Bonny Wolf
NPR commentator Bonny Wolf grew up in Minnesota and has worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in New Jersey and Texas. She taught journalism at Texas A&M University where she encouraged her student, Lyle Lovett, to give up music and get a real job. Wolf gives better advice about cooking and eating, and contributes her monthly food essay to NPR's award-winning Weekend Edition Sunday. She is also a contributing editor to "Kitchen Window," NPR's Web-only, weekly food column.
Wolf 's commentaries are not just about what people eat, but why: for comfort, nurturance, and companionship; to mark the seasons and to celebrate important events; to connect with family and friends and with ancestors they never knew; and, of course, for love. In a Valentine's Day essay, for example, Wolf writes that nearly every food from artichoke to zucchini has been considered an aphrodisiac.
Wolf, whose Web site is www.bonnywolf.com, has been a newspaper food editor and writer, restaurant critic, and food newsletter publisher, and served as chief speechwriter to Secretaries of Agriculture Mike Espy and Dan Glickman.
Bonny Wolf's book of food essays, Talking with My Mouth Full, will be published in November by St. Martin's Press. She lives, writes, eats and cooks in Washington, D.C.
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Jews commemorate Hanukkah by eating fried foods. For most American Jews, that means latkes — potato pancakes fried in oil. But other cultures use different foods.
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Evening markets are a common sight throughout Asia, where delicious aromas regularly beckon hungry shoppers. Now night markets are popping up here in cities across the U.S.
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In the new year we'll be eating pot pesto, pork fat and pancit along with the newborn progeny of Brussels sprouts and kale.
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The milkman has been out of style for decades, but all over the country, trucks have started delivering fresh milk, organic vegetables and even humanely raised chickens to your door.
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Say so long to chia seeds and cronuts — so 2013 — and get ready to welcome freekeh, an ancient, fiber-rich grain. Eating local goes into overdrive, and cauliflower is poised to become the new Brussels sprout.
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It's delicious, it's nutritious and it's basically rotten. Fermentation is the hot culinary trend, and as Weekend Edition food commentator Bonny Wolf explains, the preservation process gives food a flavor unique to time and place.
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Lots of creepy crawly things will appear on doorsteps and fence posts for Halloween, but will they be on your dinner plate? Insects are being proposed as a cheap and environmentally friendly food source. Long accepted around the world, eating bugs is considered, well, gross to many in North America and Europe.
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During the harvest season, farms across the country are inviting their neighbors to an elegant multicourse meal with the farmers at the food's source.
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Americans are undergoing an awakening when it comes to fava beans, with their buttery texture and slightly bitter, lovely nutty flavor. And after a long, dark winter, what could be more spring-like than their fresh green color?
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Most people are familiar with latkes, the potato pancakes that are the Hanukkah staple among American Jews. Bonny Wolf explores a wide world of other Jewish dishes that celebrate a tiny vial of oil that burned for eight days.