Deep South meets Singapore in this dish I cooked for Anna in her kitchen the other day when I was still too depressed to use mine in the middle of a construction site. I’m sure soft shell crabs are a treat outside the Southern States too - Louisiana and Mississippi especially, but that’s where I [...]

My apartment is still a mess because of the water damage, but I got my laptop back, and even managed to whip up something despite the debris around me. Today’s recipe may not be top cuisine - it’s definitely not what I had in my mind before I started cooking - but the end result [...]

Institutional food can scar you for life. At my previous job in Helsinki, the hospital chefs disguised cheap sources of animal protein as culinary innovations, coming up with dubious creations such as Rainbow Trout Topped With Grilled Edam Cheese or Salmon Sprinkled With Pizza Herbs. Suffice it to say, I have been turned off [...]

When friends from abroad visit Helsinki, we tend to stuff them to their gills with herring, salmon, trout, and arctic char. No wonder foreign visitors quickly form the impression that Finns eat nothing but fish. While this is wildly incorrect, Finland does have over 1,000 kilometers of seaside and 190,000 lakes. When I was growing [...]

I was backpacking in New Zealand around the turn of the year, and since I was on a budget, I bought at least one meal each day from supermarkets. Each and every store carried a huge selection of mussel products: pickled, fresh, smoked, barbequed or baked into pies. The common denominator was the mussel species: [...]