FOOD

In this week's installment of Food for Thought, Nancy Leson and I explore the delights of dunking with not a donut or basketball in sight. Instead, we break out the dunkage on cookies, whiskey, sandwiches, saltines and soup.

"The nicest thing happened last Thursday," I told Nancy Leson . It was Broadway Farmers Market day, happening right outside the door of our new Tacoma studios. And what a nice surprise a market shopper gave to me that morning.

Just back from Philly , Nancy Leson says that easterners are more likely to chat up people they don't know, especially in restaurants and in supermarkets. "Strangers just come up to you and talk. Or I come up to strangers and talk. About anything. About what you're ordering, how to make it." Nance says this happens all the time back east but not so much in Seattle. Does she think this is the much bemoaned Seattle Freeze?

"What was I thinking?" The question's not just for past relationships. In this week's Food for Thought, Nancy Leson and I share tales of some of the questionable gizmos we've bought over the years.

I'm a guy who appreciates the virtues, however imaginary, of the quick fix. And what could be more emblematic of the QF than duct tape? Surely there's something analogous in cooking. When I asked Nancy Leson what she thought that might be, she posed the question on her Facebook page.

Back by popular demand: Nancy's favorite easiest pasta sauce from 2016 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

“It’s so much like the days of yore, when the marketplace was a place for people to meet and greet.” That’s how food commentator Nancy Leson described Tacoma’s Broadway farmers market , after she’d spent a couple hours there with KNKX’s Dick Stein on a recent Thursday morning. It’s one of four around the city.

This segment originally aired June 21, 2017. "My kid finally got a real, paying job," Nancy Leson announced. Young Nate's now a B.C. barista. Which led us to reminisce about our first food service jobs. Nancy's was at the Chalfonte , a venerable Cape May, N.J. hotel. My first food service job nearly earned me a deep-fried head.

As a guy who excludes fruit from his diet, I have no business pointing a finger at anyone else's food phobias. But I will, anyway. How can my wife, the Lovely & Talented Cheryl DeGroot, a generally omnivorous woman, hate grits? And she'll have nothing to do with Pisum sativum , either, no matter how I beg her to give peas a chance. Nancy Leson's husband Mac won't eat the cheeses she finds so pleasing. This week, Nance and I commiserate on our spouses' food phobias and offer recipes for stuff

Those colorful bean seeds I traded our cow for worked only too well. No vine to the sky, but plenty of green beans here on the ground. So many that we're having trouble keeping up. One day the thought came to me: Green bean spaghetti. Could there be a recipe for such a thing? In .47 seconds I discovered 14,100,000 of them.