We have cooked *a lot* of fish lately. More will follow, but tonight I have serious red meat cravings and will just make a sirloin steak. Last year when we travelled in Argentina, I came across the best bife de lomo I have ever eaten. Argentine beef is tasty and tender beyond belief. It was […]

Sometimes happiness lies in simple things. The same applies to food: when the milieu is right, you’ve got the appetite and have good friends around you, even the simplest of dishes can taste delicious (or palatable at least ;) Lenkkimakkara or saunawurst is a Finnish specialty, a cheap overgrown link sausage with bologna-like consistency. Despite […]

When friends from abroad visit Helsinki, we tend to stuff them to their gills with herring, salmon, trout, and arctic char. No wonder foreign visitors quickly form the impression that Finns eat nothing but fish. While this is wildly incorrect, Finland does have over 1,000 kilometers of seaside and 190,000 lakes. When I was growing […]

Living in New York, I”?m constantly homesick for good bread. In my neighborhood bodegas, the bread is suffocated in plastic; the sweet stuff comes from Entenmann”?s and would survive a nuclear winter. A Dominican bakery that is just a few blocks from us makes fresh pastries every day – unfortunately the bakers there are rather […]

I was backpacking in New Zealand around the turn of the year, and since I was on a budget, I bought at least one meal each day from supermarkets. Each and every store carried a huge selection of mussel products: pickled, fresh, smoked, barbequed or baked into pies. The common denominator was the mussel species: […]