About a month ago, I went with my friend Louise to Natural Deli.  We both had some free time scheduled around our lunch hours - so we decided to head out for a quick stroll and grab something to eat at a neighboring cafe. When we arrived, it was almost 1pm, so the lunch crowd really hadn’t arrived yet.  I just loved the atmosphere with lots of light, tables, a really nice setup around the cash register that really showcased some of their muffins, cookies and dessert cakes that were displayed in a glass refrigerator. It’s a good thing, too that there was a glass separating me and those desserts, or I would have had to try one of each and that would have been disasterous for my spring/summer figure!

It just so happened that two of my friends, Kate and Annette dropped in for brunch at the same time as Louise and I, so I got to see not only how lunch tooked, but breakfast too!  Anyway, Louise and I wanted some of those fresh fruit shakes and their wraps.  Just everything looked so good on the whole menu, I wish I could have ordered one of each!  I finally decided on the Mexican Wrap, which to be honest, was one of the tastiest wraps I have ever had in my entire life (and I know wraps! I used to go to Camille’s in Chicago all the time for lunch!).  The guacamole had just the right amount of spice and zing! Louise ordered a beautifully prepared salad with peppers and mushrooms - just divine looking!  Each plate came piled up so high with salad and a lovely dressing that was not too heavy nor too salty or spiced, it was - in so many words, just right!

Kate and Annette had gone a little traditional with breakfast - and I completely understand why.  Just look at that picture! Big coffees, homemade toasts… yummy!

After lunch, we decided to take a look around the store.  There were all kinds of organic foods, spices, shampoos and cleansers, and much much more imported and local goods.  I was totally impressed.

So when my friends Rebecca and Mojgan wanted to meet for lunch a few weeks ago, I immediately suggested the Natural Deli.  They live a little closer to the ND location in Las Canitas, so we went there instead.  We got there right in the middle of the lunch hour, so our wait was somewhere around 45 minutes to be seated.  There certainly weren’t as many seats, but it is understandable as the whole locale is a lot smaller than its Barrio Norte counterpart.  When we were finally seated, I was so hungry for good food, I could hardly speak.  We each immediately ordered a different shake and unfortunately, only two of the six listed on the menu were available.   Then as we were going to order a variety of wraps, they let us know that not everything we wanted was available - again.  Rebecca couldn’t add chicken to the wrap that she wanted either, nor could she ask for a different kind of wrap without a certain ingredient that her food allergy wouldn’t tolerate.  Oh well, I still promised them good food, and we figured whatever we ordered would be good anyway.

When we finally got our food, I was a little disappointed to say the least.  Yes, the Mexican wrap had the same great flavors, but it was a lot smaller than the one that I got when I was in the Barrio Norte Natural Deli.  And the side salad was pretty skimpy,  with a skimpy dash of oil on top.  I thought that they had run out of lettuce until the couple next to me received their beautiful fresh salads piled high on their plates about 40 minutes later.

So I left thinking, probably the Barrio Norte Natural Deli was much much better.  I had the opportunity to introduce an Argentine friend of mine to my favorite Natural Deli.  She had only been to the local in Las Canitas and had a good experience there so I was excited to be able to show her the locale which I thought was much more light and impressive.  Everything was good - the service, the salads, the fresh bread - everything except the fact that the menu had changed.  I was truly dissappointed to see that some of the interesting shakes had dissappeared along with my favorite Mexican wrap.

We instead tried a wrap with some beef, eggs and mustard that had an exquisite flavor and a salad - one of those piled so high with lettuce, you can’t see the plate - I loved it.  I hope the menu change is something that happens seasonally - as I wasn’t as inspired by the new menu as the old one.

But if that Mexican wrap doesn’t come back, I will have to try my hand at making wraps at home.

bring it back.

Nothing brings back memories like food to me.  See, back in the day in Chicago, I would spend a lot of time at my Italian grandmother’s house.

My grandmother, was actually born in Brasil to Italian parents. They later moved to Conzenza, Calabria in Italy and lived there before she moved to and settled down in Chicago. Elisabeta was her name.  People called her Elise, but I knew her only as “grandma”. She almost reached five feet tall, was round and had long grey hair that was always braided and carefully positioned in a bun on her head.

She wore the same kind of dresses all the time (never pants) that stopped right below her knee and always had some kind of pin with the Virgin Mary or some saint on her lapel.

