Alice Waters speaks with the cadence of a poet. She talks of food the way one might of a treasured companion, with warm reverence. And while she is most associated with California, her formative experiences happened here, in Chatham, NJ. Alice Louise Waters was born in April 1944, the daughter of a stay-at-home mom with a love for gardening and brown grains and a father who worked for Prudential and who adored jazz and coconut cake. “I grew up at […]

Categories: food & drink

The beauty of home cooking lies in its ability to be delicious, unpretentious and—dare we say—triumphant, all at the same time. That’s the conviction explored by beloved food blogger and Jersey native Deb Perelman, with her trademark wit, in her second cookbook: Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant & Unfussy New Favorites (Knopf, 2017). It’s a mission she has brought to millions of Smitten Kitchen blog readers since 2006, an unheard-of run in the fickle turbulence of the internet. There’s a reason […]

Categories: food & drink

One tends to think France-by-way-of-California when considering Alice Waters and her prix-fixe Berkeley temple, Chez Panisse. Yet the mother of American farm-to-table cooking spent her grade school years in Chatham. In her memoir; Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook [Clarkson Potter; 2017, with Cristina Mueller and Bob Carrau], Waters traces the unconventional path to her now-legendary restaurant’s 1971 opening. Spoiler alert: It begins in the Garden State. This may surprise those unfamiliar with our bounty. To […]

Categories: food & drink