Culinary Adventures with Camilla

I'm always up for a reading challenge...and a cooking project. So, when a friend suggested that we read and cook from Dante's Divine Comedy , I didn't even blink: Yep, I'm in. We're still working on the format and she's leading the charge for this round. So, I'll post the invitation soon, but if you feel like joining the fun, please do! Get your hands on a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy . We'll be reading from September through November. Here are a few versions*... I've included a translated version, a parallel translated version, a graphic novel version, and a kindle version. Happy reading!   *Disclaimer: This blog currently has a partnership with Amazon.com in their affiliate program, which gives me a small percentage of sales if you buy a product through a link on my blog. I will only recommend products - usually books, cookbooks, but sometimes equipment or a DVD - that I have used and loved...not for any compensation...

These are all photos of funky fruits from my trip to Costa Rica a few fall breaks ago. Okay, so this isn't really a "book club" in the sense that it's not a club. It's just me, bolstered by a resolve to read more this year and read things that matter to me. Top of that list: food. No surprise there, right? My pick for the month of February was Adam Leith Gollner's The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession. This journalistic foray into all things fruit ran from historical to erotic and back again. While his descriptions read like full-color fruit porn, sometimes in a somewhat off-putting manner, I devoured his accounts of the truly fruit-obsessed such as the fruitarians who eat nothing but fruit, the fruitleggers (fruit smugglers, yes, really) and the fruitmafia (kind of self-explanatory), and the fruititects. I just made up that word, fruititects, but what would you call someone who builds a fruit? Have you ever heard of a g...

Though I am not big on New Year's resolutions, I did make one this year: read more. I've had a life-long love affair with books - for anyone that has ever helped me move, they can vouch for this fact - but once I had kids, I stopped reading for myself. It took years for there to be a book on my nightstand that wasn't a board book or one with more pictures than words. Seriously. Now that both boys read on their own, I miss curling up under their covers, a mass of arms and legs wrapped around mine while I try to hold a book where they can both glimpse at the pages. But I am grateful that I can now whittle down the mountain of books I have on my nightstand. I rarely read novels. Mostly natural history. Some historical fiction. But this year I found a Sustainable Food Book Club , or at least I found their reading list. I had already read two of the books on there; and I owned several of them. Remember that Everest of pages? So, I decided that was the perfect list to get ...