FOOD

Cochinita Pibil, the Yucatan-style roast pork is smoked and slow roasted in banana leaves. My mistake was trying to smoke it in a gas grill. After 30 minutes over max heat my little disposable aluminum tray of wood chips was barely scorched, let alone smoking.

"I do like to have a nice summer quaff," says Nancy Leson. My Food for Thought pard goes on to explain that "At our house, what we drink in the summertime is really different than what we drink in the winter." What's that? Read on, dear reader, if you would know.

Okay, maybe not "profit," exactly; but not all that "hard," either. Plus, you could save a few bucks. Recently, KPLU Promo Queen Brenda Goldstein-Young, chatting with me on a non-food related topic, asserted, "I live in hope." "Hope!" I scoffed. "The only thing left in Pandora's box after she released all those evils into the world" I added, "Who but the Greeks could've come up with that one?" Brenda said, "Yeah, but they sure make great yogurt." Now so can you.

Nancy Leson was so excited! "I just came back from Goodwill with the definitive Chinese Cookbook!" I recognized the title immediately. I've been using that one since it hit the shelves in the '70s.

Recently, DeGroot and I shared a root beer float made with Tacoma's Ice Cream Social vanilla at the Crown Bar, right down the street. We reflected on how simple and perfect a concoction that is. It got me thinking that some of the very best food preparations are the simplest. When I mentioned this to Nancy Leson, she was quick to weigh in with some of her favorite simple preparations.

Kitchen queen Nancy Leson claims that size does matter. She thinks my tried and true sheetpan, pictured above, is (sob)... inadequate. Sheetpan snobbery, I calls it. She'd never even have known had it not been for...

It's kind of a grab bag on this week's Food for Thought. Among other things, Nancy Leson and I chat about leek scapes. She loved the store-bought ones she grilled the other day. I (cough, cough) grow my own, but intend to follow her example very soon. We also discuss a time-saving tweak to that homemade pastrami recipe seen here a while back. And we do some general grousing about how all the used-to-be cheap cuts of meat are now pricier than a slushy in hell.

There's nothing I like better than spending a whole day or two working a complicated recipe. I'm a little nuts that way. But just as games with the simplest rules often have the most depth, sometimes the simplest recipes yield the the most flavor. Nancy Leson's candidate comes from cookbook author Marcella Hazan. Nance says it's "reputedly the world's simplest, most delicious sauce. I really could not get over the complexity of flavor out of just three ingredients."

Call me quotidian, but one my favorite sandwiches is just a plain old ham and cheese. I used to prefer thinly sliced ham, but now I want it thick. That's because my H&C is both hot and cold at the same time.

Though its population, at a mere three million or so is relatively small, the language of Wales uses up as much as 80 percent of the world's supply of consonants. The Welsh national symbol is the leek. Fortunately they’ve left plenty of those for the rest of us. On this week’s Food for Thought learn how to grow new leeks from old.