Category: Links

My 7 Links: Selective Best of Roving Gastronome

Ah, blog tagging! I’d forgotten about such a thing, paddling way over here in my little Queens tidal pool. But the excellent Conner of Here Is Havana just reached out and tagged me for this 7 Links round-robin. (Here are her selected links–all pretty great reading if you’re curious about Cuba.)

So hop into the way-back machine with me, and let’s check out some goodies:

1. Most beautiful post:
I’ve got 845 of the buggers. I can’t find the one that used to make my throat constrict and tears spring to my eyes. Can’t even remember what it was about. So instead: How I learned to cook, via Madhur Jaffrey.

2. Surprisingly successful post:
Just scrolled down to see what was charting as my most popular post. What?! New Mexico #4: All Aboard the Rail Runner? This warms my heart, because I guess this means I’m not alone in loving trains.

3. Most popular post:
Technically, second-most-popular: Car Insurance in Mexico: My Experience. This is my most straight-up, just-the-facts-ma’am post ever. So I just ignore the fact that it’s popular, because that might imply that my lyrical wordsmithing and my deep, deep thoughts might not be the reason people read this blog. La la la, I can’t hear you, stat counter.

4. Most controversial post:
My commentary on the flap around Thomas Kohnstamm’s book about his first gig as a Lonely Planet author. Stupid Yahoo killed my comments in that era, but eesh, I got an earful by email. I stand by it all, though I take even fewer freebies than I used to–not worth the trouble.

Runner-up: I complained mightily about Pistilli, Astoria’s worst developers, in Why Astoria Will Never Be Cool, and it pulled out all the love-it-or-leave-it Queensians who didn’t get the tone. Again, no comments thanks to Yahoo, but there were some gems. Years later, I’m channeling my Pistilli loathing into Astoria Ugly.

5. Most helpful post:
I set up this blog back in 2004 to record the details of our pig roast, because at the time, I couldn’t find anything similar online. Turned out the pig rocked, and we did a lamb for good measure. And in the course of writing the specs down, I also wrote a long story. And years later, that story got turned into a section of Forking Fantastic!, and then people read that and did their own. So by that definition, that single post has likely helped the most people.

Runner-up: Cancun bar bombing: not a tourist issue. I woke up one morning and was dismayed to see people freaking out on Twitter about an explosion in a bar in Cancun. I used Twitter then to spread the word about the bar’s real location. I hope I helped some people feel less freaked about traveling to Cancun.

6. Most underappreciated post:
A whole set of them, the ones I wrote about Robert Farrar Capon’s book The Supper of the Lamb. Rereading them (start here), I can’t say they’re really bursting with my best writing, but I feel like they’re underappreciated because not every. single. person. has written to say “Thank you thank you thank you for introducing me to this book!”

On the other hand, come to think of it, maybe these posts are how I came to know A Thinking Stomach? In which case, I’m completely satisfied.

7. Post that I’m most proud of:
I think this one about the Momofuku cookbook, line cooking and copy editing. After seven years of blogging, I think I’m finally getting better at controlling my urge for digression. This one is focused and doesn’t gallop off by itself.

Now time to pass the hot potato. I tag:

A Thinking Stomach: I live vicariously through her garden.
Killing Batteries: Fellow LP author, master of the miserable/hilarious trip diary.
Food Bridge: All the nuances of Israeli food. Which I have not yet eaten, and it kills me.
Hudson Line Rider: Beautiful smartphone pics of an NYC commute.
Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking: Kate the Great, bursting with tips and thoughtful words.

Carry on, and happy blog exploring!

The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking

A couple of days ago, I peered into the shelf where we keep the sheets and towels, and something looked odd. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

A tiny act of domestic order, courtesy of Kate Payne

And then I realized: That light-blue duvet cover was folded properly!

How could this have happened?! I searched back in my brain, back back back, till…last week, when Kate Payne was visiting. Yes.

Kate is the eponymous Hip Girl, and she’d been here for a couple of days in the early stages of her press tour for the magnificent new Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking, a splendid book that I’m just having the pleasure of getting to know.

Kate is one of the best things to come out of writing Forking Fantastic!, because she saw the book and decided Tamara and I were just her sort of people, and tracked us down, and she was completely right. The first time I went to her apartment, I realized I was in the presence of greatness, because she’d managed to make a basement in a Bed-Stuy row home look like a palace, and she’d only been living there a matter of months.

By contrast, when people come to our house, where Peter and I have lived for five years, they often say, “It’s so…lived-in!”, which is a euphemism for “It’s so…dusty, and why is this coffee table so sticky if you don’t even have any children?” Due to steady work and lots of travel, we’ve lost the thread on a lot of the domestic arts, so the HGGH couldn’t arrive at a better time.

Kate’s book is so full of tiny bits of wisdom (how to manage your compost, how to hem your pants, how to make bread) that I’m getting that feeling that everything is possible. Even folding my sheets properly, so they give me that sense of peace and order when I look at them, instead of a feeling of panic.

