When I interviewed Arun Kapil of Green Saffron for the podcast, he casually mentioned “the very unfortunate cumin incident”. Even though I had never heard of such a thing, I didn’t pursue it at the time because it seemed too much of a diversion. In essence, someone, somewhere put peanut shells (an...

What kind of stupidity is “8 cups of grapes”? Squished in? Lattice packed? How big is each grape?

This was the lunacy that faced me on Saturday as I started to research homemade grape jelly. I moved rapidly along from that one, aside from lingering doubts about why it included one teaspoon of butter, and whether I should do the same. Italian recipes, for jam, not jelly, were not much more helpful, with amount of sugar ranging from 600 gm to 240 gm per kg of grapes.

Last week we went out of town to meet friends from the UK for lunch, and I ate the most superb galletto alla diavolo I’ve had in a long time.

Rachel Laudan recently published a piece on her website arguing, I think, that there is no food system and that it is unhelpful to talk about it being broken. No, and yes.

Quite by coincidence, I listened to two podcasts about coffee back to back. Well, it wasn't truly a coincidence; I saw that there were two in my queue and so I interfered with the ordering to listen to them one after the other. Anyway, Benjamen Walker's Wake up and smell the coffee was the kin...