My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
As you can imagine, returning home to Seville after five months on the road we’ve been bombarded with questions, including “Are you nuts?” and “Are you two going to stay put for a while?” (The answers are “Yes” and “Yes.”) But the two that always come up first are these: How much weight have you…
“I like my gingerbread covered with pâté de foie gras , accompanied by a nice white wine.” As Philippe sighed with pleasure at the memory, I thought: “I will never get this town.” Dijon was the 36th city we’d stayed in during the last five months. Our Mediterranean Comfort Food Tour has taken us through…
“Deliciosa, ” my guests all murmured politely. “Que maravilloso.” But it was pretty obvious they didn’t really think the dinner Rich and I had prepared was delicious or marvelous. In fact, having accepted the smallest possible servings, they mostly just pushed the food around on their plates as if hoping it would somehow contrive to…
Want a simple, sure-fire way to break the ice with strangers? Try committing a social faux pas! Rich and I proved the effectiveness of this method yet again last Saturday night when we showed up at a dinner in Turin, Italy with a bottle of white wine as a hostess gift. I’d chilled it in…
Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano couldn’t survive in space without a taste of home. One of the many things I loved about living in Cleveland was Little Italy, a neighborhood where you could always find outstanding pasta, veal piccata, and Chianti, often served family style with a side of accordion music. A friend took us down…
Hosting dinner parties in a foreign country provides abundant opportunities for pitfalls, pratfalls, and faux pas. I often recall with a shudder one particular night, shortly after we moved to Seville, when I passed around a cheese platter only to have my Spanish guests throw back their heads and howl with laughter. I stared at…
Remember the chicken dance ? The one where you flap your wings and shake your tail feathers? When was the last time you did it walking down the street in a foreign city? Yeah, I can’t remember either; maybe never — until last Monday night in Zagreb, Croatia. That’s when Rich and I heard the…
“Bey’s Soup is the ultimate comfort food of the Balkans,” Dalida told me, as she began chopping onions. “We eat it in every season, at the holidays, for special occasions — all the time really.” “Who is Bey?” I asked. “Ah, that would be Gazi Hüsrev Bey ,” she said, smiling the way you do…
Sam Osmanagich, a Bosnian businessman based in Houston since 1992 and dressing as Indian Jones since becoming an amateur archaeologist in 2005. Growing up in California, I was steeped in the culture of goofy roadside attractions involving ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot, and ancient, unfathomable mysteries recently invented by hucksters who’d like to sell you a ticket…
“Whatever you do, don’t cross her,” Rich said, after our first encounter with the manager of our hotel in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. This formidable woman had issued a flurry of instructions and left a large, laminated card in our room listing more rules. No cooking in the room, despite the fact we had a…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
