Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

My aunt is a vegan and she used to grill portabella caps and make this vegan gravy with soy sausage and soy milk. Even as a child, I loved this alternative "biscuits and gravy," and I HATED mushrooms when I was little. I got the recipe from her and now I make it all the time as a healthy brunch. It is seriously delicious. She is truly a master of spices and man does this dish display that in full form...

The Various Flavors of Coffee by Anthony Capella is a fiction book that is very food-and-drink-centric. It's sort of a cheesy romance novel, but it has a lot of interesting coffee banter in it. Hey, then there's the Vino-lover's, Sideways by Rex Pickett and A Good Year by Peter Mayle. For foodies: Cooking for Mr. Right by Susan Volland, The Secrets of the Tsil Cafe: A Novel with Recipes by Thomas Averill-about his mother's catering business and other slice-of-life moments...

Ooh, here's a good list... Thank you internet...
http://www.multcolib.org/books/lists/foodfic.html

I would love to learn more about Indian spices. I love to make Indian food, but it seems like everything I make tastes like curry and I tend to overspice or underspice. Not good. Also my Thai is a little rusty.

My family are all vegetarians. When I was little, my mom's favorite thing was to imitate foods from other cultures than our little country hometown. We'd spend hours in the library every weekend looking at recipes and pictures of food from all over the world and then recreate them at home. We'd spend entire months fine-tuning one cuisine and then another. My favorite memory is of making focaccia bread for a neighborhood bake sale.

We spent two days in the kitchen when I was seven covered in flour and pressing buttery fingers into the doughy tops of each loaf. When we brought the individually wrapped, rosemary-topped loaves to the bake sale, we had to answer question after question about the bread as most people had not seen focaccia before. We sold it all in an hour. It was a lot of fun and I loved being a little kid, but being asked all of these serious questions about cooking that I knew the answer to.

Ever since then we've been asked to make focaccia for almost every family or community function.

Hand-made rosemary focaccia, grilled panini-style, with red onion marmalade, brie, thinly sliced pears, arugula, and grilled chicken breast glazed in honey/rosemary. SO GOOD