"What’s for dinner?" could be the most-asked question around. "I don’t know yet" is the standard answer — and it’s the one I got at around 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning when I called Citizen Cider to ask what the  $10 special was for the weekly Supper Club.

The nonanswer, though a bit surprising from a restaurant, was nonetheless familiar. Who knows what’s for dinner until about half an hour before you start making it?

The Citizen Cider employee suggested I call back at 4 p.m. to see what the night cooks had in mind. But by then, close to meal time, I'd have missed the opportunity to enjoy hours of anticipation. Even so, I figured I’d  show up and try my luck. It’s an approach I recommend.

There were two $10 options on Tuesday evening: wild mushroom tacos and chop chop salad.  Because I was eating with three college students, I decided I’d get one of each, keep the tacos for myself and share the salad.

I also decided to cheat and spend more than my allotted $12, the amount permitted by “Dining on a Dime.” For an extra four dollars, or $14 total, I added a glass of cider to my meal. The offering that night was Barrel Aged Stan, a dry cider aged in a bourbon barrel. It paired well with a sultry dusk on Pine Street.

The three tacos, brimming with ingredients, were grounded by earthy and meaty mushrooms. Wilted kale, beans, chopped onion and tomatoes, and sprinkles of cheese filled out the soft shells.  These yummy ingredients were enough to fill me up,  but I made room for some chop chop salad — an abundant mélange of greens tossed in maple vinaigrette and piled high with chicken, goat cheese, tomatoes, crispy capicola, apples, carrots and red onion.  Ten dollars. Wow.

My dining companions ate tacos, a cheeseburger and fries, and chicken wings and Brussels sprouts — and they delighted in our shared salad.  At meal's end, they noted with awe that our server, Derek, cleared ten plates from our table in one swoop.  He balanced eight plates on his tattooed forearm, put two more in his other hand, and, just like that, evidence of our feast disappeared.

We headed to the waterfront and Burlington Bay for the year's most bittersweet eating event: a back-to-school creemee.

Not long ago, it was considered impolite to let out a cough during a classical music concert. Now audience members can clink their glasses and cheer.

That is, if they’re listening to a Vermont Symphony Orchestra string quartet perform at ArtsRiot in Burlington, site of a musical series called Jukebox. The collaboration of the symphony and the bar kicks off its third season this Saturday night, September 1, at the Pine Street club.

A baffling cross-border bagel mystery turns out to have a simple answer.

Food website Eater Montreal posted a story Thursday with the headline, “A Vermont Bakery Mysteriously Has the Same Logo as St-Viateur Bagel.” St-Viateur Bagel is a famous Montréal shop, opened in 1957 and still running 24 hours a day on Rue Saint Viateur O. The Vermont bakery in question is Myer’s Bagels, the Montréal-style bagel shop that first opened on Burlington’s Pine Street in 1996.

The headline brings up a good point: The two bagel logos do appear to be close to exactly the same. But the rest of the speculative story is filled with holes.

The easy-to-obtain answer involves Lloyd Squires. The Montréal native spent years learning the art of bagel making from Myer Lewkowicz, the St-Viateur founder. When Lewkowicz died, Squires moved to Burlington and opened a shop he named in his mentor’s honor, said Adam Jones, one of Myer’s owners.

Mike Winters has been an art teacher, a divorce lawyer, a juice-maker and a vegetable farmer. The latter two gigs are joined via Winters’ business,
Juice for the People, in which he makes juice using vegetables and herbs that he grows at a farm at the Intervale in Burlington.

Now Winters is ready to move on again. He is closing his juice business, which operates as a concession at City Market/Onion River Co-op in Burlington’s South End, on Friday, August 24.

In my house, pizza happens at least once a week, sometimes more. Lately, I've been into making sourdough bread (it's quite the rabbit hole, as any home baker can attest), and I make enough bread dough for a big loaf of bread plus two or three pizza crusts. If I'm out of the baking habit, I just buy raw pizza dough — Hannaford carries a decent option from Maine's Portland Pie Co., Red Hen Baking offers par-baked crusts at several retail outlets statewide, and there are others, too. Check the fresh pasta section or the freezer section.

