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Hi! I guess I should begin by introducing myself. Call me kew ('kyü), short for Qistina. I live in Malaysia's model intelligent township about 50km from the capital city Kuala Lumpur, and adjacent to the new administrative capital city Putrajaya. I am a SAHM, with 4 kids ages 4 to 12. I quit working about 8 years ago to concentrate on being a full-time Mommy. 6 years ago, I began baking goodies at home for sale, mostly to friends, family, and acquaintances. Back in the 80's I had the opportunity to live in Canada, where I studied Computer Math at one of the universities in Ontario. I loved it there, and still miss it very much. Given a choice I would have stayed there and work, but I had to come back. After about 2 years of being back and working in the field of my training, I realized that I didn't want to be holed up with machines and data all day long and eventually found myself in Personnel/Human Resources. I enjoyed what I did very much. I was first assigned to the Recuitment Section, then on to Compensations and Benefit and later to Employee Relations where I was also in charge of the cafeteria. We had about 4000 employees working round the clock on 8 hour shifts then. The cafeteria services was leased out to Gardner Merchant of the UK and I thoroughly enjoyed working with them. During that time, our cafeteria was known to be the cleanest and the best within Penang. I really loved my job, but when I was pregant with my third child, I decided that being a Mommy is more important to me. So, when my oldest child entered kindergarten, I quit my job. It was then that I had time to dabble with my other passion which is baking. My Grandma was a baker and my Mom, although she didn’t really pursue that as a career, loved baking and always did so for friends. Apart from the baking, I also now have a small home-based web services business. I should warn you that we don't eat any designer or elegant food at home everyday. And I hardly plan out in great detail as to what we'd eat. Gone are those days. Now, I much prefer to take it easy, so to speak, and work things out according to the changing demands. Some days I cook, other days I just want to be lazy. Weekends are rest days, we eat out. Breakfast is usually a hurried affair of bread or cereal and juice or milk for the kids before they leave for school. DH, he just wants a cup of coffee. And as for me, I eat whatever I want. Today, I had a Butterfinger Wafer for breakfast followed by some ice-cream. Butterfinger Wafers are not available here - we received a box of goodies from a friend in the US - hence the excitement And I needed to be real quick about it. I had a cake to deliver this morning, some 40km away and then come back in time to pick up my little girl from kindy. I seldom eat lunch because the kids have lunch at school and DH works too far away to come home for lunch. So, mostly I will talk about what we have for dinner. But I will try to eat a proper lunch the next 3 days. And you've been warned, it will be nothing like those you've seen before .... where you see them prepare/eat elaborate and elegant food. Everyday meals are a simple affair. And as I am currently over my head with things (but I've been asked to blog for several times that I feel guilty of saying no ) , I don't foresee preparing any time-consuming dishes. I will blog for the first 4 days and then TeePee will take over the next 3 days. Perhaps, we can see the similarities or differences between what a typical Malay family (mine) eat for everyday and what a Chinese family (TeePee's) normally eat. Feel free though to ask questions and I will try my best to answer them. I will talk about today's dinner in a bit. It's only 5:30pm here now and we don't eat dinner till about 7:30pm or so.

If I wasn't a chef I'd definitely be into cooking. Well I used to be into cooking......and I'm actually not a bad cook but it just doesn't fit into my life style anymore. I suppose that sounds weird so I better explain myself. I spend all day everyday preparing food for other people that when it comes to thinking about what I'm going to eat and preparing my meals, I'm totally spent. So I've fallen into the habit of eating whatever requires the least effort to aquire. So I'm guessing most of you would think, "o.k. so she eats alot of easy meals, like sliced fruits and vegetables, quality cheeses and breads, simple pasta dishes etc...." but you would be wrong! That type of eating requires effort, typically more effort then I attempt on working days. I'm a Pastry Chef and well what's effortless around me to eat, is: pastries. I feel like I need to post this. Warning: I apologize to all of you in advance, because this blog will probably scare you. The following eating has been done by a professional and shouldn't be attempted by non-professionals. I'm not writing that as a cute ploy (cause it's not cute, it seems pretty stupid right now) but it's true. I have a feeling I might been seen as the poster person for horrible eating habits. My eating habits are extreme and so I'm highly embarrassed to expose this to you all. But my love for all things pastry and desire to share override my embarrassment. My days off of work are Sunday and Monday. That's when I do eat more normal/healthy meals. Although, I've been panicking and thinking I better actually prepare "meals" during this week......so I won't be embarrassed.........well, we'll see.... that depends upon what's happening at work and how much time I have after work. I do sort of start my day off like everyone else, so I'll start my blog off like others too. Bear witness to this, my daily breakfast: Technically the container it comes from says it's "Gourmet Cappuccino, French Vanilla".........but I don't know of any real cappuccino drinkers that would let this mixture pass thru their lips. O.k. soooooo it's sort of like a hot chocolate/coffee mix and nothing like a real cappuccino. I used to drink real coffee, but my system can't take it anymore and it definitely can not be consumed by me when my stomach is empty. I tried to very hard to switch to becoming a tea drinker, but it just didn't take. I never prepare breakfast at home. If I'm starving I might grab a couple cookies or whatever is fully prepared laying around and instantly ready to eat. When my husband is home we do always eat breakfast, he can't live with-out it (that means he gets really cranky with-out it). But then it's rarely prepared in our kitchen but sometimes he likes to cook. We normally go out for breakfast every weekend. This weekend we were busy gardening so we ate what was available 'instantly' at home.......because I actually had something at home to eat. Here's what our breakfast this past Sunday consisted of: (I hope it's o.k. to talk about past meals too?) I took the photo of the rolls that were left and then I proceeded to finish them off while typing. I had made too many of these at work for a brunch party we had. They didn't all fit on the serving platter so I snook the extras home for my hubby. He really likes these! As we ate, he talked about how we should open a store selling only pecan sticky buns, blah, blah, blah. Of course he's thought up the easy to imagine name of the company and what our sales literature would look like. "Let's call it, Sticky Bunns and have a photo of two buns looking like a "back" shot." That's cleaver..........I teased him. Knowing full well we'd never actually start another business.....but we had a little chuckle over the whole concept. I have to leave for work and I'm not certain when I will return online. So I'm going to pack in as much info. as possible so you can barely get thru these opening posts before I return. This is me, exactly like how I work, when I'm at work (I'm preparing these posts in advance, on Monday and I've got my photos all loaded and ready to go in advance). I hate getting caught short so I ALWAYS work as much in advance as humanly possible..........and I always seem to go over board!! I'm shaking my legs as I type unconsciously (until now)......that's me too, always got to be in motion, ready, ready, ready. Wait, I suppose I should get this out of the way. I wouldn't want to break tradition and not post a animal member of my family right off the bat (I think thats the 'hook' to these blogs. We're are more then mear foodies, we are also a bunch of animal lovers.). It's very rare that I sit at the computer by myself. Just like everyone else I too have a cat that is certain he must accompany me at all times when I'm on the computer. That's his job and he does it to excess just like me...well he is just like me, too much. He's certain I'm his sole mate (cause he treats me like another cat not a human) and he's always at my side when I'm home. When I sleep he checks me all night to make sure I'm still alive (he drives me crazy! and sometimes he bites me). This is Hawkeye: He isn't a cute cat, his legs are far too short for his long body with his front two legs being shorter then his back two. Nor is he sweet, we often refer to him as "the devil cat" and our other cats definitely agree. He was the last kitten of his litter sold at the animal shelter....well the last kitten from all of their adoptive cat litters. We're certain there was a reason for that (but, I love him dearly anyway). I believe what our whole family eats is fair game for blogs so I thought I'd mention Hawkie only eats to survive. Sometimes when he's laying in front of me at my computer I hear his stomach growling. He forgets there is always food out to eat or he just hasn't linked the feeling of an empty stomach can be solved by eating. I have two other cats who live to eat and if I can't think of anything else to write about I'll drag them into this blog too. Hum.........what else. Oh I remember, I was going to show you where I work, the kitchen, my ingredients etc... in my intro. to welcome you into my work life. I took photos already (just to be prepared) so I'll post a whole bunch of them so you can get the lay out. If things go slow at work I'd be happy to make anything pastry wise anyone wants to watch me eat. Most of my eating takes place at work, heck I eat all day long at work so I believe that makes most of my work fair topic to post about according to the blogging rules. I was sort of hoping to focus on my work as a pastry chef throughout this blog. I'm open for requests. Any requests, like: do you want to see my actual work/pastries (which I do eat, all day everyday) and what items: petite fours, breakfast pastries, cookies, cakes, wedding cakes, novelty cakes sweet tables, candys, anything about the savory side at my work (I eat their food too), photos of what I've made previously (I certainly tasted all of that), photos of what my day consists of as a pc (I eat constantly thru that), requests for recipes or techniques I can show (before I eat it)????? ...............Oh, maybe I should mention that I live about 1 1/2 hours drive from Chicago in the Northwest suburbs. I could take you on a tour eating my way across Chicago-land bakeries on my day off, if that interests anyone (besides me)? Wait, while I was typing the other two cats desided they needed to be included. I promise no more photos of pets........maybe a cutie kid photo thrown in later....... if you all begin to fall asleep.

