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...

Someone recently said that good food produced from healthy animals who have been treated fairly, humanely, and kindly is expensive, and it should be. (It might have been the woman everyone loves to hate--but me--Alice Waters.) Naturally, whoever said it raised a major ruckus, especially among those of us who...

A few weeks ago, my partner and I were watching The Ten Commandments, as we always do during the Passover holiday. It's a fabulous bit of spectacle, isn't it: Moses goes up the mountain and comes down with wonderful hair, styled by the same person who did up Elsa...

About five years ago, when the term "locavore" had not yet been coined and we all thought that eating organic was about as good as it got, I was driving around town in my Subaru and listening to NPR's Faith Middleton interview Carole Peck. Carole is the...

I really never put two and two together, but there was probably a reason why, during the 1960s newspaper strike that crippled the advertising business (among others), my father would take the dog out for a walk on weekend mornings and come back with peculiar canned foods, like Spam....

I have, admittedly, a very peculiar relationship with this time of year.

I grew up in a secular Jewish home where we spent Christmas Eve eating Chinese food and going to the movies; we had no tree, and even though I wanted one (like most Jewish kids) I was...

Maybe it's just my imagination, but I don't think so.

The run-up to Christmas this year, with each passing day, just keeps getting odder and weirder, more dangerous and dreary, but somehow compelling nonetheless. The markets are crashing left and right, and it's been impossible for me (admitted financial moron...

Twenty years ago, when I was the book buyer at the original Dean & Deluca in Soho, I was often lucky enough to get sample copies of new works that were about to be published. This was a boon, since I generally couldn't afford to buy new hardcover books...

If you are a magazine and blog addict the way I am--and if you're paying attention--you will at some point begin to notice some universal truths about the concept of trend, be it design or food-related. For example, I never in a million years would have thought that that teak...

Thirty-one years ago, when I was fourteen years old and living in Forest Hills, New York, I had an experience that would forever change the way I think about the basic decency of people.

It was a tough year. It was the Summer of Sam, and his hunting ground was...

Every year around this time, my partner and I pack up the car with too many books, cooking tools, and our very large dog, and we head north to central Vermont. This escape, which has over the years ranged from 1 week (not ideal) to 2 (more ideal, but...

Much has been made over the last week of the Alice-Gone-Down-The-Rabbit-Hole Republican Convention; we had Fred Thompson going on about how great things really, really are. We had Giuliani stealing a magnificent 13 minutes of airtime by going over--way, way over--in a speech that, even for him, was...

I'm sure I'm not alone among like-minded food professionals: watching the Republican Convention has, for me, resulted in a powerful urge to eat the most authentic, pure, simple, interesting, indigenous foods I can lay my hands on. I'm fairly certain that it's directly related to seeing, in all its gorgeous...

I'm sick.
My nose feels like it weighs 87 pounds.
My head is pounding.
My body is aching.
My eyes are burning.
I think I may have a fever.

I never get sick. I really don't. I spent last winter working in a hermetically-sealed...