One of those great web discoveries is Carolyn Tillie's food-inspired jewellery.

Carolyn told me that she studied  Metalsmithing in California but spent the next ten years in the food and wine industry. She has now turned her hand to producing "gastronomically-inspired jewelry to whet the appetite".

Her themes include Champagne, Just Desserts, Bento Box and Farmers Market. The food bits in the jewelry are reclaimed and recycled Japanese gumball machine toys, known as 'gashapon' which are decoratively set in sterling silver and 14k gold. There's lots more here.

zee, 13th May 2010

Fuchsia Dunlop is a world authority on Chinese cooking and her books, articles and blogs are an absolute delight.  

Here she talks about her latest book, Every Grain of Rice, which, unlike her others, is not focused on one province, but is a collection of delicious everyday recipes, mainly from southern China.

This is an extract from a longer interview and discussion on Chinese food with Mark Hilton of Xiamen University which will follow shortly.

Things occasionally get bought, put on a shelf and forgotten about.

Pre-Christmas stressed shopping, I'd grabbed this elegant cone-shaped little bottle as something different for non-alcohol drinkers.  Sounded deceptively traditional, Cox's Apple and Plum cordial.

On Christmas morning (not great forward planners here) a last minute challenge was to find a way to make one very  small bottle of home-made sloe gin (or was it vodka?) go round ten guests.  A much loved book, Cocktails: How to Mix Them was still on top of the piano where it has lived for many years having been passed down through  at least three generations.  Undated, but with the feel of a war-time utility edition, it is by "'Robert' of the American Bar, Casino Municipal, Nice, and Late of the Embassy Club, London".

Robert had the answer - and we had the ingredients:  Sloe Gin Rickey. (1 or 2 lumps of ice, the juice of half a fresh lime, 3/4 gill of Sloe Gin, fill up with cold Soda).  Perfect!  So was the non-alcoholic version, invented as the doorbell rang with the first guest, 50/50 cranberry juice and ginger ale.  It matched exactly the light raspberry-coloured Rickey,  the forgotten cordial in the pretty bottle abandonned on the sideboard.

We've only just opened it.  It is absolutely delicious!

(More from Robert's Cocktails will, undoubtedly, follow)

Adam Gopnik's The Table Comes First is a witty meditation on life and food.  It is subtitled Family, France and the Meaning of Food.  Jesse Thompson reads two extracts here.

You can also see Adam Gopnik in conversation with Fergus Henderson, who unwittingly gave him the title for his book, in our Watch section.

Spring by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. This magical and bizarre portrait, painted in the 16th century by the Italian artist,  is part of his Four Seasons series which resides in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Take a closer look at his fascinating and whimsical paintings  made up of vegetables, fruit and flowers, fish and books here.

Vegetables in a Bowl or The Gardener

zee, 29th April 2010

Time for another picture by Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Here are two  versions  of Summer, both painted in 1573.  You can see the date and the artist's name in the embroidery on the jacket.

Photos courtesy of www.giuseppe-arcimboldo.org

zee, 10th June 2010

Meet TimH. Film student, YouTube star, sometime editor for Talking Of Food... in his own words:

"I say stuff about things on the internet".

On a recent trip to USA, Tim reported on popular food culture in a series of 10 videos. Starting with Burger Culture and ending with Standing in Line, his take on pretzels, pizza, ice cream and fast food chains is delivered in his own very individual style - fun, quirky and informative.

Screenwriter, novelist, award winner, journalist, playwright… just a few of the words that describe the literary careers of James and Kay Salter.  They are also responsible for one of the most delightful musings on food in print, Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Day Book published by Knopf.

Whether writing about Peanut Butter, The Sandwich, Samuel Johnson's appetite for good eating or The Siege Of Paris this quirky collection is unequalled in its information, erudition and utter originality.

Extracts from the book are read by their son, the actor Theo Salter.  Enjoy!

Tony Shaloub and Stanley Tucci in The Big Night, a delightful film about two brothers from Italy opening a restaurant in America which becomes a cultural battleground between the old world and the new. If you haven't seen it check it out... it's great.

Two of the great eccentrics of English cinema, Robert Morley and John Le Mesurier (best known as Wilson in Dad's Army), matched for the only time in their careers... and happily in a scene about food!