So I’m dog-earing pages and making lists and looking at my laundry with a fresh eye. And I’m completely loving Kate’s approach–that managing your home life is empowering and makes the whole rest of your life better. And while Kate may have more natural talent for rigging up ingenious things with clothespins, she’s also just a super-enthusiastic beginner who’s tenacious enough to stick with things until she learns how to do them. Or until she realizes that maybe perfect isn’t the goal, and that good enough is just fine.

Just at the moment, I don’t have free time to improve our whole house, I’m just briefly setting the book in the various trouble spots, ritualistically, hoping its magic will rub off and start to instill order. In our bedroom, which is a pit of organizational despair. Or over by the pile of half-finished sewing projects. Oh, or there, on that shelving that’s the catch-all for crap on the second floor.

So I heartily recommend this book, which is a joy to read. And this isn’t even because Kate gives a big shoutout to FF! in it. It’s because I realize how much I need this book, even though I thought I was reasonably domesticated. Which means pretty much anyone setting up a home anywhere needs this book.

If you’re in the NYC area tonight (May 9), you can nab your own copy at Greenlight Books. I’ll be there. Even though I probably should be home folding my sheets.

Cancun Is the New Tulum

Finally, all in one place, with photos, my thoughts on why Cancun is not a place for smart travelers to flee, but a place for them to challenge their ideas of authenticity, and what it means to have fun:

Cancun Is the New Tulum, in this month’s issue of Perceptive Travel.

(And honestly, this has nothing to do with the climate change conference happening there now. For better or worse.)

Crap, and I didn’t even mention the shrimp tacos with the Doritos garnish! Well, you’ll just have to buy my Cool Cancun & Isla Mujeres iPhone app for that…

Conned in Cairo, and a Mexico connection

I’m just back from Mexico and catching up on a lot. Happened to read this truly excellent essay at Perceptive Travel about getting conned in Cairo–and the surprising value in it. Cairo is really a test of travel skills–if you keep your guard up too much, you miss the good stuff. In this situation, I think I probably would’ve missed out on the author’s experience.

And by happy accident, the author, Jim Johnston, lives and blogs in Mexico City, where I’m headed in January, and am all fired up to read more about. Thanks, internet, for hooking me up…

By the way, on this Mexico trip, I finally finished David Lida’s First Stop in the New World–it was slow to get into, but wound up covering all kinds of fascinating aspects of the city.

Stay tuned for more meaty posts and photos from the Yucatan in the next few weeks. I finally got myself a snazzy camera, so there’s a lot to sort through.

Postcard from Chile

My brother, Casey McFarland, is in Chile right now. He’s a wildlife tracker and the author of Bird Feathers: A Guide to North American Species which is released today. In Chile, he’s supposed to be tracking mountain lions, though it sounds a lot more like he’s taking 20-mile hikes in armpit-deep snow and seeing everything but mountain lions.

I’m a little hazy on the details because I’m a city mouse; Casey’s a country mouse. It’s very thoughtful that Casey thought to put his wilderness experience in Chile in even terms I could understand. He sent me this photo:

He writes:

super rad little place on the “highway” from coyaique to cochrane- a 300 km stretch of rutted, potholed dirt road through the mountains.

run by a really nice gal- a wood stove and the griddle heats the place… two buses welded together. she made a mean “churasco completo” which is the chilean hamburger, more or less. but it’s just a big slab of meat on pan, with mashed avocados, sliced tomatoes and a little mayo (or sickeningly massive amounts if you’re not careful). pretty damn good.

spring seems to be here- some flamingos showed up the other day- funny to see them standing in the bleary, high grassland mountain lakes with snow covered peaks all around.

Funny, that’s exactly what I thought about the bus–something so tropically colored in a totally wrong environment, like it took a hard left somewhere in Colombia and just eventually got stuck in that snowbank.

Casey’s still in Chile, even as Bird Feathers: A Guide to North American Species is released. Spread the word to all your birder friends!

He and his co-author worked insanely on it–there are some great candid shots of them elbow-deep in feathers at the book website.

Cancun bar bombing: not a tourist issue

I was dismayed to check the news today and see headlines about a bar getting bombed in Cancun–this is tragic, no matter what. My additional worry was that some nightclub full of tourists has been blown up. But it’s not the case. The bar, the Castillo del Mar, is well out of any area tourists would go.

Here’s a Google map I made. The approximate location of the bar is marked in red. Tourist zones are highlighted in green. Even my very adventurous app guide to Cancun doesn’t go farther than these green areas.


View Cancun bar bombing in a larger map

The bombing apparently had something to do with organized crime, and it hit staff, not customers. Of course this doesn’t mean a complete guarantee of safety for tourists, but it is extremely unlikely a tourist would get hurt in Cancun, and no one should change their travel plans based on this event.

I’m especially peeved about the news item on Momento 24, which calls the Castillo del Mar a “bar of tourists,” which is patently not the case. Fox News is almost is bad, because it IDs Cancun as a “resort area” and never explains where the bar is. And surprisingly, BBC is also flaky, as it never locates the bar either.

CNN is much more responsible, as it explains the location of the bar.

And the Diario de Yucatan coverage (the moderate Merida paper, the biggest in the region) doesn’t mention tourists at all!

