This year we spent the week around Reyes (Epiphany) in Central Mexico. Of all the marvellous sights, tastes, and smells, those of Puebla are lodged deepest in my limbic system. The city is terribly pretty, full of Spanish colonial buildings, but somehow more ornate and painted even brighter than others in similar colonial cities you [...]

I’ve been drooling over the pictures of the Hungarian food blog Chili & Vanilia for months, so when I discovered the story about what Hungarian goulash is and what it is not there (in English, no less), I re-remembered pörkölt and naturally had to try the recipe over the weekend. I’m all about edible [...]

The region of Modena in Emilia Romagna is home to the alchemists who make gold out of musty grapes. I have been to Modena exactly once, spitted out from a slow commuter train, missing a vital connection back to the unlovely student summer apartment I shared with two Czech biznes student girls in a mildly [...]

Harlem is gentrifying like crazy. Crime is down, so brownstones are going, going, gone and craggy old warehouses are being converted to condos for yuppies as we speak. All this is so inevitable that of late even the crunchy socially conscious granola-eating, Subaru-driving community activist types on my block seem to have given up organizing [...]

The first time I tasted this dish I was in paradise on earth. After exploring the Douro valley of Northern Portugal where grapes for port wines are grown in one of the most dramatically beautiful landscapes in all Europe, we crossed the rolling mountains of the Beira Alta by car. After being too late for [...]