Rick Nichols is a Philadelphia native (a product of rowhouse Mayfair) who moved as a child to Lower Bucks County and later to New England. He graduated from the University of North Carolina and worked on the newspaper in Raleigh. After a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, he joined The Inquirer in 1978. He was for many years a member of the Editorial Board, and has several journalism awards.
His column “On the Side” appears Thursdays in Food, and his column “Food” appears in the Sunday Image section.
Video: A chat with the owner of Queens Farm at the Head House farmers market.
Series: On the Side | The Kitchen Diaries, a tour of Rick's new kitchen.
Rick Nichols' "On the Side" column does
not appear today.
Fifteen thousand plants spread their loveliness in a bucolic corner of Bucks County.
On a morning last month at Carousel Farm, Niko Christou was finishing the planting of his elegant kitchen garden - cucumbers at the moment, many of the other raised beds already sown and well under way.
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Last week, the grates were pulled down over the windows of the Sansom Street Oyster House, a small closed-for-business sign with an ambiguous reopening date the only evidence of the familial, almost biblical drama that had transpired behind the scenes.
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The rogue's gallery has been gathering dust on the corner of my desk, "stupid foods" I call them - boxes of "Italian-style" panko bread crumbs (which is sort of like saying "Japanese-style" fettucine noodles), a jar of powdered peanut butter to which one is asked to simply add water (Why?), a "twice-washed," shrink-wrapped "microwave-ready" Idaho potato that promises (Miracle of miracles!) genuine "oven-baked potato taste."
- Maia has gobbled up an enormous Main Line space for its restaurants and market. What's to eat? You name it.In Villanova one day last week - one month, to be exact, after its long-delayed opening - Maia, the behemoth on the Main Line, was doing a credible, if slightly disorienting, lunch business.
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It is Tuesday in the smokehouse of Sugartown Smoked Specialties, which is to say, "Spread Day," which is to say, the day they make the Hungarian smoked salmon spread that the regulars will descend upon - with customary vengeance - at the Lancaster County Farmers Market in Wayne the very next day.
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MILMAY, N.J. - At Bertuzzi's Farm here, a regular stop on the way to the Shore, Joe Jacobs attributes the particularly juicy sweetness of his strawberries to what at first seems a rather unlikely secret - his salt-hay mulch.
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Murray's Deli, the Bala Cynwyd fixture, has long derived its identity not so much from its decor or menu of Jewish deli standards, but from its proximity - less than a block away - to competing Hymie's Deli, the older of the two (at this location), but the more recently updated.
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The streets of the city are scented in various precincts - near 30th Street Station, for instance, or stretches of Woodland Avenue - with the smoky spice of jerk chicken, oxtail and curried goat of Jamaica, much of it dispensed from trucks, some of them manned, to the disappointment of native Jamaicans, by Haitians or Africans whom they say don't always get the taste of things quite exactly right.
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Across from DiBruno Bros. cheeserie near 18th and Chestnut last week, the line was moving smartly at the newest burger joint in town, a fresh-faced interloper called Goodburger.
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It is hard to miss Deborah's Kitchen on the faded 2600 block of Girard Avenue, its awning aglow like a lantern in the dark, the door wide open, a clutch of men hanging by the counter waiting for their fried chicken and turkey chops, for chopped collard greens and Sunday picnic potato salad, and - with a quiet, easy patience born of waiting for cooked-to-order soul food - for the bread pudding, pink-stained strawberry cake, or tub of banana pudding to finish things off.
- When Osteria's chef directs a workshop, his students dream of crackling crusts drizzled with delight. First lesson: Artistry takes time.When the word went out that Osteria's estimable chef Jeff Michaud was hosting a pizza workshop in the demonstration kitchen at Foster's Homeware in Old City, I could feel a mischievous glint rising in my eye.
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