This column first appeared in CityView magazine’s October 2026 edition.
I was four years old when my mom put me on the road to a lifetime of good eating.
I was a little young for cooking lessons, but she saw me riveted by the process—especially when she was making pies. So she let me start rolling out some pie dough and making little tarts filled with berry preserves that she and my dad had made from the wild strawberries I’d picked on the hillside field behind our house. The little tarts weren’t pretty—a disjointed patchwork of crust scraps—but oh were they good!
And Mom had instantly created a child who would never starve, but instead would always be ready to make a good meal.
That led eventually to dozens of cookbooks and more hours than I can count watching Julia Child and some of the other cooking gurus of an earlier day. And, of course, thousands of hours playing in kitchens. Even after my busiest days at work, I loved winding down by playing with food and creating something interesting for dinner. And weekends? Time for even bigger adventures.
To this day, I believe fine dining begins at home. Enjoying a great chef’s work is enhanced immeasurably by understanding what he or she did to create some culinary joy. I expect that much from anyone who works in the food industry—how can you sell and promote great stuff if you’re clueless about how it’s produced? Which reminds me of my shock, a few years ago, when I heard the manager of a busy, popular local grocery store tell another worker that he can’t cook—that he knows absolutely nothing about how to build a meal. I’m sure it’s not all that unusual, but it still left me shaking my head and wondering how the guy got as far as he did in the food business.
I also believe the dining is infinitely better when most of the ingredients come from my own garden, or from someone else’s garden nearby—which is why I’m a regular at several local farmers markets and why I love the farm-to-table movement among good restaurants. I believe in supporting local agriculture, especially small family farms. But that philosophy takes a back seat to an even stronger instinct: Fresh, locally grown food tastes infinitely better than packaged stuff, or food that’s grown and harvested thousands of miles away. Meals, as much as possible, should be celebrations of deliciousness. A short trip from garden to kitchen makes that a lot more likely.
I reinforced those beliefs this year with my best-ever gardening effort. I added more raised-bed gardens to my backyard and filled them with plants, most of which surprisingly survived, despite my legendary ungreen thumb. Not all of them, though. Some subterranean critters decided they liked—no, loved—the roots of bean and pea plants. Despite multiple plantings, I struck out and had to rely on the farmers market for them. But five varieties of tomatoes filled my kitchen, some going to salsas and stewed tomatoes that will make me smile on cold winter days.
Two varieties of cucumbers led to all sorts of interesting meals (they pair beautifully with peaches, cantaloupe and cherry tomatoes in a salad with a citrus vinaigrette) and dozens of jars of pickles. Four kinds of peppers are likely to keep producing (maybe the better word is “inundating”) until the first frost. We’ll still have plenty of winter squash around for Thanksgiving, even if the summer squash was a bit of a bust (better, I thought, than a zucchini deluge that’s even more life-altering than the cucumber barrage). And that’s not even touching on the winter veggies and greens I started in early September.
After the initial build of the garden beds, none of this was all that labor intensive. Watering, weeding, and picking have taken up just a few hours a week—not much more time than I spend hanging out at farmers markets. It’s not rocket science, although there is a bit of science involved, which is handy to know.
The great joy, for me anyway, is in the cooking—which is happening as I write this column. My typing is alternating with short walks to the kitchen counter, where I’m slicing cucumbers, peaches and some cooked chicken from a recent grilling, tossing them with a good handful of crumbled feta cheese and another of fresh shredded basil from my herb garden, then topping it all with a generous pour of a gochujang vinaigrette I just whisked up.
Report from one day later: It was a splendid dinner salad that will be repeated a few times before the growing season is over.
So, get yourself to a farmers market, and then into the kitchen, and prepare to have fun.
And as Julia told us at the end of every show, bon appetit!