I'm Tammy. This is Liam: Some of you may remember my foodblog from October of 2003, when I was pregnant with Liam and eating every 2 hours to stave off morning sickness. Well, the little guy's not only been born (April 26, 2004), but is eating food of his own now, so it seemed like it would be a good time to blog again. I know my teaser said "babyfood blog" but that will just be a small part of the week's activity. I will be blogging his meals as well as my own, but I'm taking advantage of my week of foodblogging to do some other fun stuff too. I don't do much cooking these days because I live in a cohousing community where we eat meals with our neighbors several nights a week. (I'll be posting more about that in just a little bit.) But I do make most of Liam's baby food myself, since it's cheaper and better tasting than the jarred stuff and I try to cook organic for him as much as possible. I'll share a recipe for baby food that - mixed with a little salt and lots of lemon juice - would make a lovely dip for pita chips. :-) Later in the week I'll be attending a cheese tasting at Zingerman's, a pretty famous deli/specialty foods store here in Ann Arbor, MI. And we'll seek answers to my weekly challenge of finding a restaurant that can accomodate 8 to 10 adults and an equal number of babies, most of whom need high chairs. Liam started his day off with his favorite beverage - mama's milk, straight from the tap. I work 3 days a week and on those days (Monday-Wednesday) it can be a challenge to get out the door and to daycare and work on time. So Liam goes in his high chair and I give him some finger foods to snack on while I get his bottles and lunch food ready. We're pretty much creatures of habit at breakfast time, so today's breakfast was mostly the same as yesterday's - half a banana, half a piece of wheat toast, and 2 ounces of plain organic whole milk yogurt. He starts with the banana and toast, and then when I sit down to eat my breakfast I feed him the yogurt - he's not so good with spoons yet! But he ate really quickly today and I needed time to finish this post, so added a special bonus to his breakfast - Cheerios! (Well, Purely O's, the organic equivalent). Breakfast for me today is a bowl of frosted mini wheats with skim milk, which I'm eating while I'm posting this. Now it's off to work - I'll be back in a little while, looking for your advice on what I should cook for 30 or 40 of my neighbors on Sunday night.

Now you are probably wondering about the title.... My past two blogs covered big events here in Japan New Year's blog Undokai (sports day festivities) blog Currently there is no major event going on in Japan so I have decided to focus this blog on modern and traditional Japan and how they are combined in daily life. There are a couple things going on this week. Today (April 5) is the first day of school, the Japanese school year runs April- March) so in about 15 minutes I will go outside with my daughters to send them off to school. (yeah ) Mia is going into the 4th grade and Julia the 2nd. My son Hide will go back to preschool on Thursday. This time of year is one of the most beautiful in Japan, it is cherry blossom (sakura) season and the trees will all be in bloom by the time my blog is over. I will take tons of pictures of these trees as the area I live in has them lining all of the streets. it is just gorgeous. oh yeah and we will talk about food too!

