My friend and colleague in cyberspace, Chef Miles Collins provided the inspiration for this post by blogging about Salt-Baked Fish – a dish he was prepping for the menu of a family of restaurants in Spain. The restaurants serve up Spanish and related Mediterranean specialties with emphasis on seasonal and locally sourced ingredients. Miles post describes in nice detail how encasing a whole prepared fish … Read more
I’ve written a lot about the participation of Asian nations in Silk Road trade, but what I haven’t considered enough is the effect of the Silk Road on Europe. The Silk Road and its spice trade played important parts in shaping early modern Europe, and it was no less than the price of pepper, cinnamon and cloves in the mid-fifteenth century that forced the Portuguese … Read more
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . . As the moments of the storm pass, the snow piles up like a Fibonacci sequence – each hour a layer falls deeper than the one already on the ground. Yesterday morning, when we were on the snow vigil waiting for the snow to begin, my son mistook the small birds flitting around the … Read more
This interesting object recently found its way into our home. It’s a jade vessel dating from China’s Yuan Dynasty. It appeared on the breakfast table one morning at the end of January. To be honest, at first I wasn’t so sure about it, but the more I consider it, the more I’m taking a shine to it. We’ve got to clean it up a bit, … Read more
We had something really wonderful for dinner last night that I had to share with you: a Turkmen Savory Meat and Onion Pie. It is a dish of Tartar origin that is now eaten in different variations across Central Asia and into Southern Russia. Although Turkic in origin, it clearly has influences from mother Persia, because it can best be described as a biryani enclosed … Read more