Mindful Eating
Posted on February 9, 2012 - Filed Under Food & Wine | Leave a Comment
I remember my first experience at “mindful eating.” In 1987, I joined a few comrades on a search for the best Kobe beef in Kyoto, Japan. After a bit of research, we found a restaurant where I ordered a small portion at US$105. We all decided that we would eat in silence, meditating on every [...]
Read More..>>Sacrifice of the Extra Virgins
Posted on December 5, 2011 - Filed Under Food & Wine, Sonoma | Leave a Comment
In the Mediterranean, olive oil was a wonder substance, used as a medicine, a skin oil, a soap, even as fuel. Fill’er up with Extra Virgin please! Olive oil tastes good and doesn’t clog your plumbing. Hercules planted olive trees by pounding them into the ground with his hunky arms. Father Serra (he of the [...]
Read More..>>American Cheese
Posted on July 13, 2007 - Filed Under Airlines, Culture, Food & Wine, Misc. | Leave a Comment
Maybe it reveals me as the pious food snob that I am, but today, in a Continental jet wafting over Winnemucca I stare at a sealed, steamed-up baggie labeled “Pierre Creations: Charbroiled Beef With American Cheese†wondering just what it would taste like. First, I was stunned to get a meal on a plane, the [...]
Read More..>>Shopping for Valentines: The Kama Sutra, One Bite at a Time
Posted on February 14, 2007 - Filed Under Food & Wine, France, Holiday, Misc. | Leave a Comment
It is a mashup of Animal Crackers, Cracker Jacks, Willie Wonka and, uh, sex. What ever happened to the idea of fun candy? As a kid I used to sit around with my pals biting the heads off of giraffes and the butts off hippos, giggling self-indulgently at my cleverness. Likewise with Cracker Jacks: one [...]
Read More..>>Memories of Manka’s
Posted on December 30, 2006 - Filed Under California, Food & Wine | Leave a Comment
In November I surprised my wife on her birthday. We got in the car and started driving, not to dinner in San Francisco but toward the Northern California coast, and not to our usual haunts in Muir or Stinson beaches. Not to Bolinas, the little town that counterculture built, now inhabited by a melange of [...]
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