Hi everybody! Breakfast on this sunny Saturday morning is a small bowl of milk & granola: When I am not Chufi, I am Klary, and I live with my husband and 2 rats in Amsterdam. I work parttime and when people ask what I do on the days I don't work, my answer is: I'm always busy with food I'll be taking you on a tour around my favorite shops and foodplaces this week. Ofcourse I'll get some cooking and eating done as well! I hope my english will hold up. If you don't understand me, please say so and I'll try to explain! off to the shops now, see you later

So here we are in an internet cafe in Siem Reap Cambodia, sharing a dial-up connection with a handful of locals. We've been traveling for two weeks, we're blogging the last week of our vacation here. In the past two weeks we've been wandering around Thailand, we were fortunate in our inability to extend our diving trip in Phuket last week so we were safely up north in Chiang Rai for the earthquake and Tsunami that trashed the beach we were staying on a few days earlier. We spent the past two days in Phnom Penh which was surprisingly enjoyable. Good food, nice people, and traffic that makes my driving look calm by comparison. This morning our first meal was on a converted cargo plane flying from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. We'll add pictures once we find reasonable speed net access. On a 45 minute flight on President Airlines we were fed a bag of peanuts and what looked like a croissant but was egg bread with some sort of coconut jam inside. When we checked into our hotel this morning we had a proper breakfast (for the country we just left) of rice porridge with chicken, scallions, and celery tops - the usual condiment tray of chili powder, sliced chilis in vinegar, fish sauce, and sugar was provided. Some pineapple, papaya, orange juice that tasted more like flat orange soda, lipton tea, and a doxycycline pill rounded out the meal. We're off to Angkor Wat for the day, we'll check in again tonight - hopefully with pictures. MsMelkor & Melkor

my name is mongo jones and i once selected "revolution #9" three times back-to-back on a jukebox in a los angeles bar. the jukebox was shut off 3 minutes into the second playing. i'm just saying. see you all tomorrow. and if it all ends in tears, recriminations and mass-excommunications blame adoxograph.

Hello and Good Morning, foodbloggers! For some reasons I was tagged/untagged/tagged again. All within the last 48 hours. Just to give you an idea of the drama. I had no idea about the nature of the foodblog before. Now I'm the one who has to continue after Mongo's blog. Do I need to say more? Oh Gods, what is my sin? Is this a Hiob test? Please note, eGullet is about the only place where I have to deal with writing English language. I'm working part-time as a translator for English/German technical documentations. But writing in an foreign language is a different animal. Forgive in advance. And if anyone is tempted to answer, please translate the coolest, latest slang expression for me. Ok? It's now 7 in the morning here on a gray, rainy summer day in Erlenbach, a village near Zurich, in the German speaking part of Switzerland. That's the place where the blog is going to stop for a week. (Geographically, tiny Switzerland is the watershed of a continent. Within a circle of 50 kilometers, there are the springs of 4 rivers, each one reaching a different sea around Europe. ) I've grown up in this country where I was born about 50 years ago. My mother was of mixed Italian/Swiss origin, my father is a Bulgarian immigrant. For 19 years, I'm together with my beloved Beatrix. We built a home 4 years ago and now, we are living together here. I'm a bit tired today, because yesterday I visited a wine producer working at the majestic lake of Geneva. This producer devoted all his energy to variety called "Chasselas", a variety known to the Aegyptians already. It's cultivated at the border of the Lac Léman (the lake's real name) for some 900 years. This wine is generally not in high estem with the elitistic wine community (and Switzerland doesn't export almost any), but what Pierre-Luc Leyvraz achieved with his tiny production is a truly oustanding apéritif wine. Until now, it's a almost a grassroot evolvement. I have to unload 120 bottles this afternoon. On the way home, I stopped in Gruyére (the town) of course and bought some Gruyère d' Alpage (the deleicious summer, mountian variety of Gruyère, produced on spot by hand. Etivaz as a reperesentant of that Gruyère variety), a piece of Gruyère Surchoix (more mature than regular Gruyère) and some Extra-Vieux (Gruyère matured for 18 months). Now I'going to prepare some coffee and to walk over to my bakery to pick some fresh croissants. Afterwards, I've got some work to do. So again, foodblog community: Hello! We are going to spend an easy, less exciting week (we all need that after Hurricane Mongo, no?) and I try to give you an impression of our food and how we live here.

Boris kindly told me on Sunday that he was tagging me. Gave me a day or two to panic. Boris showed us a lifestyle and an approach to food that's a hard act to follow. Living and eating gets the big Tokyo squeeeze some days, and Tuesdays are a prime example! Later I want to show you some summer pickles (which involves some time-travel, since I started pickles on Monday so that they would be ready before blog week was ovr), some other preserved foods we make, and also talk about family cooking in those years when the house has more hungry mouths than bulging purses, and family schedules are fuller than the fridge! Meanwhile, this is how my blog really started... I got home around 4pm, to find my office at blood heat, and son1 using a mood-altering substance - an ice cube on a saucer, which he hoping would make him feel cooler while he studied for a test tomorrow. He and son2 consumed a cob of sweetcorn each (from a bag bought off the back of a farm truck which often comes round selling veges at weekends). Son2 grabbed a bottle of cold barley tea and a stick of string cheese, and headed off for 2 hours at cram school. Son1 and I dismembered some of the green soybeans and whorled mallow I had bought at a vege stand on the way home, in the interests of his science test tomorrow. By that time, son1 was HUNGRY again, but we didn't eat till 7:30, when son2 came back from cram school. Husband ate when he returned home after 10pm...pretty normal hours for a Tokyo worker. The rice includes an umeboshi cooked in with it to keep it fresh in lunchboxes tomorrow (bad wife! bad mother! should be up at 5am to cook rice...). The soup bowl (before miso soup was added) contains a fish sausage with a stick of burdock in the middle, and HALF A GREEN BEAN harvested by son2 from "his" plant at school. Shallow dish is squash and green beans simmered in dashi stock with soy sauce and sweet sake (mirin). Actually cooked that yesterday and forgot to serve it! Normally I would add the green beans at the last minute to preserve the color, but the family are getting sick of beans (very cheap from the infamous vege shack over the road at the moment), so I simmered them till they had absorbed more flavor. This is not so much a rough construction as a loose collocation... On the small plate, pork slice panfried with ginger, deepfried eggplant with a dab of yuzu-koshou, and some boiled whorled mallow leaves. Whorled or "Chinese" mallow is slightly mucilaginous, like okra or melokhia. Naganasu photo at bottom of page (Japanese text) Shouga-yaki (pork slices with ginger) usually has the ginger mixed into it, but I often make it with the ginger and a tiny sprinkle of cornflour and soy sauce "sandwiched" in the middle. The eggplant was 50cms long, a "naga-nasu" from Kyushu. The whorled mallow leaves (oka-nori or "upland laverbread") After dessert, the boys heard the breadtruck which comes every Tuesday evening, and insisted that we had a moral duty to introduce it to you! The driver was quite shy at the thought of making her worldwide debut. Not so my son2... In the end, they had to admit that the chocolate-filled cornet and the melon-pan had better be saved until tomorrow. I will also save talk of pickles till tomorrow, because I have a video to transcribe for class tomorrow, a sample translation to do, a shirt to iron, and a dish of chicken simmered in soy sauce and vinegar to make ready for tomorrow's dinner...not to mention dishes and bath, and it's already 10:30pm Tuesday night Japan time.

