I am slowly, ever so slowly, finding stores within a 50 mile radius of where I live that have the ingredients I need to make Colombian and also Japanese foods. The first 30 miles of that travel is through a foodie wasteland so don’t be impressed with the distance I travel for food . One...

Ahh, this was yesterday’s lunch. For supper we had the soup, more meat, all over rice. This sort of food is just so amazingly fulfilling and filling. It is very fulfilling for the cook who likes to create foods that are rich, deep in flavor, and that start from very inauspicious ingredients. Oxtails are about...

(Xanthan Gum. Chemical model graphic used with permission from Dr. Martin Chaplin of the London South Bank University, London, UK) Molecular Gastronomy plays with established food identities to challenge the semiotics of food. It explores the use of chemicals and processes previously the domain of high-throughput industrial food producers and food scientists to deliver non-intuitive...

*See note at bottom of this page. My objective in writing this article is to present the facts about Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) and let you decide if its as benign as the recent foodie hype over at the New York Times (China’s True Dash of Flavor by Fuchsia Dunlop) would have you believe. Introduction MSG...

You may have read recently in the New York Times an article, “China’s True Dash of Flavor” by Fuchsia Dunlop, that tries to sooth readers into a laconic gullibility around the use and consumption of MSG or monosodium glutamate. This article is so substatially unfortunate on various levels. It suggests that, as many “good” chinese...