Autumn won't officially end until December, but now that the clocks have turned back an hour and snow is in the forecast, it seems winter is upon us.  I have no regrets about the way I sent off the season though.  The last week has been a good one.

Last Sunday, six of us drove north to Farmington to spend the day riding roller coasters at Lagoon.  ( Read more... )

Rather than indulging in a long explanation/apology about the 3-month gap between posts,I'm going to get right down to business.

My knowledge of Venezuela comes from years of listening to NPR, so I know that it's an urban, oil-rich country with a leader who doesn't get along too well with the current U.S. administration. Looking at a map, I see ( Read more... )

Best Chicken & Ribs sits just off State Street on 2700 South, on the north side behind a donut shop.  It's a small, informal restaurant where vinyl booths and formica tables surround a huge rotisserie in the middle of the room.


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Given the pretentious title of his blog, I would be remiss if i didn't mention an article from the june 30th issue of The New Yorker, titled "The Itch."  It begins with a horrifying anecdote about an insatiable itch that causes a woman to do nightmarish things to herself, then discusses phantom limb syndrome before launching  into a discussion ( Read more... )

Contemplating the sign on the side of the El Jaripeo taco stand where I ate sopes last week, I realized that the address references not the stand itself, but a restaurant around the corner on 3500 South.  Assuming I knew the neighborhood pretty well, I thought there was nothing there, but when I bicycled over on Monday, I found the sit-down El ( Read more... )

The first taco stands I patronized  were the ones around Sears on 800 South State Street, close to downtown.  The tacos I ate at those stands changed my thinking about Mexican food, and about eating out in Salt Lake.  Here was genuine street food, in a city that had had none before.  Competition between stands kept prices low (usually 2 tacos for 1 ( Read more... )

I love being a father, but my new family life has, of necessity, reduced the time I spend with my friends.  It had been two or three weeks since I had hung out with Scott, quite a change from the days when we were nearly full-time shooting pool at Brewvies and eating late-night burritos at Beto's.  After nearly nearly seven years, our friendship ( Read more... )

I was talking to my youngest sister (who blogs at Food for Thought) about the way the universe repays our bad behavior.  She told me how, as punishment for driving the short distance to the train station instead of walking or biking, she misplaced her car in the station’s parking lot, not finding it until after she had reported it stolen to the ( Read more... )

As the spring turns to summer, I find  that my thoughts are dominated by food and bicycling instead of food and reading.  These days, I don't go through the weekly issue of The New Yorker cover to cover, and have been reading Ross Macdonald instead of John Updike.  And I'm loving the bikes.  Whether it's riding to work, mountain biking on the ( Read more... )

This week I noticed two new taco carts on 3500 South at 1600 west (on the north side, in front of a car audio store) I've been in a rut with Mexican food lately, eating it infrequently, and not finding much new, so I am excited to to have some new choices so close to work.

The cart I visited today is a little hard to identify. It looks well- ( Read more... )