Whaddya Think, Doctor Fink?

                         Birthdays are nature’s way of telling us to eat more cake – Edward Morykwas, author, photographer   It’s time to party! Is it your birthday? A family birthday? Kids? How about friends, pets, and celebrities? That adds up to a lot of celebrations and tasty birthday cakes. How much would you pay for the perfect birthday cake? Let’s find out. Birthday celebrations have been around for ages. According to How

Soup. It’s food for the soul. My legacy soup is rich, buttery red potato. You probably never heard of it. My family came from a small town in Austria-Hungry, beneath the Carpathian Mountains and near the Ukraine border. The soup was made by frying onions in sweet butter, adding diced potatoes, and paprika to turn it red. Water and tiny dough balls made it into  soup. True comfort food! My grandmother brought the recipe with her when she arrived in

So many choices. Peperoni or sausage? Red or white? Deep dish or thin crust? According to the popular saying: You can’t buy happiness. But you can buy pizza, and that’s kind of the same thing. There’s truth in numbers. Pizza is one of the most popular foods on the planet, leading to the question: where did it begin? The answer is in how you define pizza. Is it fast food, gourmet dining, or flat bread with toppings? Consider the facts.

We play with food, laugh about food, and analyze every bite. Food is part of life – it’s been around as long as we have. As a result, there are a lot of funny stories about the precious and hopefully tasty morsels that we consume. Below are just a few true stories . . .  Spaghetti Trees It was April 1, 1957 (April Fool’s Day). Everyone knew that money didn’t grow on trees . . . but spaghetti?  BBC (British

Spaghetti with meatballs? Pad Thai? Mac ‘n cheese? Pasta/ noodles are loved around the world. There are 600 different shapes and thirteen hundred different names for a food that fits into almost every cuisine. Go to Japan and they call it ramen. How about spätzle in Germany, patitsio in Greece, and toasted p’titim in Israel? The world spends over twenty three billion dollars a year on a food that’s been around almost as long as humans. The leader in pasta

    Times are changing. The forks (and spoons) are getting nervous. With inflation, food shortages, droughts, and floods, our culinary future is endangered – like tigers and polar bears. According to Hoffmann, Koplinka-Loehr, and Eiseman in their new book, Our Changing Menu, climate change is messing with our menu. Big time. Imagine life without a gooey hot fudge sundae. Face the day without a tangy Starbuck’s latte. Eat barbecue without flame broiled burgers, ketchup, and salty fries. Let’s look at

  Winter. When I was a kid that meant bundling up against the bitter cold and piling into the car. Mom and Dad took us to the original Nathan’s in Brooklyn – long before most people knew the name. We bought huge servings of French Fries, smothered in salt, ketchup, and mustard, loving the steamy crunch. Little did we know that our delicious fries weren’t French but the magic of Nathan Handwerker. Handwerker couldn’t imagine that Nathan’s Famous would grow

  Food says a lot about you. Are you a chocolate or vanilla person? Coffee or tea? Pizza or wonton soup? What’s in a last meal? How many “last” meals did you have before going on a diet or eating at a friend’s house (who is a terrible cook)? What about the last meal of summer or the holidays?  Last meals are fun to think about (just one more scoop of ice cream or another slice of pizza). Let’s take a

  What’s round with a hole and not a donut? What can be threaded on a dowel or string or used, frozen, as a baby’s teether? What did American travel writers, Beatrice and Ira Freeman, describe as an “unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis?” The answer is easy – it’s the unassuming bagel. Sometimes spelled beigel, it can be found around the world. You might like it plain, with salt or seeds or with a creative array of toppings. You might

Whoppers, Wimpy, and Wahlburgers. Jimmy Buffet sang Cheeseburger in Paradise and Ronald McDonald clowned for the world. Where’s your beef? Hamburgers are an American icon as well as one of the most popular sandwiches in the world. Fifty billion burgers are eaten each year in America; roughly 1.5 million Big Macs are sold every day. Globally, 2.6 billion burgers are chowed down yearly. That’s a lot of beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed