The ultimate comfort food? Aligot. Traditionally almost equal parts potato puree and Tomme cheese (joined in elasticity), I like to take mashed potatoes in this direction, adding garlic and Tomme/Raclette to Yukon Golds, stirring with figure eight motions.
This Thanksgiving side deserves a place in your dinner rotation all year. I’ll be making this for [...]

Voilà, the project I have been working on these few months at the Knight Foundation:
KnightPulse.org, a place to discuss the future of information—to talk about new ways to give, share, find, and receive information we need. We’re posting video conversations to start off, and we’ll build tools the community wants next.

All mistakes are [...]

On Friday night, I was transfixed listening to Dave Brubeck coaxing jazz with his unique time signatures from a piano on stage right—at 88, he riffs playfully, hunched over at first, then gracefully moving from one end of the keys to the other—

And I woke up this morning thinking about what I might be at [...]

From Nashville, I returned to Miami, unpacked the Jem costume, and drove back to the airport to board a San Francisco flight for the Mobile for Social Change barcamp and to see my good friend David.
David’s blog is El Oso (The Bear), and he is on a temporary hiatus from his nomatic global lifestyle [...]

This recipe is largely in service of my favorite new technique for peeling tomatoes: with a blowtorch.
The tip comes from a book I bought at Maker Faire called Chef’s Secrets, and Chef J. Bryce Whittlesey (who once worked at Keswick Hall near Charlottesville) instructs the reader that the blowtorch option prevents the tomato from [...]

I’ve just spent the weekend with hackers at Maker Faire in Austin, Texas.

Sitting next to the cool kids from the Austinist, who offered maps to let people draw their area landmarks,

I met inventors, idealists, and geeks and told them about the Knight News Challenge.

Wandering, I watched as the Austin Metal Authority forged [...]

Each time I visit, I fall harder for Austin, Texas–the pride in local, surfeit of vintage, and funktacular food entice me into scheming ways to make migas my regular breakfast.
Yesterday, the delightful Rosental Alves, who directs the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, invited me to talk to his journalism class preceding one [...]

Something about Cambridge in the fall—the colorful leaves, undergraduates attempting to look morose in careful layers of (let’s acknowledge it, plaid) clothing, cadenced conversations rising from patios and bricked walkways—it feels as incredibly American as…apple pie ice cream from Lizzy’s on Church Street.

A bit precious, maybe, but delicious. To follow that, [...]

I’ve always been fascinated by the Italian whey cheese ricotta and its ability to go from sweet to savory to salty (ricotta salata). Turns out ricotta is easy to make (with cow milk substituting for sheep).
While it traditionally provides creamy inner layers for lasagna, fresh ricotta is even lovelier on top of pasta and [...]

It begins with the pink panther theme from across a Chicago intersection.

I went up the L platform to meet my friend Brian, a groovy cat himself, and off we went to Pilsen, a Chicago area with notable Mexican food, in a city of very notable Mexican food.

Passing the rainbow building, we went to [...]