Stuff about books or articles I’ve read, shows or movies I’ve watched – usually food or wine related, but not always.
[Spoiler Alert – don’t read if you plan to watch the show and don’t want to know what happens in advance.] Not surprisingly, the Top Chef empire continues to expand as “reality” tv encroaches on more and more parts of the globe. The newest offering comes to us from Spain. I haven’t really commented on… Read More Spain’s Top Chef – Episode 1
Great book by an author who I already liked – Anya Von Bremzen’s Please to the Table is a fantastic resource for the various cuisines of the former Soviet Union. I was surprised that there was little cooking in this new volume, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. While there’s a fair amount about food,… Read More Growing Up Russian
I get a lot of requests from PR folk to review or promote products, books, etc., and generally, unless they’re directly related to the blog, I ignore them. Plus, I’ve found that an amazing number of them want me to do so without ever having tried the product or read the book. Now and again… Read More Red Border Tales
I’ve gotten away from posting about various food books that I’ve read, and someone asked me this week if there was anything I’d read recently in the genre that I recommended. So, I thought, let me get back to that – I’ve been reviewing what I read over on Goodreads (yet one more social network… Read More On Fermentation and Carrot Pudding
I don’t often post twice in one day, generally I only post 2-3 times a week, but since this afternoon the final approval copy of my new book arrived via Fedex and after flipping through it I confirmed with the publisher that it’s ready to go to print, I can’t, obviously, resist posting a second… Read More Proofed and Ready to Print
It’s an ever changing thing to answer the question, “What’s your favorite… X?” It’s also probably the most common question I get asked both by e-mail and in person by guests at Casa S. Recently, luxury travel magazine The Address asked me the same and gave me a whole bunch of pages to answer the… Read More My Top in BA. For the Moment.
Not that the Mayans ever predicted the end of the world this last month, having only laid out the end of one in a series of “long cycles” of the calendar (amazing what people will reinterpret for their apocalyptic fantasies), but given that I’m writing this and you’re reading it, the long awaited and much… Read More 2012 Gone, Without an Apocalypse
“The moment you say, ‘Please, give me a reason for this’, then you are being impossible and temperamental.” – Monserrat Caballé To see a place and a people through someone else’s eyes is often what photography is all about. You go to a gallery and stare at a picture and think, “I wish I could… Read More View Finder