So Eric spent the better part of last week in Columbus Ohio at a show and Charisse insisted that he bring her home some sort of present. After tooling around Columbus on his way back to the hotel, Eric ran into North Market, an indoor farmers market type place chock full of good food and wonderful surprises, namely North Market Spices, a small spice shop that somehow cost us 150 bucks in “presents”. We think you’ll agree that the price was worth the spices we ended up with. Powdered Wasabi, Mace Blades and Powdered Hibiscus just to point out a few. Eric even brought home a book “Herbs & Spices” which is all about… you guessed it, herbs and spices. Reading it on the plane, the smell of all those spices emanated from the pages and pushed Eric to will the plane to go faster so we could hit the

Last month Eric's parents went on vacation, right around the time their fruit trees ripened. They left about a day or two before the first fruits came into their own. Actually, this happens every year, why vacations in this family have always happened around the time the fruit ripens we'll never know, but you can plan a harvest by his parents vacation calender. This year they went chasing an eclipse in the South Pacific, (something Eric's dad Pat has always dreamed of seeing with his own eyes and finally saw one this time, after getting rained on twice before) and we raided the back yard with buckets and fruit pickers. Later, when we were hearing all about the trip Pat mentioned that it was really peculiar that all the fruit was gone. We told them that it was delicious. Charisse ate some straight up, we tossed some into this dish

It was about a month ago that Eric got home to find a backhoe digging a big hole in his front yard and our friends Dan and Jenn came to the rescue, inviting us over for dinner. Dan was going to fire up the grill and cook... something, but he wasn't sure what. Eric on the other hand had a great rub ready to go and really wanted to try out making some flavored butters. It was a match made in perfection. Eric brought the rub and the butter and Charisse and Jen handled the rest.Using a fancy butter on a well seasoned steak is almost always going to be fantastic. The butter melts along the steak as you eat it, almost as an after thought to the flavors in the steak and the rub. The rub gives the steak a kick going down but doesn't hide the natural beef