For the next week, I invite you to join me for meals at my house...nothing quite so exotic as eating in SE Asia (not by a long shot!) but, based on some of the threads popping up lately (e.g., January Detox and New Years Resolution - Lose Weight), it might be of some interest. As a quick introduction, I am Jen Jensen and I live in Sacramento. This is my second turn at blogging; the first blog is here. I won't go into too much personal detail, since it's all there and I'd just be repeating myself. Back then, I wrote "In the coming week, I'll be eating at home, eating out, and (most exciting of all) eating at Tigh-na-Mara, a spa/resort on Vancouver Island in BC." Well, I definitely ate a lot! A few months later, I stepped on the bathroom scale and realised that, if I didn't do something, I was just going to keep putting on weight until I popped like that fellow in the Monty Python skit. And so I joined Weight Watchers. My primary goal was to relearn my better eating habits. I reckoned if I did that, then I would also lose weight. So far, it's worked quite well. As of yesterday, I've lost exactly 27 pounds. And, thanks to eGullet for inspiration (and the Weight Watchers thread in particular), I've been able to eat some pretty damn good food while losing that weight! And now...I'm off to make my breakfast!

Hello, it's been a while. Since we've been promised snow in this week's forecast, I've traded in my food bus for a sleigh. This blog doesn't actually get started until tomorrow, but I wanted to get y'all thinking some. See here's the deal. In my first foodblog, many of you came and visited with me as guests in my home. Well, now you're all more like family. So this time, you have to help me. Welcome to the interactive foodblog. I decided that if I was going to do another blog, I had to branch out. I couldn't just do the same thing I did last time and more importantly, I didn't want to replicate any of the dishes I did last time around. This I realized was going to require me to step outside my foodbox somewhat though. So I'm going to do some experimenting. I'm going to make some things I've never made before. Now I know, from reading the various threads on these forums that there's a wealth of information and advice to be had, and that's exactly what I need from y'all. I'll be doing stuff that you're going to think "how can she not know how to do that?!". Well I haven't and I don't. But, I'm willing to put my ingnorance on the line in the interests of higher learning. I'm putting myself out there folks. Don't let me fall. Not only that, but other than our big Christmas dinner, which will actually be Boxing Day (the day after Christmas for all you non Canadian and English people), I don't think there's a speck of beef on the menu. Oh the withdrawal! Note the Southern drawl? A lot of what I'll be doing are Southern dishes. I figure by the time I'm done, not only will my drawl have improved, but I'll be a card carrying Southern Mama. So sit back and relax. But don't get too comfortable. Y'all need to work with me on this one.

Is it bad form to start Foodblog admitting to be lightly intimidated? I mean, seriously, having to follow Kew & Tepee's blog is like a comic having to follow Robin Williams! I hope I am worthy. My name is Arne Salvesen, I'm 39 (40 in August - egads!) and live in Burnaby, BC, Canada which is the next municipality east of Vancouver - home of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games Bottom line, I'm no more than 30 minutes from downtown Vancouver. My family consists of my two sons (who gave me the Daddy-A handle) who live with their mother in Pitt Meadows (we'll be making a trip there this week), my wife "J", and our two Jack Russel Terriers, Ringo & Gromit, who graciously allow us to share our home with them. I'll be posting dog pictures later, but in the meantime my avatar will have to suffice. My connection to the "food" scene is completely amateur in nature. Never worked in a restaurant and have only really thought about it as a "hobby" over the last couple years. Professionaly some of you already know I am a Certified Kitchen Designer (CKD), so that is probably my closet "professional" connection. My web site is in my sig line, or you can PM if you'd like more information. Still, one of the greatest joys I have in life is cooking for my family & friends, or enjoying a meal out in one of the most vibrant food scenes anywhere. That is what I hope to share with you this week: a small sampling on how Daddy-A cooks & eats his way through a week in Vancouver. We'll visit some of the better known places, but I hope to also introduce you to something new. Along the way we'll also meet a few of the local eGulleters, and see what I can do with my brand new Weber Smokey Mountain! Heaven help my waistline! A.

Good morning, EGulleters! Food before introductions. . . TJ's breakfast: That's Kashi Good Friends CinnaRaisin crunch and Pepperidge Farm Whole Wheat English Muffins with peanut butter. My breakfast: That's. . .yeah, you can probably read the labels. Nice to meet you. I'm Diana, 31, living with TJ (the boyfriend) for just over 5 years now. A couple of years ago, we bought a house in St Petersburg, Florida, USA, which is in the Tampa Bay area. All the foodstuffs this week will come from the Bay area, and I hope you enjoy the trip. Goodness knows some of you could use a glimpse of sunshine & warmth right about now. Today's going to be a little busier than usual. . .we've been looking for an excuse to fire up the smoker, and thank goodness the blog opportunity came along. Tomorrow (Saturday) we'll be smoking a brisket and a pork shoulder, so I have to go to the meat market today to get the brisket. Before that, I need to turn a bowl of cookie dough into cookies, and meet TJ & friends for lunch at a great Cuban place over in Tampa. I feel like this requires full disclosure: I love shopping for foodstuffs almost as much as I enjoy cooking & eating it. So this week, I plan to take you all to the Saturday Morning Market here in St Pete (it's like a farmer's market & crafter's market all together); the Italian import shop; and Publix. I think the only place you'll miss this week is Costco, since that's not an every week shopping trip. Grab some flip flops and sunscreen and enjoy a trip to the (near) tropics in the middle of winter! Diana

