FOREWORD: WE BE THE FREAKS   “There’s a sucker born every minute” –P.T. Barnum   Generally speaking, chickens are a dull topic.  I know this, first hand.  I spent weeks researching facts about chickens on the internet, preparatory to writing a few recipes and essays.  The only information worthy of retaining would amount to about […]

There ain’t nobody here but us chickens There ain’t nobody here at all You’re stompin’ around And shakin’ the ground, You’re kickin’ up an awful dust –Alex Kramer & Joan Whitney   I live in Waterville, Maine, a small town of about 15,000 people located on the west bank of the Kennebec River.  It is […]

The good don’t always win And might makes right The Sword of Damocles is hanging above your head –Lou Reed Ever since my restaurant went out of business back in April, I follow the same fruitless routine every morning.  While drinking multiple cups of coffee, I search on-line for employment opportunities.   “Dad”, my younger […]

I was a Cub Scout for a brief period in my childhood.  I was a complete failure at it.  My lack of success in this noble organization stemmed from both an early burgeoning of rebelliousness and a sense that I had been gypped.   I felt gypped because I thought I was going to learn how […]

  Acronyms are taking over our language. We can thank computers for that, as well as the texting feature on cell phones.   I envision grave evolutionary consequences from this: Entire books will be only three pages long, written in a string of vowels and consonants which everyone, by then, will understand. The only punctuation […]

The picture of the pie on this and my previous blog entry is not the “exploding pie”.  Rather, it is how the exploding pie would have looked if I hadn’t screwed it up.  It was an aesthetic failure and, simply, a god-awful mess because I was careless.  You can’t be careless when you cook.  I […]

I’m broke. My restaurant went belly-up two months ago. My arthritis is giving me fits.  I have a chest cold. My older dog, Moses, has been dead for three days.  I’m an unemployed, achy,  snot-clogged, one-dog chef in his late fifties.   It is a wonderful day to bake a pie.   Actually, baking a pie […]