Frontier Psychiatrist

  I live in a primarily Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhood. Every day, Mexican food vendors set up shop on the main streets with big containers of tamales for sale. To accompany the tamales, they sell cups of atole or champurrado, a thickened hot breakfast drink. When I lived in Mexico, in the countryside, atole was a breakfast [...]

Cream of tomato soup — well, not cream actually, just Campbell’s tomato made with skim milk — was a staple of childhood, usually served alongside a grilled cheese sandwich. As a grownup, the Campbell’s version offers a trip down memory lane, but little else — it is salty and thin, with the texture of baby [...]

Recently, the unimaginable happened: I hosted a bagel brunch and had leftover smoked salmon. This is like having leftover shrimp cocktail from a dinner party….what sort of guests leave the expensive seafood on the tray, yet eat me out of fruit salad? I suppose this is the benefit of being friends with people who perpetually [...]

I opened the food magazines this weekend only to find to the inevitable annual onslaught of Halloween pumpkin recipes. The squash suggestions range from the classic (pies) to the modern (martinis). I actually don’t like many dishes made with pumpkin outside of the usual sweet treats like pies and spice bread, and even then once-a-year [...]

Pesto is often rolled out in cooking magazines in the late summer as a garden-based sauce for every home cook to try. It has gone from highly trendy to cliché in the fancier food circles, but it still tastes good, and that’s what matters. It may have been the quiche of the Eighties, as Nora [...]

The season of the Hatch green chile is upon us. For those of you not finely attuned to the various harvest times of the crops of the Southwest, the region of Hatch, New Mexico is known widely for its chile production. I am friends with transplanted Arizonans and New Mexicans who wait all year for [...]

Eggplant is a late-summer delicacy that all too often finds itself defaced by a thick armor of greasy breadcrumbs, drowning in sauce and smothered in melted cheese. You can barely tell there is a vegetable lurking in the Eggplant Parmesan served up by most delis and red-sauce joints. And, I suspect that’s the point. Early [...]