Viva Variation

In living the research for The Silk Road Gourmet, I found that modern, western cookery imposed something of an artificial uniformity on the art of the kitchen by demanding that all food adhere rigorously to prescribed recipes.  By comparison, in much of southwest and Central Asia, recipes are given with ingredients such as “greens” in them, with no specific mention of whether the cook means … Read more

No Guru, No Method, No Teacher . . .

Thank you, baby . . . To celebrate the publication of the first volume of The Silk Road Gourmet, my husband took me to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks show on Friday night. Astral Weeks has always been one of my favorite albums by Morrison, along with the string of those that he recorded with the Pee Wee Ellis band in the mid-1980s: Into the Music, … Read more

The Welcome Wagon

Greetings and welcome to the Silk Road Gourmet Blog.  I started the website as a companion to my book – The Silk Road Gourmet which features recipes from countries that were once part of the great Silk Road trade.  For over 30 years I’ve been travelling the world, eating and collecting recipes, and just recently decided to gather some of my favorite Asian recipes together in … Read more