Ham Sandwich Indicted!

Cleveland is home to a great many awesome things.  Lake Erie. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Great Lakes Brewery's Christmas Ale.  A bunch of fabulous restaurants (Greenhouse Tavern, anything by Michael Symon). The Flats. (Eh, maybe not so much that last one...it's not 1995.).  It's also the hometown of Michael Ruhlman, writer, chef, and general food-lover. Maybe you've heard of Ruhlman because you watch No Reservations with chef/global traveler Anthony Bourdain...they're friends, and Bourdain frequently mentions Ruhlman on his show. Maybe you've seen him as a judge on Iron Chef, or maybe you've actually read a couple of his books. Ruhlman started out writing non-fiction books on a variety of topics ( all-boys high schools , wooden boat building ) but began spending more of his time focusing on food after he did a stint at the Culinary Institute of America, then wrote about it in The Making of a Chef . Fourteen years and several more food-related books...

Every Sunday evening, I get together with my sister and brother-in-law for dinner and some HBO viewing at what they've deemed "Sunday Night Wind Down."  They've been hosting the Wind Down almost every week for the last several years, as they've moved from New York to Philadelphia to Columbus.  It's an ideal way to start the week/end the weekend, especially since my bro-in-law also loves to cook and we work rather well together in the kitchen. The soundtrack for our kitchen work varies from "This American Life" episodes to '90s  hip-hop to obscure indie bands, depending on who is DJing. Wine and microbrews flow, several hunks of cheese get eaten while we're cooking, and we'll then troop into the living room to eat and catch up on the lives of the Stackhouses, Atlantic City gangsters, or the Starks of Winterfell. Because the sibs and I both have CSA shares, we've got a lot of vegetables at our disposal, and it can be a challenge to ...