The Essential Brotherhood

In her amazing book, “Home Cooking,” Laurie Colwin wrote, “One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.” To these pleasures I would like to add reading and writing about eating and cooking.





Last week, my purse was stolen. Along with $20, an easily deactivated debit card, a few sentimental-value-to-me-worthless-to-the-thief trinkets, and a sense of safety (this will pass, I know), I lost my notebook chronicling recent attempts to make homemade pasta, limoncello, strawberry wine …

When I’m not working as a writer and editor for an online food and travel website, I’m busy blending lemon rinds with grain alcohol, plotting theme dinner parties with my sister, cousin and friends (past themes have included Indian, Greek, French, 60s Kitsch and Southern Blues, which is now an annual holiday event), and writing “Communion: Meditations on Eating in Vietnam” for Things Asian Press (due out in spring 2007). Rather than continue my musings in a new notebook, I decided this blog is a safer place to store my writing about my experiments in the kitchen.

My basic goal: one post every week or so about the latest (or ongoing) achievement in my TINY kitchen two blocks from the old Third and Fairfax farmers’ market in Los Angeles. My emotional needs goal: to hear from like-minded cooks on topics such as kneading whole wheat into dough for ravioli, distilling strawberries in a big jar from Cost Plus on a counter near your windowsill, choosing the best recipe for fig jam (next on my list of experiments), and so on. I also hope, through the online food community, to be reminded, no matter what bad things happen in this world – my own loss being the least of the badness going on these days – of the essential brotherhood of man.