Yeah, I’ve been away, and I have a damned good excuse. That’s me, after squeezing out more than 7 pounds of screaming baby. Oh, and that’s baby. He calmed down a bit.
Perhaps nothing illustrates the traumatizing effects of childbirth as much as this: I ate hospital food for six meals, and loved it. After I […]

Oxbow Market is a gourmet market/food hall just across the river from downtown Napa. For a foodie, it makes for pretty exciting shopping: charcuterie from the Fatted Calf, artisanal chocolates and olive oils, and the dairy delights of the Oxbow Cheese Merchant.

For those whose interest in food is mostly limited to eating it, the eateries […]

Display at Richaud, Confiseur
“Welcome to Apt, the capital of confited fruit,” says a sign at the center of town in Apt, Provence. I stopped there on my way home from India, meeting up with Wes, because my parents were spending the month there. It was the week before Easter, and all the confiseries’ windows […]

I sold a story to the Los Angeles Times Travel section, so you’ll have to wait for that (it’s still unscheduled) to hear about our 24 hours at home with the legendary Nimmy Paul.

Bananas are big in Kerala. I wish I had caught photos of the many small stands selling bananas — green, yellow, short, long, piled in bins, hanging from the ceiling — that we passed as we drove through the state. After we crossed the border from Tamil Nadu state, our driver, Vasanth, pulled over and […]

I got this jar of fish from a Cambodian supermarket in Long Beach. I was looking for fish paste, an essential Cambodian ingredient, to go with my new Cambodian cookbook. Overwhelmed by the variety of goopy fish concoctions in jars, I enlisted the woman from the in-house snack stand.She was very enthusiastic, and pointed me […]

Rats may not sound very appetizing, but you can’t argue with almost 5,000 years of zodiacal history. My friend Cynthia threw a party for the lunar new year, and though there was no champagne or pointy hats, there were dumplings galore, Hainanese chicken rice, noodles, and char siu bao. I arrived early so got drafted […]

I know I’m not the only one whose attention was captured by the adorable Modernist gingerbread house from Red Envelope. Wes has been preaching to me the doctrine of clean lines and simple style, and where better than in a gingerbread house? Why struggle with turrets and froufrou Old World styles, a la Martha Stewart, […]

I went to a Sri Lankan festival, but I didn’t bring my full appetite - a poorly timed snack left me unable to eat as much as I wanted. That was a shame, because there’s apparently only one Sri Lankan restaurant in town, Tarzana’s Curry Bowl, and after having their signature dish, a bizarre stir-fry […]

For years, one of the best places to go for authentic Thai food was Wat Thai, a Thai Buddhist temple in North Hollywood whose parking lot was taken over on the weekend by food stalls. You bought plastic tokens from a little booth up front, then trolled the offerings. Some people loved the tiny […]