SaltShaker

Buenos Aires – Yesterday was a cool and cloudy day, looking like imminent rain at every step. A few times a drop or two fell from the sky, but they never seemed to get enough support from fellow raindrops to continue. My friend Barbara and I decided to make it a day of museum hopping. [...]

Buenos Aires – A few things, from the last few days…
This is just oh so wrong. According to the deli I got it at, this squashball sized bread roll is a knish, or knitche as they had it labelled. It’s basically an empanada wrapper twisted into a round shape around dried out, unseasoned, mashed potato. [...]

Buenos Aires – I know, I’ve kept you in heart-wrenching, breath-held suspense for nearly a week. Harold won. That’s the short version. There’s not even much of a long version. It came down to two things – cooking skill and personality. The judges claimed that “this isn’t a popularity contest” – that was after the [...]

Buenos Aires – Francisco “Paco” Urondo was a poet, journalist, and militant politician, born in 1930, and, as I understand it, was one of “the disappeared”, or at least was taken into custody and killed by the Argentine regime at that time, and died in June 1976. Reading poetry in a new language is possibly [...]

Buenos Aires – I’d billed last night’s dinner for Casa SaltShaker as an exploration of my roots, or at least nearby roots – which, is a bit of an exaggeration. It requires considering the entire former USSR, and therefore all the various former republics, as if they were the same neighborhood. In truth, that part [...]

Buenos Aires – I set out on this little jaunt with the intention of writing what might be the most unfair review of my writing career. Not unfair because I had some predetermined plan, or because I thought the restaurant I was headed to was bad, or good, but because of how I thought the [...]

Buenos Aires – I have to admit, I was truly disappointed in the outcome of this episode, though I’m not sure I would have made a different decision than the judges did. It had to happen sooner or later. This was the first week of the “finals” in Las Vegas for our remaining three chefs, [...]

Buenos Aires – There’s a new player in the local world of pizza a la parrilla. I recently reviewed a couple of places that have been around for awhile, Morelia and Mamina, both of which I liked a lot. The new kid on the block, Minna (is there something with M’s and pizza a la [...]