I love England. A lot.

I love the grayish patina that backdrops nearly everything in London, and the dusty green East Anglia farmland, and even the rough brown edges of the Midlands. I haven't been back to England in a very long time --- actually, an inexcusably long time ---...

She made pots of Hungarian goulash and piles of latkes; she broiled a virtual river of fish and roasted a hatchery of chicken. For the eighteen years that she was in my life, my grandmother stood in our tiny galley kitchen in Queens and cooked for me, for my mother,...

My people are from Brooklyn, going way back. Way, way back. My father, actually born in the Bronx on his mother's kitchen table, lived on Dahill Road off Ocean Parkway, before moving in 1934 to Avenue T with my aunt and grandparents to a building directly across the street from...

No, no --- not that one.

I'm talking about the other one. You know: it's the one that's showing up everywhere today in the food world. The word itself conjures up images of dusty farm boots and tractors, piles of lush vegetables and happy, grass-fed animals frolicking in emerald...

It never ceases to amaze me: just when I think we're actually starting to turn the corner where humanity is concerned, we about-face and start dragging our metaphysical knuckles again, and the God-given right to raging ignorance...

I've always been an exceptionally honest person, so when I flew home yesterday from a week sampling the most astonishingly fresh, utterly delicious Prosciutto di Parma in Parma, Italy, I knew that there was the possibility that the hunk of culatello I...

Small business owners, take note: If you've ever sent out a blind email blitz announcing something--a new service, a special event--and have been on the receiving end of notes from infuriated recipients who believe that they've received your email by mistake and feel that their privacy has been violated, it...

I didn't make it to the 2010 IACP Conference this year, although I really did want to go. For one thing, the International Association of Culinary Professionals was holding their annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, a city I've never visited. On the other hand, I wanted to attend...

The food writing world is a strange amalgam of civility and arrogance, conviviality and snark, anger, pomposity, delusion, and fear; I've always said that no other line of work involving the act of providing sustenance is also so peculiarly mired in attitude. This first became clear to me almost ten...

It snowed.

It snowed like I've never seen it snow before--enormous, dry, high desert flakes that blanketed the ground, shut down western highways, stranded motorists and truckers, and brought west Texas and the eastern part of New Mexico to a screeching halt.

But the weather didn't prevent dozens of journalists,...

Imagine this:

You wake up on a beautiful sunny morning. It's a lovely, temperate day. The deer are in the yard under the apple tree, munching happily on fallen fruit, leaving your roses and unfenced organic garden alone. You turn on the radio and listen as you get dressed: the...

In 2004, while researching an article about childhood obesity, I did some very simple digging about the Hartford school system and the kind of "food" it was serving to its students. What I found was in no way even remotely surprising: students, young and younger, were served largely preformed food-like...

I grew up listening to my maternal grandmother tell stories of how her father, a kosher butcher in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, would slaughter chickens in the back room of his store on Friday mornings; he was regularly inspected by the local Rabbinate, who gave him the official authority to do his...

It's true: timing is everything, everywhere from fashion to design to film to sex. And at a time when the death knell for print media has been tolled from one end of the publishing industry to the other; when Gourmet dies a sad death and vitally important cookbook authors...

When my father died in 2002, I inherited his thousand-album music collection which ran the gamut from The Red Army Choir Plays Kalinka to a chortle-inducing bit of vinyl called Port Said, the cover of which involved a belly dancer wearing what appeared to my once very embarrassed young...

They were doomed from the start.

Three months before they got married, my father called my mother from his Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, just to say hello.

"Whatcha having for dinner, Cy?" she asked.
"A roast--" he responded. "It's in the oven."
"Who's coming?" she asked,...

I remember the day well:

I was working as an editor at a 150-year-old Manhattan book publisher. We all filed in to the editorial conference room for our Tuesday morning meeting. Once seated, a fixture in the group--an editor who had worked at the company for 48 years--suggested that we...

My attitude problem began a few years ago when I came home from work to find the latest Williams-Sonoma catalog sitting in my mailbox, and there it was: a home foamer. This was during the heyday of molecular gastronomy, when everyone and his brother was trying to turn a steak...

Well, it certainly has been a rousing and rollicking time in the joyous world of food blogger-dom, hasn't it. I don't care if you don't know a chef's knife from a thumbtack: you'd have to be living under a rock if you didn't hear something about It.

But just...

Julia Child wants you -- that's right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end secretarial job and nothing but a Stop-n-Shop for miles around -- to master the art of french cooking. (No caps, please.) She wants you to know how to...