Taste & Smell
Picture if you will the mandarin, the scholarly imperial bureaucrat immersed in poetry, the dedicated civil servant in his finest regalia sipping a dainty cup of expresso. Now picture the mandarin, the majestically orange, oblate fruit, the clementine or the tangerine pierced by the finest expresso beans and smothered in the waters of life. One more Mandarincafécello and I will have to pull out my copy of "The Selected Poems of Du Fu".
Read more... Add new comment
Meet my two new pets - Mirka and Niedamir. You'd think that with 3 dogs and 4 cats we would be done with taking on any more pet ownership responsibilities. But, these pets are easy. They live in the refrigerator. As long as you take them out about once a week, to feed and play with, they can live forever. Not good for snuggling or playing fetch, they can however help with an endless supply of delicious, sourdough baked goods.
I've always liked the idea of making my own cheese, well, actually, I've always liked the idea of making most of my food myself. In fact one of the first books I've ever bought for myself was 
Few thing smell as good to me as onions frying in butter or especially bacon fat. It's always a good start to any tasty sauce or meal. In the Polish village tradition it can be a dish all onto itself. The poor man's answer to the rich man's butter - smalec.
Limoncello is an old, traditional, Italian lemon liqueur made by infusing vodka, grappa or some other hard liquor with lemons or lemon peel. It got some notoriety in the States recently by the excesses of Danny DeVito and Avril Lavigne but it has been enjoyed as an end-of-meal refresher and pick-me-up for centuries.
