Webgourmand – a site for the good life

My hokey description of what this site is all about

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Webgourmand – a site for the good life

ATTENTION!

Yes, gluttony is fine but...
it doesn't mean putting anything in your mouth just because it looks like something you can eat. There is a lot of junk out there that you should stay away from.

I am particularly concerned about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food supply. The biotech industry has managed to contaminate most of the food we can buy, and we cannot trust the government to protect us from that; you have to protect yourself. So, I encourage you to learn about GMOs. There is information about this in our site about health and the environment.

Please do not overlook this. This is serious business. I am not exaggerating when I say your health and your life depend on it.

Good eating.

So you want to learn to cook... even become a chef?

I did it backwards: I became a chef so that I could learn to cook. I did not go to culinary school; I made a decent living running my own restaurant for 12 years, then sold it and quit. Now, I just run my websites and do a lot of cooking, but purely for pleasure. When my friends come to my house, I can cook them things they can't even pronounce It's just a great time.

If you want to know how I ended up doing all this, read these stories from the Commentary section:

If you have a great recipe, I will publish it in the Recipes section here. Use the Contact page to tell me about it; it can include a photo of you and/or your dish. Whether to publish it or not will be strictly at my discretion, so make it good.

Check out the Online Store, where you can buy anything related to the good life - meats, fish, wine, coffee, chocolates, all kinds of goodies. And now, cigars too!

Most people think making a good paella is rocket science: it ain't so - it's actually a rustic peasant dish. There is no reason you can't make a nice one yourself.

Here are photos of one I made for my son's birthday in 2009; here is a good recipe, and here is an article about it.

Have fun!

This will be of interest mostly to San Francisco Bay area residents: read the best SF restaurant reviews, by Patricia Unterman. They are published every Friday, right here, in the Restaurants section.

Café BS, anybody?

I took a table in a so-called "cafe" in San Francisco and the first thing that caught my eye was the following list:

Caffè latte.
Café au lait.
Café con leche.
Milchkaffee.

For a few seconds, I felt like I was someplace in France or Spain. "How nice; this must be like a little dictionary to help travelers", I thought. But then I noticed prices, not all the same, following each item. Back on earth, I realized I was looking at a section of the menu.

People who order all these things in their own language just expect a cup of coffee with hot milk added or on the side. Except in the USA, that is, where nobody has thought of heating the milk so you don't end up with lukewarm swill. And "Coffee with milk", what everybody was ordering, did not appear anywhere on the menu. And why different prices? Maybe this was a front for currency speculators.

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