Month: August 2009

No Guru, No Method, No Teacher . . .

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Thank you, baby . . . To celebrate the publication of the first volume of The Silk Road Gourmet, my husband took me to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks show on Friday night. Astral Weeks has always been one of my favorite albums by Morrison, along with the string of those that he recorded with the Pee Wee Ellis band in the mid-1980s: Into the Music, … Read more

Ramadan Kareem

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The time of Ramadan is almost upon us once again. Since so many of the land and maritime routes of the Silk Road ran through predominantly Muslim countries, and since Muslim traders played such an important role in moving the goods and ideas around that led to a globalization of the ancient world, I wanted to take a moment to explain the holiday to non-Muslims … Read more