It was a spicy ginger chicken soup with brown rice and lots of vegetables, should get me through this short week, and everything came out of the freezer – frozen ginger knob is great, used a microplane to grate.

Returned from a nice long vacation and skipped out on all electronic media and news other than a few ebooks and films.

Read Wartime Lies, by Louis Begley, and saw The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, these are well worth mentioning, reading and seeing.

I was on a cruise to the Carribean and brought my own spice kit, it made the less tolerable food more edible, and it made a great sweet vermouth for a Negroni,

We had a 1 ltr bottle of gin, and a 1 ltr bottle of Campari, 1 Orange, a bottle of red wine and a small airline size bottle of my homeade bitters.

I’ve never heard of homemade sweet vermouth before. I took the red wine and infused it with a little simple syrup, added an orange peel, a few spices. It needed to be reduced, but turned out quite flavorful, one of the better vermouth’s I’ve ever had, and definately the best Negroni I ever had. Way too many.

Wishing you all a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

My cousins on my father’s side are preparing for a family reunion this summer, and we are planning to rent or borrow a kitchen from a church or institution so we can all cook together (not far from Cleveland, Michael, you’d be welcome). On my mother’s side we have an annual three day reunion during which my sisters and I cook a dinner for about 125 relatives. Every memory of my childhood is tied to cooking and sharing food with friends and loved ones.

happy new year to you and your family!

I seem to recall that you don’t like the term “home cook.” I, on the other hand, do like that term, use it to describe myself, and say out loud that your are the mentor of us HOME COOKS.

Thanks for everything – the spoons, and the bread, and, certainly, the fried chicken. Happy New Year to all the Ruhlmans.

I make my black-eyed pea dish for NYE with a smoked ham hock broth, black-eyed peas cooked with a mirapoix plus garlic and bay leaf, a pile of sauteed mustard greens, a poached egg, and a topping of gremolata.

You have to be organized, as you have preached many a time. I make a worksheet each week listing what we will have for breakfast and dinner and what needs to prepped/thawed in advance. You have to be dedicated. If your job has you on the road more often then not, this is not going to be easy or possible, though you can still do your best to make intelligent choices when traveling. But even busy employed Americans who can make time for television, internet, and any number of recreational activities can carve out some time to make sure someone in the home is cooking at home.

And Michael, perhaps you should go down to DC and teach a cooperative cooking class to the clowns in Congress. Maybe if they can work together to put a dinner on the table they can figure out a way to work together to avoid destroying our economy and our lives.