Friends came over last night, and drinks at the magic cottage turned into small plates of dinner. I stirred this tomato pesto into sautéed corn and annelini pasta, little ring shapes sometimes found in soups or salads.
Smaller pastas are often reserved for children, but why should they have all the fun?
Like green pesto [...]

My friend Pilar has just opened an empanada shop with her husband Juan on Washington Avenue (right next to Lincoln Road) in Miami’s South Beach called Half Moon Empanadas.

The food is as satisfying as the great typefaces in the logo, and Pilar tells me everything is made in the restaurant:

My favorite is the [...]

Were I to be scrupulously honest, I suppose I might admit this is less a salad and more a deconstructed guacamole.
But as I’m not so inclined, this recipe is a light dressing, a sharp uppermost layer for soft, green flesh encrusted with red salt that sparkles like garnets on top of the fruit Jenne [...]

My beautiful friend Jenne drove with me to the end of the world today–or, at least, what felt like the end of the world as the road ended and we got out to look around.

She smiled as we heard the sounds of things uncivilized approaching…

and an ATV trio rumbled past in their mudded glory. [...]

The wild winds of Tropical Storm Fay are whipping around the magic cottage today.
So we’re making my favorite breakfast food, pancakes, with crispy edges (more edges in HD version here):

Recipe: 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/4 tsp salt. Stir. Crack one egg in middle, add 1 cup buttermilk. Stir. Drop [...]

My good friend Antony, who lives in Sydney, just reminded me of this great clip with New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo.
My favorite part is the supermarché aisle sequence, and it strikes me that many of my beautiful American readers may be in [...]

Last week, I found another reason to worry about disappearance of honeybee hives.
Like touring punk bands, bee swarms travel a country pollinating different audiences (more widely in the United States than abroad), and their demanding migratory schedule may be one of many reasons for their rapid decline in recent years–part of a syndrome called [...]

I have been in the same room as Issac Hayes.
Last July, I presented ways to blog smarter to the American Television Critics Association in Los Angeles with my colleague Kevin Dando at the PBS Press Tour, where we held a Stax Records event (PBS show Great Performances premiered their “Respect Yourself” episode a few [...]

Should you ever find yourself in possession of a decent amount of fresh conch, you might fritter away an afternoon and the edible mollusks…
(Watch this episode in Vimeo HD here.)

Recipe: Make a batter of 1 cup all-purpose flour, add 1 cup of a golden beer, dice and add 1/4 to 1/3 lb. conch meat [...]

A few years ago, on the sixth day of June, I attended a party at my friend Eric’s house and partook of vodka cured with smashed atomic fireballs and other fiery delicacies. Needless to say, this is the only picture I can share of the event, and don’t look too long—those are snakes on my [...]