Krik's Picks

After a visit to the Minneapolis Farmers Market , I came home intent on making gazpacho. Not just any gazpacho, however. I remembered making an amazing recipe for a dinner party … a few years ago. I couldn’t remember what year it was. But I was very sure the recipe was from Bon Appetit magazine. I remembered a couple of very distinctive things about the recipe. There was no bread to thicken the gazpacho. I remember pureeing the vegetables and then pressing them through a sieve, so that there was no pulp in the soup. But the most distinctive part was a ‘tower’ of crab salad, molded and placed in the center of the bowl with the gazpacho spooned around it. No problem, I thought. I’m sure I’ll find the recipe on Epicurious . Nope. Well, I thought, maybe it’s on the Bon Appetit web site. Nope. Now I was starting to doubt my recollection. I tried a general Google search. Lots of gazpacho recipes, but none with a tower of crab salad. I pretty much gave up on finding the recipe. I became ...

My wife and I have a couple of friends with whom we enjoy trying new restaurants. Not always brand new, mind you. But if none of us have eaten there before, we still say it’s ‘new.’ In the case of our most recent dinner, Heyday , it really is fairly new. It opened in April 2014. We actually tried to go sooner. But surprisingly, one thing after another kept popping up. So it wasn’t until mid-August when we finally went. We had a very good experience. We had a reservation, and it was fairly early – 6 p.m. When we arrived, the restaurant was not very busy. We got a friendly greeting from the host and joined our friends who were already seated. Our server popped by after we were seated and had a chance to peruse the menus. Heyday has a good selection of wine by the glass. I was tempted by a Lambrusco, which you don’t see too often on menus in the U.S., but reminded me of our trip last spring to Italy and Emilio-Romagna. But ultimately I went with a chianti. (Another Italy reminder. It ...