Metro Connection

It might be hard to pin down the quintessential "D.C. dish," but award-winning chef Scott Drewno of The Source has his own ideas on cooking "distinctively D.C." cuisine. Rebecca Sheir visits The Source's kitchen to dish with Scott about the D.C. food scene, and to cook up an entree that combines local ingredients with the District's international flair.

[Music: "Maximum Consumption" by The Kinks from Everybody's in Showbiz]

Gusty's... Danny's Bakery... Paul Young's... Little Taverns. For longtime Washingtonians, these names conjure up D.C. food memories of yore. Rebecca Sheir visits a standby that's been around more than half a century, Silver Spring's Blair Mansion Restaurant, where she walks down memory lane with Sheilah Kaufman of the Culinary Historians of Washington, D.C., and Ramon Zeender, whose family runs Blair Mansion.

[Music: "Dinner Bell" by They Might Be Giants from Apollo 18]

For all D.C.'s farmer's markets and groceries, you'll still find quite a few "food deserts" in the midst. A local nonprofit is trying to bring farmer's markets to communities that need them most by converting an old school bus in to a vegetable-oil-run, movable market. Reporter Marc Adams hopped aboard to find out more...

[Music: "Caravan" by Rachel Portman from Chocolat: Music From the Miramax Motion Picture]

If you could pour the nation's capital into a glass, what would it taste like? Rebecca Sheir seeks answers to that pressing question with mixologist Adam Bernbach, who concocts a Berbere-grappa cocktail that represents some colorful aspects of life in Washington.

[Music: "Punk Covers - Cheers Theme" by Less Than Jake from Covers]

Washington, D.C. has one of the nation's highest HIV rates, and many of the newly infected are people using dirty needles to inject drugs. A small number of local nonprofits provide clean needles to drug users, but the main provider, PreventionWorks, closed earlier this year. And now another program is picking up the overflow. Rebecca Sheir pays a visit to HIPS (Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive), which doesn't just provide clean needles for drug users, but for transgendered people who...

Queer theory challenges all sorts of things, especially our ideas about our "natural" identities. American University literature professor Madhavi Menon takes this outside-the-box thinking and applies it to William Shakespeare in her new book, Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Rebecca Sheir talks with Menon about how she feels Shakespeare can be "queered," and how, in turn, queer theory can be "Shaken."

[Music: "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" by...