My name is Andy Lynes and I am a Site Manager for eGullet. I live in the village of Patcham, just outside of the seaside resort of Brighton and Hove on the South Coast of England. I'm 39 years old and married to Gill. We have two kids, George (11) and Alice (7) and a German Shorthaired Pointer named Lulu. My entire life revolves around food. Apart from my duties here on eGullet, I write about it for a living, I cook most days at home, I eat out a great deal and I read everything I can lay my hands on that is food, drink and restaurant related. My interest in just about anything else (apart from music and Uma Thurman) is limited, which can make me tiresome company for the non-food obsessed people in my life. However, I think we're all on the same page here, so this week I'll be documenting everything I cook and pretty much everything I eat. I won't pretend that its going to be a normal week in the Lynes household, I'll be making a special effort in order to make the blog at least readable. So I'll be visiting my local butchers, fish mongers, markets and supermarkets to give you a flavour of what its like to live and cook where I am. I'll be sharing recipes, techniques and general food-musings with you and I'll document the soundtrack to my cooking (there's always music or the radio playing when I'm preparing a meal). I'll tell you how I'm feeling in order to judge if mood can affect what I cook and how well I cook it. I'll be exploring what food means to me and who and what has influenced the way I cook. This week is a particularly interesting one as it will include a visit to Bray to chat with Heston Blumental and a gathering of UK eGullet members for a winter feast in London. I'm looking forward to it.

About a year ago I blindly hurled myself through a week of food blog for the first time. It was a pretty intense experience, opening home and heart to my eGullet friends about one of the most important subjects of my life. But once the week got going, I fell into the rhythm and things generally took care of themselves. It was a little bit like having a guest. At any given point in your life, depending on where you are and what you do, you have special friends who come often. These are friends who know a whole lot about you and accept you even if you’re far from perfect. They know where the sheets are and have their favorite pillow case which you always save just for them. These are the friends I sometimes pamper but sometimes can’t. They bring their own tisane of the hour, they have their own teapot in the cupboard, they fall into the rhythm of the household seamlessly and without fanfare. Sometimes this kind guest alerts me of arrival a day in advance, sometimes a week. There’s no worry that this guest will have a good time. I don’t have to shop and menu plan because I know they’ll have their ideas about what they want to do and eat, and they’ll probably even shop for food or even bring the contents of their own fridges and jugs of things and samples of this and that to add to my larder. They've had my best and also been subject to a few failed experiments, and they're generally ok with whatever's coming out of the kitchen, even if it's plain and simple food. We’ll share stories and wine and food as we while away the evenings talking and cooking. Thank you so much for coming to see me! I'm so glad you're here!

…to Louisville, KY, USA: Home to premium bourbon, beautiful horses and fast women, as they say. Every year in this city, thousands of banners like the one above begin appearing in mid-April draped over anything that’s stationary. If you work in the food industry, that’s your cue to roll up your sleeves, order tons of extra product, and break out your “F.A.B.O.D.” t-shirt to surreptitiously wear under your chef’s jacket. (In case you didn’t guess, that stands for “F*#@ A Bunch Of Derby” – lots of cooks and servers in town own similar shirts.) In typical Derby Week fashion, I’m gearing up here for several 14-to-16-hour days in a row this week. I’m also in the middle of moving house from one part of town to another. And as if that weren’t enough to keep me busy, I offered - in a bourbon-induced moment of temporary insanity, to be sure – to be eGullet’s foodblogger for Derby Week. So saddle up and ride along with me, your intrepid culinary Girl Friday, as I juggle my many hats at two different jobs (more on that later) in the race to feed the throngs of locals and tourists alike during the run-up to “The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports” - The Kentucky Derby!

Hi all - After many months of procastinating, I am your humble blogger this week. I signed on to eGullet about 2 years ago and remember being terrified to post -- everyone knew so much about food and I wondered what I could contribute. That feeling is even stronger today -- the food blogs so far have been outstanding. I feel like the kid who goes on after Sammy Sosa! I was very inspired by Lucy's blog and finally decided to do it. So here I am today -- the week will be quiet for the most and thankfully so. I will be making shrimp, chicken and much more. I am sure all the recipes and creations will not be Indian so this is NOT the "Real Indian" blog that Soba kept referring to in the last blog! So good morning, welcome on board and in a few minutes I will show you where I live and what I see when I wake up each morning!

In real time, I was passed the torch by balmagowry on Thursday, I believe. But with the schedule being off due to Stinger’s truncated blog, I got to ruminate on my fate for a few days. One would think this would give me plenty of time to think of a schedule of events and write a beautiful, sweeping introduction to my food life. One would be wrong. Mr. Victoria, hereafter known as Keifel, and I have been supremely lazy this weekend so far, aside from dragging the boychick, our son, off to the farmer’s market entirely too early for his liking yesterday. However, I will try to give a little background, since I haven’t gotten around to doing a bio post either. I will try to shorten what could be a long story. My husband and I have been married two and half years, but we have only been living together for about two months. We met online four years ago, fell in love, decided to be rational creatures… oh, wait. Did I mention my husband is from Trinidad? And that he didn’t have a resident visa? Well, we fell in love. He got a work visa. He went to London on business. On his return, he discovered his papers were not in order. He was summarily deported in July 2001. Then September 11th happened. His employer withdrew her support of his work visa. We got married in January 2002 and started jumping through all the necessary hoops to get him here and lo and behold, he landed in Nashville in March and we have been disgustingly happy since. How does this apply to the foodblog? Keifel doesn’t have a work permit yet, that hoop is still flaming. So, currently, I have the good fortune to have an amazingly devoted house husband, who drives me to work and the boychick to school and cleans and does a great deal of the cooking. So what goes on at ms. victoria’s over our week together with the foodblog will involve him and he has been kind enough to be both a good sport and help with pictures. I have only been in Nashville since last November and am still learning the lay of the land. I quit my old job as an associate television producer to find my fortune (or at least follow my bliss) as a personal chef and a writer. I’ve applied to the culinary arts program at the local state school and am working as a temp at another university in the area. Until a month ago, I was also waiting tables but the current temp gig pays fairly well and I wanted my weekends back. Generally, things are in flux, but the good kind. We are still kind of hitting our groove in the kitchen. I tend to be a haphazard cook as far as menu planning at home. I cook what I feel like eating or decide at 8 PM to make bread. We are getting more into a routine of sorts and I am learning meat cookery from my dedicated carnivore of a husband. (Until he got here I was either hardcore vegetarian or maybe eating fish, I have fallen off the veggie wagon and into the omnivore sidecar.) For this week, I do have a little bit of a plan. We are going to have a Trini dinner at least one night and a Mexican dinner on Wednesday to honor Cinco de Mayo. Aside from that it will be catch as catch can and I will only be able to post photos from home in the evening. I am now off to the kitchen to make French toast for breakfast before we go to church (UU if anyone is interested) and the Pottery Barn thereafter to shop for a teapot. Our kitchen (a little messy, right after we moved in):

