Ancient Near East! Come to the Ancient Mesopotamian Cookoff Challenge! Think of it like Iron Chef – Mesopotamian Style! But instead of a theme ingredient, you have a list of ingredients without amounts or directions attached to them. The only thing between you and a finished dish is your own culinary creativity. There are two goals to the challenge: 1). Create dishes that could have … Read more
Imagine for a moment you are at a royal banquet. It is an Assyrian royal banquet in the seventh century BCE. It is a large dining hall in the palace at Nineveh draped with fabric and decorated for the celebration. Smoke and incense perfume the room. Music fills the air. Quiet pieces have harps, lyres or lutes and perhaps pipes accompanying singers or poets and … Read more
Many chefs and cookbook authors spend their careers touting the unique aspects of the cuisines they cook and write about. I’m different from most. I look around and see nothing but commonalities and connections between the major Asian cuisines. In The Silk Road Gourmet Cookbook, I write a lot about how ingredients and dishes swirl in patterns across Asia and tell us a lot about … Read more
Salt . . . the only rock we eat. The natural salts of the sea – both past and present – vary a great deal in taste. Some are “salty” and dissolve quickly in the mouth – like Murray River salt from Australia; others are comparatively mild like the sea salts from France and El Salvador. Still others take a long time to dissolve … Read more