until our first winter in the house when I realized how much cold air was seeping through the porous opening.

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An instant-read thermometer is indispensable in the kitchen and at the grill. Unfortunately, they’re often wrong. I discovered that recently when I slightly overcooked a small rack of lamb. Something had knocked my thermometer out of alignment, causing it be be off by a whopping 12 degrees. Luckily, it only takes a minute to recalibrate.

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We make pestos pretty frequently, but that’s mostly because the herbs in our garden need to be trimmed occasionally. I made one the other day to dress some lamb. It always surprises me when people are impressed by homemade pesto. It literally takes two minutes to make.

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I’m usually a stickler for fresh ingredients, but sometimes the prepackaged stuff is just easier. For my clam sauce, I like to use cans of minced clams. I sometimes eat these directly out of the can as a snack. It’s weird, I know, but I was never really a potato chip kind of guy. My mother always kept junk food in the house for my sisters, but she bought wild rice, minced clams and mac & cheese for me.

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Sometimes I find myself in the mood for some good old-fashioned, unhealthy comfort food, Brady Bunch style. I didn’t have enough vegetables to make Alice’s famous meatloaf, so I decided to make some big meatballs, flatten them into patties, and fry them. And since I abhor the solid ketchup “crust” that people put on meatloaf, I decided to make a pan sauce instead.

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I’ve always been more of a people-watcher than a beach reader. Before our recent vacation, I planned to listen to a lot of Bob Dylan and flip through some magazines between my frequent bouts of stir-craziness. I brought two books to the beach in case I got the itch to read something longer than a few paragraphs. One was Purple Cow, an advertising/marketing book. The other was Frank Stitt’s Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill, a very large and heavy coffee table book. Purple Cow was pretty good, but I was on vacation to get away from work. Oddly enough, I read Frank Stitt’s cookbook cover to cover.

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I was browsing through my news feeds recently when I ran across this topic in an advice column. The questions was, in a nutshell, whether diners were obliged to tip for takeout food. Not delivery, but takeout. Here’s part of the response:

You should tip for takeout, because filling your order takes work. Someone has to take your order over the phone, and that order could be an extra-crispy, extra-sauce, half-anchovy sausage pizza?in other words, complicated. Or worse, it could be vague: “Yeah, I don?t have your menu in front of me, but do you have, like, a tofu in peanut sauce type dish?”

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Last time I blogged about our garden, everything had just gone into the ground. Now that spring is slowly turning into summer, everything is starting to grow. We’ve lost a plant or two, but everything else is doing great — especially compared to last year’s blight.

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There are a thousand recipes for greens out there, and I’ve tried a lot of them. They’re all pretty good, but some are more complicated and don’t offer much of a reward for your hard work. I’ve come to rely on a relatively simple recipe that makes sweet and spicy greens with a mild, savory glaze.

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Over the years, I’ve tried countless marinades, rubs and cooking styles to bring out the best flavor in pork chops. I’ve finally settled on the best recipe, which oddly enough is one of the easiest. When done this way, they come out sweet and tender. Most importantly, they taste like juicy pork chops, not like salty fruit juice.

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