Good morning and thank you Ms. Victoria, I hope I can do justice to the blog tradition! But first, a shout out to all of us Mothers, mommies, moms, mas, mammys, and mahs: Happy Mother’s Day!! I’m a "here and there" home chef. Right now, here is NY, and there is Italy. My husband and I have spent a quiet weekend at our house in Northern Westchester, we’ve been getting the house ready for spring and summer, planting flowers, cleaning up the outdoor plants…and we’ve been eating rather well. A quick bio: married, 1 son, 2 cats. We’ve been married a long time…20 years…and lived together for a few years before that. Our son is just finishing his first year in college, he can’t make it home for Mother’s Day because he’s working away finishing his last project of the semester. We are going to Philadelphia on Tues to bring him (and his mountain of stuff) home, I’ll still be his mother on Tues, so we’ll celebrate then. Most of the week we live in a loft in Soho, which is in downtown NYC; weekends we try to head up here to Westchester. I’ve had some formal training with cooking, I graduated from an accelerated program at the NY Restaurant school (the school has since merged with some other school, I’m not sure of the name anymore). I thought I wanted to become a caterer, but as this was an early mid-life career change, I found I could make more money working in the garment center, and have weekends off; so now I just cook for family and friends. Some of the high points in my life have been very literally high points: I’ve climbed and stood on some of the world’s highest peaks with my husband and son. We climbed Kilimanjaro, Mt. Elbrus and some peaks in Bolivia to mention the really high points. We are avid downhill skiers. Anyone want to talk about the trials of cooking at altitude?? Now that’s a real pain. I commute to work in the city by bike, which is an adventure in its own right. Hold on: we just got some great news!! Our friend who is an avid hunter, just called to say he finally got a wild turkey!!! Its been a long, dry spell since he’s been successful. Our deal is, he hunts, I cook. He just called from upstate on a scratchy cellphone connection to let us know the good news. Oh boy!! Enough bio. Onto the food. We left work a little early on Friday, so we were able to eat to come up here to the house, and have dinner at home, which is a rarity on Fridays, as we usually have to leave the city late, after the traffic has abated. Friday night was grilled artic char and shrimp, served on a nest of cappelini with a parsley brown butter sauce, and some grilled baby fennel. Need to work on the baby fennel part, it would be great if you had very sharp teeth and were in need of fiber…maybe this is one vegetable that needs to come to maturity before eating. We opened a 98 bottle of Haynes vineyard Turley that was magnificent. A bit overboard for the fish, but it was delicious. And it was Friday night, after all! Saturday lunch was a warm white bean and shrimp salad. Is there any more symbiotic relationship than parsley and garlic? This was served with a Tavel rose that worked perfectly with the bright flavors of the salad. I’ll post photos later, right now, I’m working off a really s l o w dialup connection, but I can post when we get back to the city. Saturday dinner was a TV dinner. That means the temperature dropped, it started to rain, so we had to eat inside. So dinner was served while we watched Sling Blade. Remember, that old Billy Bob Thorton film? It had some serious story flaws, but overall it has held up and is still interesting to watch. We had grilled quail for dinner. The quail had spent the afternoon relaxing in a ginger, garlic, and lemongrass bath. So they were simply grilled and served on a bed of rice, along with some white asparagus, and a terrific watercress salad. The watercress was a type I had never seen before: very thin stalks with oversized leaves. It was firm, crunchy and very peppery. I tossed it with some sliced red onions, micro-planed some orange zest on top, and made a simple vinegarette with EVOO and orange juice. The oranges are very, very, very tart. Sunday morning I made my favorite Sunday brunch breakfast. It has a number of names: salade du pays, survival salad, but it’s a frisee and lardon salad. I’m able to get some nitrate free, applewood smoked bacon in a slab. That gets sliced up into cubes and cooked, frisee salad gets a very light simple vinegarette. This all gets tossed, 2 poached eggs on top, a little toast and you have the perfect meal. We had some fresh squeezed orange juice (need to find some sweeter oranges to mix in with these babies!), and grapefruit juice. Coffee is illy brand coffee, made in the mokka with the foam coming from the chuga-chuga. I honestly don’t know what its real name is, we bought it in Italy, and I just made the motion and chuga-chuga sound to the man at the store, and he instantly produced exactly what I wanted. Anyway, the chuga-chuga is a metal cylinder, heavy bottomed container that you heat the milk up with, the top has a plunger with a mesh screen attached. When the milk is warm, you pump the plunger a few times, and voila! You have perfect foam for the cappuccino. Low tech perfection. Here you can see my dear old Caloric stove. The clock has worked in years, but the burner space is large, the oven is large, its truly an old reliable friend. We have a bunch of people coming for dinner, its Sunday Soprano Supper. Something that has become sort of a tradition, we eat dinner and watch the Sopranos. Of course, we start with the Simpsons, because you just have to love the Simpsons. And for the Sopranos, you need a bunch of people around to keep you up to date on the plot. I need to go and get some groceries, so we’ll be back…!

