Leah Eskin

Calendar once meant a grid, on paper. I scrawled tasks into its boxes, producing a craze of arrows and exclamation points and scratch-outs. Thoroughly informative. Now I live wireless, penless,...

Bombs explode, tearing things apart. Good things — like people, like Paris, like peace. Conventions crumple. Good conventions — like dialogue, disagreement, diplomacy. Bonds fray into fear. We fear for...

Lemon adds a good squeeze of sunshine. Tart, tangy and brilliant yellow, it's the antidote to darkest December. Except at your local coffee shop, where it's banned. Tea? Sure. Lemon?...

Gravlax means grave salmon. Not grave as in serious, grave as in hole. Once, the Scandinavian fisherman buried fresh salmon in sand, letting salt and time cure it. Much like...

Vanilla suffers typecasting as ordinary. In software, it's vanilla versus custom. In finance, it's vanilla versus exotic. In the bedroom, it's vanilla versus kinky. But vanilla hardly counts as plain....

The polar bear is no picky eater. He goes for seal, raw. Lacking seal, he will settle for whatever's handy, even kelp. It's hard to believe a string of seaweed...

The universe is expanding. That's what Matt said, over cocktails. Any given point could be the center. Here I lost my grip on the concept, if not the cocktail. Matt...

Milk turns to yogurt, yogurt turns to labneh. It's the way of bacteria. As cow or goat or sheep's milk thickens from fresh to fermented, it gets creamier, tangier and...

Burrata is like that friend-of-a-friend you're always running into. Suddenly everywhere. When did the soft cheese show up? How does everyone seem to know it? You squint, remembering cheeses past....