essays

A common complaint that food lovers and cooks have with supermarkets is that they sell smooth, perfect looking fruits that are hard and tasteless. Tomatoes and peaches come to mind as the top offenders.

Reading the IMBB 24 "Make It In 30 Minutes" entries hosted by Too Many Chefs, it struck me that a lot of the participants were sure to include a dessert in their meal. When I was ruminating over what to make it never even entered my mind that I should make a dessert, because I'm not a dessert person.

March is Women's History Month, and today, March 8th, has been declared as International Women's Day. The theme of Women's History Month this year is Women: Builders of Communities and Dreams.

The latest brouhaha to hit the world of food blogs is this article in Food and Wine Magazine in which Pete Wells criticizes what he calls "cheese-sandwich meanderings". While it's easy to dismiss the entire article, which is not the best example of journalism to ever exist, I think there are some things to be learned from his off-hand comments about food blogs.

My comments here are, of course, my opinion only, and my focus is on personal food blogs rather than food blog aggregators and the like.

Some very thoughtful responses were left to my previous post, about recipes and copyright. Rather than trying to squeeze all my responses in a comment, here is a folow-up:

Rachel, who was quoted in the Washington Post article, says:

The Washington Post has an interesting article titled Can a Recipe Be Stolen?. It addresses the question of copyright and recipes. Can recipes be copyrighted? If you take an existed recipe, and change around a couple of ingredients, does it make it your own? How much change is enough?

Happy New Year!

There is an interesting article in Salon today, where a former food writer relates how she got disenchanted with the food world (though she did not actually quit, she was replaced by someone cheaper.)

Well it has been a while since my last post... I have just been occupied with other things (trying to catch up with work, reading, taking care of family, enjoying the summer, etc etc.)

It's not that I haven't been eating of course. That is one thing about having a food blog: you rarely run out of things to talk about. That is of course, unless you get too sick to enjoy eating.

My favorite television program at the moment is The Amazing Race. In case you have never watched this U.S. program, it's a reality/adventure show where 11 teams of 2 (the combinations vary from married or dating couples to parent and child, roommates, best friends, and so on) race around the world and try to end up being the first at each leg's destination. The final winner wins $1 million. It's really a fun show that even many reality genre haters like.