Good morning, everyone! Guess who's it this week? (Thank you, Judith! I'll try to do you proud.) Actually, I've had a very crazy week, getting ready for our annual wine festival. I was on the phone trying to deal with screwed up orders for stemware, cookbooks, t-shirts and supplies, and I was absent-mindedly lurking through eGullet (my favorite way to relax) when I received a message that I had a PM from . . . hathor ?? Oh no, that can only mean . . . And the little devil tagged me on the eve of a major wine festival! Quick bio: My real name is Mary. I live at Dover Canyon Winery and Vineyard in Paso Robles, California. It's a small winery in an appellation that includes 80 wineries and over 200 vineyards, including some old vine vineyards. I live with my SO, who is also the winemaker, and he loves to cook. (Life is sweet.) This morning we are cleaning up the debris in our home from a barbecue-party last night to celebrate the efforts of our volunteer staff after the grand tasting Saturday, as well as my son's 21st birthday. (It feels very weird to say to him What are you drinking, honey? and have that be okay!) Anyway, we will be grilling appetizers in front of the winery today—lamb ribs rubbed with a mixture of sea salt, coarsely ground black pepper, herbs de Provence, and duck breasts rubbed with a cayenne-cinnamon salt. We get our meat from a local butcher that operates a shop behind his home. He also processes wild game for local hunters—venison and boar mostly. The herbs de Provence come from an herb farm just down the road. I'll take pictures today and try to get them posted first thing tomorrow. As soon as I figure how to do it. We're expecting several hundred visitors today, so I need to scurry, but I will check back later!

Howdy, Y'all. Apparently I got tagged this morning. Thanks Seth! Awesome job, by the way. I'm normally on at all hours of the day, but today was a big cooking day for me, so I didn't check in after my first morning fix. Since the blog is supposed to start on Sunday, I'll try and remember what I ate/cooked yesterday. I'll start with an introduction. I'm Vanessa, and I live in Dallas, Texas. I have a habanero temper and a chipotle smile. I have the pleasure of living with my significant other of 6 years, three cats and a dog. Pictures of said beasts to follow, of course. They are our only children. We moved here just under a year ago from Chicago, where we lived for two Before that we were living in the culturally hopping Bryan/College Station, Texas. Its been an interesting year learning my way around Dallas. There are many delightful foodie finds both on and off the beaten path. I have a passion for several different ethnic cuisines and seem to acquire more the older I get. I'm 32, if anyone is counting. I'm trying not to. I'm just your basic self-taught, home cook. I'm not a picky eater, but the SO is, at least in comparison to me. But that is easily worked around. I cook a whole lotta Tex-Mex and Mexican food. Thats the SO's favorite, and its good to keep the powers that be happy, eh? Fortunately for me, I also love it. In no particular order, my other favorite cuisines are: Indian, Middle Eastern, Greek, and a new one for me, Ethiopian. I'm also fond of French, Italian and American Regional. I just love learning about different cultures, and since I have a culinary bent, thats generally how I relate. I'm going to go gather my thoughts and make some uploads to image gullet, and I'll post again before bed.

I'm it this week. And who am I, anyway? You could check out my bio, if you really want to, but really all you need to know is that I'm not professionally involved with food, although more and more I wish I were. I have amassed nearly 1000 posts here in (I think?) pretty quiet fashion. I mostly take from eGullet-- I learn new things every day, and I'm very grateful. I live in Brooklyn, with my wife Robin and our two children, Leah (2 years old) and Nate (almost 7 months). I am a lawyer, but for the past four months I've been on a leave of absence taking care of the kids. This leave of absence ends June 1. That's right, we are at the beginning of my last week of freedom. (Incidentally, I did a sort of half-blog for a while about new stuff I was learning to make while on leave. You can find it here.) When my leave began, I wanted to tackle a bunch of disparate projects, but eventually I became primarily obsessed with baking bread. I began baking every day, and I eventually got my own sourdough starter (whom I call Ringo) up and running. This daily bread-making has become part of my identity now, and it's going to be tough to part with it. Once I return to work, my daily baking is going to have to end, so I've recently been baking more than ever, trying to cram in what I can before I go back. So this week you can expect some bread from me. And I'll try to show you a few things about how we live here in Brooklyn, U.S.A. We will be traveling later this week. We'll be leaving Wednesday night to go to my mother's home in Maryland. My mother knows not of this eGullet business (at least, so far as I know ), and it might be best if this remains the case. So you may not get much in the way of food photos while we're in Maryland, but I'll give you some reports that you might find amusing. So, on with the blog already! Oh, by the way, I've been instructed to tell you that if you reply to the blog, you're fair game to be tagged as the next blogger. And that you have a moral obligation not to say no! I was apparently the very last choice to be tagged for this week. (They said it was because I live in NYC, where so many of the bloggers have lived, but really...) I've always been picked last since I was a child, so I'm okay with it. But don't put some other loser in my position! Say "yes" when you're tagged! Take it for the team! (Now will anyone dare reply? ) Okay, so dinner this evening was (drum roll, please)....... tuna salad. Behold, mortals! See, I made this poached chicken with aioli on Friday, and there's just a ton of aioli left over, which I love, but I'm having a hard time getting rid of it. Yesterday I assembled a bunch of cooked and raw vegetables for a sort of veggie "Grand Aioli," and tonight I briefly entertained thoughts of a Bourride, but it was so hot out, and like a jackass I had the oven at 500 degrees already for some French bread. The thought of turning on a burner was just too much, at least until we put in our stupid air conditioners. (See Note 1, below.) So it's just a tuna salad sandwich, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's also got a little extra: it's made with homemade aioli on homemade bread. It tasted pretty good. I also put together some Biga (a firm batter of flour, water and a little yeast that will bubble all night, creating flavor for future breads), which I'll use Monday and Tuesday. I got my hands on some actual Italian "00" flour (their white flour), so I thought I'd make a Pugliese and maybe some durum wheat bread with my "00" Biga: For tomorrow: I dunno. I can never plan ahead. My wonderful wife got me this great gift for our anniversary: It's the seven quart Le Creuset (we have an oval five already, I think). Give me some ideas. What should I make in this pot? If I like your idea I'll use it on Monday or Tuesday! Also: I got these beautiful radishes at the greenmarket on Saturday: I dipped some slices in aioli yesterday. What else should I do with them? Put them in a salad? I haven't the faintest idea. Help me out. See you tomorrow (or later this morning, really). It's late. Note 1: This is what most of us New Yorkers do, by the way. We take down our air conditioners in the winter because otherwise we'd freeze, and we store them in closets, or in the corner, or wherever we can, and then when it's hot again we risk our backs picking them up and we install them in our windows, blocking our pathetic views of alleys and neighbors in their underwear. Glamorous, huh?

