Eating out

"How we understand ourselves as modern and civilized, how we have cultivated the types of social exchanges that seem proper and conventional, and how we have developed our appetites and chosen to enact them in the public arena are the main preoccupations that frame this book. 

"The popular practice of dining out is a means for exploring these concerns, as the restaurant itself is located squarely in the space between the private and public."

Joanne Finkelstein in "Fashioning Appetite: Restaurants and the Making of Modern Identity"

In a pickle

"Despite the fact that my first two cookbooks are always shelved with the jam making and canning books, I am a fan of kitchen tinkering of all stripes. I live for drying, salting, curing, marinating and brining. I am simply fascinated by the meditative practice of taking a foodstuff and transforming it with little more than salt or sugar, heat or moisture, time and magical bacteria.

"Enter the humble pickle. Although I love all of my kitchen creations the way a mother hen loves her flock, pickles have truly captured my heart (and my stomach!). I swear, I could live on little more than hot rice and cold pickles, provided they are crisp, flavorful, pungent and bright. It is only natural that, with so many Asian flavors spilling from my dinner bowl plus so many years of traveling to Asia and living there for a spell, my interest would turn to pickles of the Asian continent."

Karen Solomon in "Asian Pickles: Sweet, Sour, Salty, Cured and Fermented Preserves"