Holidays are a good time to expand your news tastes
Food, glorious food.
Of course, it is a subject of interest any time of year, but is there any time when it is more enticing than the year-end holidays? Is there any time when it is more appropriate to step back a pace and remember that the newspaper offers so much more than the news?
Or to remember that some subjects defy politicization? The Food Section is at least one area where a Washington Post byline offers no succor to those stalwarts engaged in the determined crusade to prove the mainstream media as a bastion of liberalism. It offers not only a respite from the angst, sturm and drang of sensational events but also a chance to learn new and interesting things you don’t have to be a chef to appreciate.
Like, as you would have found in Wednesday’s paper, that a buckle can both hold up your pants and offer a nice breakfast treat or after-dinner desert. Or that most products demonstrating our contemporary craving for pumpkin-spiced everything are “all spice-based smoke and mirrors,” containing no actual pumpkin. Or that people in the Caribbeans, not exactly identified with a love of squash, have been using pumpkin in drinks for generations. Or that no pot of hot water is involved in making an onion boil, which is actually a baked item.
You may think that, aside from certain regional details, a Food Section here will have no more local, personal appeal than a Food Section there, that a collection of recipes in the Chicago suburbs is little different from one in Los Angeles, New York or, for that matter, Omaha, Nebraska. But if you do, you did not notice that good food and drink recipes in your Daily Herald also come from friends, neighbors and local businesses, showing they are not exotic fancies but practical ideas for any reader.
Like Wednesday’s column on soup-sourced stress relief, by M. Eileen Brown, a Daily Herald vice president. Or the description of a one-pot apple cobbler by Chef Grace Goudie, whose dishes can be found at Scratchboard Kitchen in Arlington Heights.
With a late-year Thanksgiving now behind us, we plunge headlong into a mélange of seasonal drinks and dishes, as well as ideas that can ignite your imagination at any time of year. Every week’s Food Section, far from being a way station for kitchen nerds, offers options for breaking away from what can become a humdrum rotation of familiar table fare as well as just plain interesting reading.
As Oliver Twist and his musical chums sang, “food, glorious food, marvelous food, fabulous food, beautiful food!”
If you aren’t already a regular auditor of the topic’s many adjectives, take a swing by the Food Section on Wednesdays. You’ll find a nice break from the news as well as unexpected ways to just plain brighten your day.
• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His new book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.