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SWFL Chef Harold Balink Talks Holiday Cooking

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The holidays loom large on the not-so-distant horizon, and that means people will be assembling grocery lists for the weeks ahead.

There are extremes in the holiday entertaining world: there’s the Martha Stewart-esque perfection with all things from scratch, and then, there’s the person just hoping not to poison anyone with whatever lands on the table.

Either way, we all begin with hopes that our feast will at least comfort our guests, even if it doesn’t dazzle, and that’s why we’re talking today with Chef Harold Balink of Harold’s Restaurant in Fort Myers. He’s been in the restaurant industry here in Southwest Florida for some time, and he’s the chef who somehow manages to meld the dazzling with the comforting in his dishes, something few are able to achieve.

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.