Greetings, Hopefully I am not stepping on Walt's feet by slipping this in before he has culminated his blog in his final dinner post, but early east coast mornings and late evening California dinners seem to cause some logistical concerns ;). I am not going to actually bother any of you with real content tonight, but I figured I would get introductions out of the way, and then begin my official blog tomorrow morning with breakfast. As far as bios go I am 23 years old, live with two roomates in Bear, DE (a little fake town of strip malls and suburbs) which is near Newark, DE (pronounced as in New Ark, not like that place in Jersey, and which is a wonderful little town with lots of charm, beautiful homes, tons of culture, great restaurants, and is somewhere I would love to attach my address to. Alas, someone built a post office near my apartment and called it Bear, so I can't). Geographically speaking in terms of places people might actually know, I Am around 45 minutes southeast of Philadelphia, and around an hour and a half north of Baltimore (I'll get around to explaining why this has significance). I am a public school music/drama/dance/etc teacher during the year (and I suppose an off-duty one during the summer) but am also teaching summer school for the next week and a half. This means that my breakfasts might not be much to look at for the next several days, but I will try to get something out. Summer school being a half-day activity I will have plenty of time to get home and play around with stuff in the kitchen however. Look forward to laughing at many pictures of me trying to cook, chopping off my fingertips, burning myself with hot oil and cast iron, and generally being a anti-posterchild for the food and kitchen safety movements. I can claim to own four cookbooks in total (one of which was given to me by Ms. Suzilightning, thank you very much) and I'm not positive that I have ever followed a recipe exactly even from them. I have no definate plans for what I will be preparing this week, and am very susceptible to suggestions by eG members. I am prone to using lots of spice, lots of herbs, and probably miss the boat on subtlety more often than not. So as I'm sure you are tired of reading my blabbering for the moment, I will just invite you to all sit back, pop open a cold one, and try not to cringe too much as I attempt not to butcher your favorite dishes as well as my own hands in the coming week.

The warrior-shaman, stripped to the waist, held aloft a stone stained with blood. His skin glistened in the sunlight as he peered down at the girl tied to the rock in front of him. "It is your turn." he intoned "and there had better be meat." "Come on, what if I just promise to be different? I'll do stuff no one else has!" The tattered remains of a black tennis shoe fell from her foot with a thud. "There must be blood!" His teeth looked sharp, and he spit as he glowered. "Um, what about salad? A nice green salad?" She squirmed. "Salad's for wimps. You're not a wimp are you? I hate wimps." "Hey, look! Transit of Venus!" She pointed towards the sun. The warrior turned, shielding his eyes. "What? Where?" When he turned back to the stone, the girl was gone. "Bah.... she'll be back. She'd better bring meat." A voice called out from down the mountain. "Fine, fine - if nothing else there will be fish!." The warrior rolled his eyes. "I totally knew it. Wimp."

Jensen contacted me earlier in the week and asked if I would take over the Foodblog for the coming week. I agreed with the caveat that I would not start until Sunday night. I am still standing by that, but I thought I would go ahead and do some kind of intro as I am at work and have nothing better to do . This blog is going to begin and end with crawfish boils (kind of a compare and contrast thing). It is that time of year down here and everyone with a hundred bucks and an 80 qt pot is having a crawfish party sometime in the next two weeks. They are really fun social events and take absolutely no prep other than getting out all of the cooking gear, cleaning up the yard and the patio/deck/barn/dock, going to the seafood market, and going to the grocery store. All of the action (cooking and eating) occurs outside so you don't even have to spend a day shoving all of your junk into closets and under beds in order to fool your friends (who know better anyway) that you live a "Martha Life". Tommorrow's boil will take place in the backyard of my old next door neighbor (she moved, I stayed) and friend Robin. She has a beautiful house by Lake Pontchatrain in Mandeville and her swell new husband is a great cook (as are many men in Louisiana-it is very common here for men to be the primary food preparers in a household-always has been). This will be a small operation (150 lbs. of bugs or so) and about thirty people. Lots of beer, soft drinks, and laughter. Simple and easy and everyone will help with the set up and the cleanup so the hosts don't have to kill themselves and besides, that's half the fun of this type of entertaining. Next Sunday's boil (end of blog) will be a giant deal. It is my company party and there will be a huge trailer set up to boil TONS of crawfish. There will be a couple of hundred people there along with a band, tents, kid games, and the rest of the trappings of company parties. An entirely different vibe than a party in someone's back yard. Still prety fun, though. In between I will keep you up to date on the daily food doings in the Mayhaw Household. I will be roasting a turkey in a very unusual manner early in the week (so that we can eat it for the rest of the week in various disguises) and then I will take the carcass and make a little gumbo out of it. I will also be making some shrimp ettouffee one night, chicken creole another, and at some point I will be doing a little bbq'd redfish (it depends on when I get the fish). If I take a day off during the week and have the time I will probably do some kind of real BBQ on my open brick pit (that thing is da bomb ) over pecan wood. Probably brisket. I will also throw in some baked goods (I bake alot, much to my wife's and my waistline's dismay) and this week, for the sake of the blog, I think that I will just do the Southern thing-chess pie, pecan pie, peach pound cake, and probably some yeast rolls one night. I would imagine that you will see a fair amount of vegetable sides as the market down the street (awesome veg. stand 2 blocks from my house) is starting to fill up with spring veggies. Fear not- we will have some okra. You won't be seeing much about breakfast food or lunch except on the weekend, as I am not home when the boys eat it (I leave for work at 6 a.m.) and none of us are there for lunch (which is usually, for both my wife and I, a brown bag affair consisting of leftovers) and both of the boys take their lunch to school as well (even though they are both in private schools, the food is uniformly uninteresting and generally awful and they won't touch it). Incidentally-I have been married to my wife Mrs. Mayhaw (Robin) for 20 years and have two boys, Miles (14) and Graham (11). My children are unusual in that they will eat damn near anything (except blue cheese and one of them, inexpicably, does not like okra in any form-and they don't eat escargot-it's a long story) so they are very easy to feed. Frankly, I am not sure that he is mine and have been considering a DNA test to prove paternity ). I will do my best to provide regular photographs but I am not promising anything-even though I make my living using all of the new technology, photo gullet is still something of a mystery to me and I may be pm'ing some expert or another for a little help. Anyway, I am looking forward to the week and I hope that you enjoy it.