When Clotilde announced WBW13: Like Wine For Chocolate (WBW is Wine Blogging Wednesday) I made a mental note to hire a wine tutor, a chocolate tutor, and to steal a recipe from a book that would tell me as much as I needed to know about both. Unfortunately, I totally flaked out and forgot to…
This is a pine nut coffee cake: It comes from the Babbo cookbook. It’s the cake I tried to make a few weeks ago, only to fail, leading to the hit film Failure. This time the cake came out a-ok (last time I forgot to add the butter) and the finished product looks pretty and…
The devastation in New Orleans has left many of us, foodbloggers especially, feeling a bit frivolous in the face of catastrophe. We can debate the merits of green risotto and the value of Amazon knife deals, but in the background 10,000 people have died and thousands more need assistance. Surely there’s something we can do.…
Here is a story of two dinners, both unplanned. The first happened Friday night. I was meeting my friend Mark, theater critic (who has a story in the NYT coming out soon!), to go see a production of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband.” Mark couldn’t do dinner first so I was on my own. I…

There’s nothing I like less than day-old risotto. When it’s hot off the stove, all the textures and flavors meld together to create a soothing, heavenly mixture. But after a day in the fridge, it turns a bit gummy and then heating it up inevitably makes it gummier. What to do with day old risotto?!…

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire, I shouldn’t look any further than my own backyard. Because it if it isn’t there, I never lost it to begin with.” – Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of Oz When I read Frank Bruni’s review of The Red Cat (a two star review, interesting to note…
For those of you who don’t live in the Tri-State area, here’s an opportunity to post some comments too. I may be opening up a big fat can of worms here (insert appropriate graphic) but I’d like to open up the floor for comments and/or suggestions regarding the site. More podcasts? Less movies? More nudity?…