MSNBC initially reported that the bar was in a tourist area (Twitter post was “Mexico Violence in Tourist Area of Cancun”), but issued an update on Twitter later and posted an updated story.

UPDATE: Per a comment below and several online news sources (including a corrected Diario de Yucatan story), I’ve moved the location of the bar. Guess what? It’s even farther from possible tourist zones.

Cool Cancun & Isla Mujeres App

Check it, guapos! Your Cancun vacation just got a million times better!

With Sutro Media, I’ve just published my collected wisdom on Cancun and Isla Mujeres in the form of a snappy little iPhone app, Cool Cancun & Isla Mujeres.

It’s got more than 100 listings. Because it’s me writing, of course it’s a little food-obsessed (shrimptacosshrimptacosshrimptacos!!!), but there’s also practical advice on how to choose hotels there, which beaches are best, how to navigate Cancun transportation, etc.

And for now, the price is just 99 cents! Snap it up now, and you get free updates for life. (And you know I’m obsessed with updates–you’ll get information in the app that’s as fresh as I can make it!) And if you do buy it, I’d love to hear your comments directly, or in a review in the iPhone app store.

Welcome to the Jungle

How to induce cognitive dissonance: read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, then go to a pig roast. Where the hosts are playing Guns N’ Roses.

That’s how I spent my winter vacation in Bali, and I wrote about it for this month’s issue of Perceptive Travel. You can read the whole thing here: Eating a Personal Pig.

I also liked Jim Johnson’s story about Morocco–specifically, about a guy visiting his octogenarian mother who’s volunteering for the Peace Corps in some Berber village. Ah, squat toilets. They somehow make me happy.

There’s also a far more charitable review of Chuck Thompson’s To Hellholes and Back than I would’ve written. I know he said all that stuff about Muslims just to enrage sensitive flowers like myself, but, dude, those pushy, money-grubby kids in India are not pushy and money-grubby because they’re Muslim. The fact that you nearly got ripped off doesn’t merit several pages of anti-Islam screed that just shows you’re kind of ignorant.

BUT I was interested to read about the Congo, so that chapter’s worthwhile. And of course I’m happy to read anything about how great Mexico is, even though people are freakishly afraid of it. (Man–I just read some random review of a hotel in Las Cruces, NM, that mentioned the guy had stopped there for the night instead of El Paso, because of the violence in Juarez. Uhhhh, what?!)

More Pie: My Kinda Recipe

I’ve been out of the loop here for a week because my dad and my brother were visiting. We made pumpkin pie on Sunday. It was kind of funny when both my dad and I were squinting at the recipe on the Libby’s can, and talking through how we usually modify it (1.5X spices, cream instead of evaporated milk, big glug of brandy, and I add nutmeg).

Which leads me to these totally realistic instructions for making pie crust. This Sunday, I decided to follow some Cook’s Illustrated instructions, just to see. Not a substantially better crust, and eight times more a pain in the ass. Of course.

And, in other news, Tamara and I will be on The Brian Lehrer Show every Thursday in December–that’s FIVE times, people! Start thinking of your holiday-entertaining-related questions (like, “How do I not have a nervous breakdown?”) now!

On Travel Writing

Last week, I rolled back into town and right back on the wee rec-room stage at Word to talk about travel writing.

This is basically a big shout-out post. But since there’s so little community among travel writers (we’re always, um, traveling), it’s nice to wallow in it a bit.

Great night! Although I was rather long-winded, as I’d gotten accustomed to entertaining bookstore crowds for 30 minutes, while riffing only off one other person. At Word, we had a panel of me, AnneLise Sorensen (who was my editor at RG for a bit) and Sarah Hull (who I can’t find a link for, but I don’t think is a Hawaiian Tropic swimsuit model on the side–but maybe?).

All moderated by the ever-delightful and sharp-dressed Katy Ball, who gets mad props for steering the discussion off the usual rocks of freebies-or-not, local-or-not and wow-your-job-is-awesome that ring the island of guidebook writing.

Aaand it was all sponsored by Jauntsetter, a website/email newsletter/blog that is so up my alley (I’m a woman; I live in New York; I travel) that I’m embarrassed I didn’t know about it until a couple of months ago, when Katy put this whole thing together. It’s great to see something allegedly for the ladies that is not pink and decorated with silhouettes of handbags and high heels. In fact, it would not horrify a man to read the site either.

In other travel news, I went into the corner 7-11 for the first time ever (WTF–why do we need 7-11 in NYC, the capital of corner bodegas?), just to look at the little Domo coffee cups. I wandered around the place like I was in another country, ogling all the weird food products in there. Did you know they make Sour Gummi Bright Octopuses now? Also, I’ve seen squirt cheese before, but never squirt chili. There were two little paper plates under the pump dispensers to catch the drips. There were many obscene-looking drips.

But the real kicker: cheeseburgers shaped like hot dogs! Sitting there in the little rolling hot-dog grill! I couldn’t actually see any cheese, so I assume it’s in the center and squirts out when you bite in. Shudder.

I was so shocked by it all that I didn’t even buy my Domo coffee.