Phnom Penh; September 12, 2021.Everyone in my hometown danced. There were some shy girls, but if I grabbed their hands at a sock hop, they’d join in. Dancing is infectious, but it’s also tribal. If you grew up in a dancing town – like Orangeburg, South Carolina, or Memphis, Tennessee, or Athens, Georgia, you surely dance. I loved to. I had two older sisters, so I never had to buy 45s because they had stacks of them. I was 6 when Nancy bought...

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September 9, 2021; Phnom Penh, Cambodia We love it here in Phnom Penh, but there is so much of the country that we haven’t seen — mostly because of the pandemic. We have traveled to Siem Reap twice — once to see the ancient Angkor temples among the hordes of Chinese tourists and again last summer when we were the only people there. We’ve been to Mondulkiri in the northeast and Battambang in the northwest and glamping on...

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Phnom Penh, August 5, 2019:I have received the following sad news from so many people. Nach Waxman was a real mentor to me. In 1984 I was working as the food editor and American liaison for the French language magazine, Ici New York. I lived on the border of Spanish Harlem, on the corner of 97th and Lexington Avenue, just a few blocks north of Kitchen Arts & Letters. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent in the store and in...

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Phnom Penh; August 3, 20121 The Brassicas – one of the most confusing plant families – are highly lauded for both nutrition and flavor, but good luck trying to categorize the myriad cabbages and mustard greens that comprise the crucifers, as they’re called.  (I have bemoaned the difficulties of the taxonomy of greens on the blog before.) Many of the cruciferous vegetables don’t even belong to that family, but to the Amaranth or Chenopod family....

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Phnom Penh; March 27, 2021: Passover begins today and ends on Easter Sunday. So called “hard-boiled” eggs are central to both religious celebrations. All of us have had trouble perfectly boiling eggs at one time or another. Even the experts such as Harold McGee, who writes about the chemistry of food, admits that there is no surefire method to ensure that the shells won’t crack, the yolks don’t turn grayish-green, and the inner membranes between...

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Our friend Ben is in quarantine after his Home Leave, so I took him some cookies and pasta sauces. He’s lived in Italy, where both coniglio and lepre – rabbit and hare – are consumed with abandon, so one of the sauces was a tomatoey rabbit sauce that he could easily reheat and serve with pasta. I went back through my blog looking for rabbit dishes and found a dozen or more, including this one, which appeared as “Gibelotte” on the blog and as...

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