Author Archives: Gordon Jenkins

To Whom It May Concern: I would like to apologize for a certain incident that occurred at my dinner table last Saturday, March 19th, at around 7:00 PM. In what I believed, at the time, to be an ingenious effort to widen the margins of gastronomical discourse and finally introduce “High Art” and “Pork Products” »

After days — I can’t remember how many — of disciplined research, I have finally found a way to get drunk during dinner without having to worry about that pesky and distracting side-component, wine. Going about my research methodically, as if to satisfy some deep, irrepressible thirst — for culinary progress — I tried and »

So the other night I was having sex with a hooker and I started thinking about cabbage. (I was hungry and rather bored.) Some people will find this strange. But as the hooker began to press sour cream into my chest and prod my stomach with cauliflower (we were having sex in the supermarket), I »

I hereby humbly declare this recipe the definitive embodiment of the most perfect cooking on earth. I invite naysayers to deny it, but I warn them that their cries of fried chicken, foie gras, Maryland blue crabs and “barbecued ribs” will go unheeded. Nothing is so simple and nearly nothing is so delicious as folding »

Stop cooking, put down your pan and wooden spoon, and think for a moment. Think about the food that’s changed you — the food that you didn’t just eat, but actually noticed. It’s the simplest food, the most wonderful food. It’s food that is merely cooked, and not altered. Think of soft, dripping cuts of »

I come from a place with no apples. I mean, the grocery store has apples, but they’re not really apples, having been trucked in from Washington or — I’m sorry, I really am, but I have to say it — flown in from New Zealand. They are bland, mealy little things; you eat them out »

I will now describe how to become very intimate with a chicken. Grab the carcass with both hands and lay it down in a baking pan. Flip it over, breasts up. Spread its legs. Find the body cavity and clear it of any debris — severed neck, pouch of organs, etc. — then trace your »

This is the saddest time of year. Everything good in life — and by life, I mean dinner — is dying. Farmers halt their tractors in the middle of their fields, remove their straw hats and gaze out across the stretches of thin, crumbling tomato vines, wilted melons, dry and fallen stalks of corn. They »

My very first taste of tomato confit was with a friend, a fellow student who claimed a great devotion to tomatoes. He insisted that the only way to eat tomatoes was to “apple” them: to rip them whole from the vine and bite straight into the flesh. He refused even a dash of salt. But »