You know you've said it. "Gosh, I bet I'd make a million dollars if I could sell (insert personally mastered food fabulosity here) at the Fair!" But as we dare to dream of success-on-a-stick, how many of us actaully make the plan, put up the cash, and go for it? Not many, except my friend Matt. I've had a mean brisket at his house and he's a man with a penchant for smoking meats, but other than that, he's just an average guy, not in the biz what-so-ever. Can that really translate into The Big Payoff? Matt's secured a site outside the main entrance gate in some guy's yard to set up his Smok'Shack BBQ where he's selling pulled pork sammies. Maybe he'll draw a few who are too hungry to wait and maybe a few more who are leaving with unfulfilled space in their gut. We'll see. This Fresh Forkin' Friday I'm saluting the dream and those who go for it.

Read more.

If you happened to see Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations about Baltimore, you may think it is a rundown city with little in the way of culinary traditions and void of local culinary talent. I wholeheartedly disagree with Bourdain and think that he maybe watched one to many episodes of the The Wire.

Read more.

It's Fresh Forkin' Friday and I feel like the summer is running out on me. I want to be making gazpacho, but I'm coolly craving chili. I've been waiting for the appropriate time when a mozzarella caprese salad makes a fine dinner, but I'm suddenly in the mood to braise something. I'll bet money that in September, when I'm in full oven mode, we'll be hit with some bright and sunny 90s that will put all of our seasonal bellies out of whack again. Go figure.

Read more.

Read more.

It's a popsicle weekend, to be sure. It may be the last chance to revel in the heat and humidity, so I'm pushing away all thoughts of school supplies and retiring to the patio. Cower if you will, inside your AC-frosted house, but I'll be cooling down au natural with a minty cucumber popsicle, making a memory that is as integral as Thinsulate to surviving January. Dewpoints, this Fresh Forkin' Friday, I call you out.

Read more.

Is it possible to get good coleslaw in this town? While researching the now famous burger issue, we must have had coleslaw at twenty establishments and maybe one or two were passable, but not one was near crave-able.

Read more.

As a kid on the eve of our local summer festival, I would ride my bike up to St. George's and help shuck barrel after barrel full of corn. The following Saturday, a small pack of girls and I would run nonstop: eating corn, playing bingo with the blue-hairs, and jamming as much cotton candy past our Bonnie-Belled lips as possible. Sometimes we'd help the teenagers run the game booths, sometimes we'd plot to lock the "Corn Princesses" in the bathroom before their coronation. By the end of the night, my mom had a basement full of sugar-jacked gossipy little fiends who had no intention of sleeping at the sleepover. All of this comes to mind this Fresh Forkin' Friday, because it is once again the eve of Corn Days, and I find myself, once again, a local. But this time it's my kid who is plotting and working on his potential mini-donut to cotton candy ratio. I'll be happy just to catch a glimpse of him every hour or so as he tears around and I camp in the one area absent from my childhood memories: the beer tent.

Read more.

If you want more evidence of our narcissistic age, there’s no better example than the foodie film opening Friday, Julie & Julia. Nora Ephron’s screenplay tells the story of Julia Child’s fascinating life, culinary awakening, and rise to influentialism, paired with the tale of mousy NYC food blogger Julie Powell, who, at a personal and professional crossroads, found herself by cooking each recipe from Child’s seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking and then writing a book about it. In some circles they’d call that necrophilia.

Read more.