Ann Lemons Pollack

  • Just a Local Quirk? Not!

    Fish fries in Lent? Of course. They've even spread to areas outside St. Louis that have proportionately fewer Catholics than the metropolitan area. But are they just a St. Louis thing? Well, no. Just liike the question, "Where did you go to high school?", they pop up in New Orleans as well. And probably other places,

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  • A New Feta Dip

    Five years ago or so I wrote about a feta dip – sour cream, feta cjeese, and green onions. This one is better, I think, despite the fact that I went against my own habit and used some leftover feta in the fridge that was not the wonderful Bulgarian stuff, just the remnants of what

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  • Grace Meat + Three

    Hie thyself to Rick Lewis' Grace Meat + Three. Rick Lewis is doing great stuff. It's my current review in St. Louis Magazine.  And a near-shouting endorsement of those chicken livers, the sort of dish that makes people say, "I thought I didn't like them, but this is great!"

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  • Ermas

    A couple of weeks ago, I offered a recipe for cookies called hermits here.And as I talked about in the recipe, I went ahead and tinkered with it. This version is named for my friend Mary's mother, who did a cookie with mincemeat in it. The result is more moist than the hermits, and a more

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  • Infected

    Infected would be a great show if it had a better script. The new offering at Upstream Theatre is by Albert Ostermaier, an award-winning German playwright who taught a semester at Washington University a few years ago. Upstream’s artistic director Phillip Boehm did the translation. It’s a one-man show with Alan Knoll as the unnamed

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  • Blackbird

    Fasten your seatbelts. St. Louis Actors’ Studio’s current staging of Blackbird is a jolting ride. This year it’s pretty much impossible to view a play about child abuse  without thinking about Larry Nassar and the young women he attacked. In Blackbird, we have a middle-aged man unexpectedly coming face to face with a young woman

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  • The Humans

    The parts are not greater than the whole. Or at least they don’t offset it. That’s the bottom line on The Humans, the newest offering from Repertory Theatre of St. Louis’ main stage. I’m clearly in the minority here; the play won multiple Tonys and other awards in 2016. It’s about a family as they

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  • Red Scare on Sunset

    It is a strange time indeed to be seeing Red Scare on Sunset. Stray Dog Theatre chose it as part of their fifteenth season, which means the decision was made about a year ago. But even compared to that period of time, things have become more…well, pick your own adjective here. Red Scare talks about

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  • Hermits

    If one Googles “food that tastes better the next day”, there’s a veritable encyclopedia of stories on that subject.. As respected an authority as J. Kenji Lopez-Alt says it pretty much isn’t so except for things with high acidity whose tanginess is lessened. I’ve been reading Kenji for more than a decade, and I respect

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  • An Update

    You may have noticed there's been less action – quite a bit less action – around here recently. There are two things going on. More of my food writing is going into St. Louis Magazine, both online and in print, for one thing.  And for another, I'm writing a book. I was approached by a

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