June 11, 2026; Athens, Georgia: In 1997, my culinary bookstore and cooking school in Charleston, South Carolina, was thriving. Two of my four cookbooks had been published that year, and I had a contract with HarperCollins to write a fifth book on southern sweets. But Harper was having a hard time financially and Amazon was threatening the health of independent bookstores. I was having a hard time with the book. While I am a very good, intuitive baker, I found that every bag of flour, every oven, the humidity of the day, and the natural yeasts in the air all influenced recipe outcomes. I could sense when a recipe would need a little more flour or water or egg, but transferring that knowledge into a written recipe was difficult. My editor wasn’t helping by ignoring me. I told my agent that if I didn’t get some response, that I would return the advance. The next day, on the cover of The New York Times, I learned that Harper was going to pay all of its new authors like me NOT to write their books. (My previous books had been published by Bantam, Workman, and Clarkson Potter.) I was paid the entire advance in full. (My contract had been like all the others: a third of the “advance” up front, a third when half of the manuscript was accepted, and the final third upon acceptance of the entire manuscript.) I was flush with cash for the first time in my life. I bought the building where the business and my apartment were located. I planned to keep it for two years and then close the business and sell, but I needed a new plan for my life. I decided to start writing fiction.

I wrote for seven hours/day, seven days/week. I completed my first novel (still unpublished) and showed it to some literary types. (My agent did not sell fiction.) Larry Ashmead, the illustrious fiction editor at HarperCollins, and I had mutual friends. He asked to see it. He read it and told me to add sex and violence, which I wasn’t willing to do. Shannon Ravenel and several of her cohorts at Algonquin read it and told me that while it wasn’t right for Algonquin, that I should submit it to a popular house like Putnam. In the meantime, I sold the building, closed the store, and continued selling stoneground corn products and my line of condiments online. They were the real bread and butter of the business. Several publishers wanted the desserts book, but I was ready to leave food writing. My husband was moving up the ladder within the federal government and I knew that we would be moving to Washington at some point in the near future. I continued to write about food, mostly for popular magazines such as Bon Appetit and Gourmet, quasi-academic journals such as Gastronomica, and for The New York Times and The Washington Post. I also wrote about travel, and I was often a guest of the International Olive Oil Council and Oldways on tours of the olive oil producing regions of Europe and the Near East. I put the novel aside.

We moved to Washington in 2004 and I began this blog in January 2007. There are hundreds of recipes and a million words on the blog, which I have mostly ignored for the past few years. I blogged only four times last year. And three times in 2023. But I have been busy! In 2008, I began another novel. It has taken so many different forms over the past 18 years, but in 2024, I moved to Athens, Georgia, and hired Judy Long (whom I met many years before when we both had bookstores and when she owned Hill Street Press here in Athens) as my editor. She is shopping the book now.

What have I been doing? In 2011, we moved to Bulgaria, where my husband was Peace Corps Country Director.  Because Bulgaria had joined the EU and NATO, he was forced to close the post, never mind that it remains the poorest country in the EU. The blog is full of meals and events from that time — an historical dinner I planned for the Charleston Art & Antiques Forum, a Bulgarian feast in Washington, for which I prepared classic Vishnev Strudel (sour cherry tart), the culling of my cookbook collection from thousands down to the few I would take with me overseas, and the drinking of the special bottles of wine we had put down to age. Before we moved to Bulgaria, we traveled up and down the eastern seaboard, saying goodbye to friends and family, to Mexico to see friends, among them Diana Kennedy, the “Empress of Mexican Cuisine,” and to Provence, about which I wrote for the Washington Post. You can follow my adventures in Bulgaria here on the blog. I learn to make banitsa, tarator, shopska salad, gyuvetch, kyopoolu, and kavarma. I learned to season with sharena sol. And I learned to cook with different ingredients — and without some that I was used to always having. We loved our time in Bulgaria, but after two years, we were transferred to Chengdu, China, a city of 22 million that I hated, mostly because of the pollution and politics. I returned twice to the States while in Bulgaria, once for the release of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking (still in print — continuously! — since 1992), and once for knee surgery.

I didn’t last long in China. We bought a house in Savannah, and for five years I gardened. In 2019, again we moved overseas, to Cambodia, where we were for four years, including the pandemic years (though Cambodia had very little COVID). We loved the country and its remarkable cuisine (so much more interesting and rooted-in-place than neighboring Vietnam’s, where we also lived for two years). We loved the people and had a large group of friends from all over the world. I wrote another novel.

Over the past 45 years, I have lived in the Virgin Islands, New York, Paris, and Genoa, as well as the aforementioned U.S. cities and our four Peace Corps posts. I have traveled to all the olive-oil producing countries of Europe, to both northern and South Africa, to England and Ireland and Scotland, to Germany and Austria and Romania, Sri Lanka, Hawaii, Canada, several Mexican states, to Panama, throughout the Caribbean, to all of the continental United States, and throughout China and Southeast Asia. I’ve seen a lot of ruins and cathedrals and museums and natural wonders — waterfalls and African wildlife and coral reefs before they were ruined, and I’ve visited vineyards and cheesemakers and bakers and pig farmers and eaten in Michelin-starred temples of gastronomy and in roadside shacks all over the world. I had sea turtle and datteri before they were endangered. I’ve eaten pig’s ears in botth South Carolina and China. Tarantulas in Cambodia. Rattlesnake in Georgia. And veal intestines filled with chyme in Rome. I’ve had horsemeat in both France and in Puglia; I didn’t care for it — too sweet.

Late in 2022, the University of South Carolina Press published and anthology of my work, Charleston to Phnom Penh: A Cook’s Journal.

And I recently wrote another novel. So that’s what I’ve been up to. We now spend most of our time in Athens, Georgia, where we bought a house when my husband retired last year. We’re both involved in creative projects and will go spend time with friends back in Cambodia this winter. I’ll try to blog more.