I don't like to make promises I can't keep, and last week I promised myself that I'm going to eat pesto every day for the rest of my life. So far, I've made good on that promise. The only thing that might thwart me is a lack of big, copious bunches of fresh basil. Or my pounding arm wears out. No taking bets out there on whichever comes first, but I have a pretty good idea which it's going to be....

I recently read The Pedant in the Kitchen, which Michael Ruhlman also wrote up, and while I found it an enjoyable rant, one vexing thought that stuck in the author's craw was recipe instructions that call for "a handful" of something. He didn't know what that meant and wondered why recipes couldn't be more precise. Writing a recipe that's acceptable to absolutely everyone can be daunting, if not im...

In the south of France, they're pretty generous with les glaçons. It's never any problem to get ice cubes, which are often brought to the table heaped in a bowl, and sometimes even already added to the rosé for you by the barman. Contrast that with Paris, where a drink with ice may have one puny cube roughly the size of a Tic-Tac, languishing on the surface, tepidly melting away. Which I've alway...

My favorite travel tip that I rarely advertise is to tell people I'm leaving a day prior to my actual departure. And tell them I'm coming back a day after I actually return. That way, I avoid all those last-minute crises as well as returning home and being slammed by a few weeks of backed-up panicky messages on my machine. I think everyone's figured it out by now and after getting in late last nigh...

"The great thing about socca," Rosa Jackson told me, as we ripped into our second double order of the giant chickpea crêpe between us, "is that even if you're not hungry, you can still eat it." A few days later, while standing on the square in Vence, waiting while a young man poured chickpea batter onto a very hot oiled griddle, a timid young American woman asked him for a crêpe. He explained, in...