This may be unfair, but I’ve come to the conclusion that you can tell a lot about a country by their sausage. For lunches, while traveling, my husband and I have developed a habit of securing some local wine, bread, cheese and sausage that we can nibble at our leisure. Since we’ve munched our...
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As I touched on in a previous post, salt is commonly obtained in one of two ways, from the sea or mined, and those methods go back millennia. Rock salt occurs in vast beds of sedimentary minerals, the last reminder of dried up lakes and seas. In the United States and Canada extensive underground...
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The custom of eating pork on New Year’s is based on the notion that pigs symbolize progress or prosperity for many cultures – not a connection that may immediately come to mind. The animal pushes forward, rooting in the ground before moving, symbolizing progress. In Italy, the fatty meat also symbolizes the fattening of...
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For the longest time I though Salad Oliveh was Persian dish, and strongly resisted any suggestion to the contrary – those impostors! I could not wrap my mind around the possibility that it might be a popular dish to most of the world, and by sheer luck I stumbled across it as an adult....
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When I first discovered San Francisco’s Japantown, I was in awe. I thought it was such a fascinating place, and it reminded me of those snow globes – a miniature of Japanese culture, and in my adopted city at that, what a happy coincidence. Part of the appeal for me, was that Japan was...
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I’ve been around enough to know that sometimes when you are having a conversation with someone regarding a topic you are both familar with from your own culture and experience, while you may be agreeing, what you are actually agreeing to, is miles apart from what the other fellow thinks. I’ll never forget, I was...
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