And, yes, I use a cookie sheet as a pizza pan because I've not gotten around to buying a pizza stone or a proper round pan. It's still delicious,  thank you very much.

The home opener of the Middlebury College football team is six weeks away. It’s time to start pre-gaming for Panthers football.

No, I don’t mean drinking beer in the back of  your car or grilling sausage at the stadium parking lot. I’m talking about an anticipatory trip to  Otter Creek Bakery, a lunchtime oasis not far from the college football field. The café’s Otter Creek sub ($9.50) — akin to an Italian hoagie — and chocolate chip/walnut/orange cookie ($2.50) together form a top-notch, filling meal.

Eating the sub on a fall Saturday in the bleachers of  Youngman Field, where the Panthers play, is a sublime event. The games are free, the stands face east to the mountains and the sandwich fits snugly in your lap. If the action unfolding on the field in home-team blue doesn’t grab you, look up and out at the golds and reds of the autumn hills.

When it’s not football season — and that’s about 10 months of the year — I seek out reasons to go to Middlebury and environs so I can stop at the bakery for its eponymous sandwich.  A recent walk on the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail in Ripton presented such an opportunity.

The Otter Creek sub is the best version of an Italian hoagie I've come across in northern/central/western Vermont. And I'd been on the prowl for this classic sandwich since I moved to Burlington from Philadelphia, home of the hoagie, almost 30 years ago.

The key is the long Italian roll the sub comes on (called French bread on the restaurant’s menu board). The bread is soft enough to absorb the sub’s juicy zing — a merging of herbed Italian oil, diced hot peppers and slivered pickles — but firm enough to hold the sandwich together. Who wants a hoagie filled with smoked turkey, salami, ham, provolone, onion, lettuce and tomato that will fall apart in the bleachers?

Otter Creek Bakery was founded by married couple Ben and Sarah Wood 32 years ago. For 30 of those years, it’s been in a little storefront at 14 College Street, where the deli case displays housemade pâtés, salads and cheeses, and sweets including cookies, cakes, tarts and pastries.

The business is now  for sale. I hope the new owners, whoever they may be, will learn from the Woods how to bake chocolate chip cookies with a sliver of orange, and how to stack a sub to satisfy a football fan from Philly.

My daughter, though she will pass on the football games, inherited my fondness for Otter Creek subs.  In fact, she’s turned into an even more passionate devotee.

“What do you like about Otter Creek subs?” I asked her before writing this piece. “I won’t quote you.”

“Everything,” she answered.

I changed my mind and quoted her.

Dining on a Dime is a weekly series featuring well-made, filling bites (something substantial enough to qualify as a small meal or better) for $12 or less. Know of a tasty dish we should feature? Drop us a line: food@sevendaysvt.com.

The applesauce and vinegar maker Vermont Village laid off about a dozen of its 50 employees this week and late last week, blaming a sales slump.

The Barre company got its start making small batch applesauce and jumped into the growing market for apple cider vinegar drinks a few years ago. It's overall sales had surged.

But over the last few months, orders slumped and the company decided to lay off about a dozen employees, according to Andrew Lawrence, brand manager. Employees work staggered shifts. The first were notified late last week and the last were notified Tuesday.

“Operations basically had exceeded what we could support with sales,"  Lawrence said Tuesday. "We are trying to get back to that level where we are cash-flow positive.’’

Barnard's Fable Farm Fermentory has no shortage of events: Thursday nights' Feast & Field Market, and plentiful farm dinners, food-forward tasting events and arts programming, too .

But for a company that makes wine production its main business, wine tastings have heretofore been spotty at best. That'll change this week when brothers Christopher and Jon Piana begin opening their winery for regular Friday afternoon tasting room hours.

From 3:30 to 6:30 p.m., $20 will buy visitors petite pours of eight naturally fermented apple, grape and honey wines, plus snacks including nuts, olives and local organic cheeses.