From the monthly archives:

May 2008

“Because I am Basque, and the Basques cook Basque”

2008.May.15 Thursday

 The singular remarkable fact about the Basques is that they still exist.” – Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World Buenos Aires – Leandro “Koko” Egozcue is not a name that’s familiar to everyone who dines in Buenos Aires, but it’s a name that ought to start being so. He’s the young and quite [...]

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Interviews…

2008.May.14 Wednesday

 You shouldn’t speak until you know what you’re talking about. That’s why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? They hand me a script. I’m a grown man who puts on makeup.” – Brad Pitt, Actor Buenos Aires [...]

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Irving

2008.May.14 Wednesday

 There is an element of truth in every idea that lasts long enough to be called corny.” – Irving Berlin, Composer Buenos Aires – One of the things I get asked about most with Casa SaltShaker is “do dishes ever just turn out terrible?” or something similiar to that. After all, often, especially when I’m [...]

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Description of a Struggle

2008.May.11 Sunday

 To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.” – Walter Benjamin, theologian, essayist Buenos Aires – There’s no question that much of what Franz Kafka wrote had a major impact on [...]

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Fall Back

2008.May.08 Thursday

 [America's] first settlers were emigrants from different European nations, and of diversified professions of religion, retiring from governmental persecutions of the old world, and meeting in the new, not as enemies, but as brothers. The wants which necessarily accompany the cultivation of a wilderness, produced among them a state of society, which countries, long harassed [...]

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Crisis, Schmeisis…

2008.May.07 Wednesday

 Everybody has a plan to save the Middle East. That guy with the bumper sticker does. Most of your friends do. Neocons have a plan. Peaceniks have a plan. Likudniks have a plan. The Bush Administration certainly thinks it has one, and we’re told the Democrats are working on theirs. Tom Clancy imagined deploying the [...]

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How to Roll a Falafel (and other stories)

2008.May.04 Sunday

 A waiter arrived with a tray of falafel, the one item on the menu that didn’t taste as if it had been scraped off the wick of Aladdin’s lamp.” – Tom Robbins, skinny legs and all Buenos Aires – Continuing on my educational journey about one cuisine or another or method of cooking, I noted [...]

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