Originally, my grandparents and their family lived on Taylor Street in Chicago - this was where lots of Italian immigrants lived at the time. The area is known as “Little Italy”.  They lived in a house with a few families - if I remember my father correctly, they were all related somehow.  When the city was building Cook County Hospital, they bought out the house where my father’s family was living and they moved to a small Georgian in Mt. Greenwood on the South Side.  It was there that my grandparents lived out the rest of their long lives - and it was obvious that not a day went by that they took that home for granted.

Approaching the house from the street, you might see my grandfather sitting outside watching the driveway or talking to company.  If my grandmother wasn’t inside cooking, she would be sweeping the walkway or driveway clean.

During the daytime in the week, she was constantly in the garden.  All along the side and back of the house were roses and flocks of all different colors.  Towards the back of the yard was her herb and vegetable garden.  I could easily guarantee that she was the only person on the block to have a grapevine that produced beautiful white grapes in the summer months.  In the center of the back yard was my grandfather’s pear tree.  Every year, it would produce the most delicious, juiciest pears you could ever imagine.

My grandmother always greeted everyone with a good kiss and some massive cheek-pinching - no matter how old you were.  And if you bought friends to visit, she would kiss them and pinch their cheeks as well.  If you arrived on a Sunday, she would first greet you at the door with a sprig of parsley dipped in fresh holy water from church that morning. She would practically beat you with the parsley, mumble some blessing in Italian and then proceed with the cheek-pinching.

Sometimes we would go to have dinner at her house - and my parents would end up in the kitchen until late at night playing Scopa or Briscola with my grandparents or whomever else decided to stop in that night.  Usually, my great uncle Louis, great aunt Teresa, aunt Mary, Big Joe, my aunts and uncles, or the neighbor from down the block, Rose, would be there to play cards, have coffee and talk about the old days.  The kitchen would smell of coffee and anisette - either because of the anise cookies that my grandmother would always have available to eat, or the Frangelico Liquor that the men all put in their coffee.

It’s the smells that I distinctly remember from her kitchen that really inspire my sweet and savory cooking.  In fact, the flavorful food that came out of her house really has become my standard from which I judge the Italian cuisine that I make and eat today.  Not only was my grandmother a great cook, but she could cook in enormous quantities.  With five children and over 30 grandchildren and even some great grandchildren stopping at her home intermittently throughout the week, she must have been cooking on the same scale as a small restaurant.  No wonder why my sister Liz always recalls that every time she came into Grandma’s house, she was in the kitchen cooking something or other - and you always knew that after the cheek-pinching you would hear “Mangiate!” Eat!

Her legacy in our family was the infamous meatball, but there were so many other things that she could do - and so many wonderful flavors that she introduced to us.  She made veal milanesas, aranchini, pasta sauces, all kinds of meats, lasagnas and pizzas (ohhh she made the best pizzas!).  She knew about cooking simply to bring out the flavor of the foods. She made these wonderful lemon glazed shortbread cookies - although my aunt Marilyn would always come over with the best sweets.

When I saw this weeks choice at Tuesdays with Dorie for Almond Biscotti, it just bought back all of these memories of my grandmother’s kitchen.  That’s usually what happens when I hear the word “biscotti”.  My friend Zoe came by on Monday and I took some time out from cleaning the mess left by the painters in my house to get some sanity and work a bit in the kitchen. The biscotti, although a nice flavor, to me - weren’t the consistency of a good biscotti.  They should have been crisp, and less crumbly.  Although the cornmeal was a great addition to the recipe and gave a lovely flavor - it’s just not how a biscotti should taste, look or feel.  That being said, it’s the only dissapointment that I’ve found in Dorie’s book so far.  The rest are gems.

I just found this hotel.  Now I want to go to Mexico City, just to stay there. It’s called the Condesa, Districto Federal.  mm mm mmmm. http://www.condesadf.com/

Do I actually have female readers? Well, if you exist, this is for you. In particular, this is for my friend… let’s call her “Smurfette” since she can’t reveal her true identity for fear of the Paparazzi finding her here in Buenos Aires… yeah, that’s you Smurfette.

On April 25th of this year at the Milano Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Tokujin Yoshioka revealed his Bouquet Chair as part of the Moroso Collection.

The Bouquet chair is an evolution of the designer’s previous tissue installation held in the Moroso Showroom last year. In that installation, a wall was covered by over 30,000 sheets of tissue to create a softer and more engaging space. Yoshioka has applied the same intent to this chair. The fabric squares, or petals, allow the chair’s user to feel embraced, evoking a similar feeling to that of receiving a bouquet of flowers.

The petals of the chair are designed to return to their original form once a person stands up - just one of many details that make this creation such a great design. Yoshioka explains that “the new chair Bouquet uplifts the sitter as well as a flower bouquet does it to the receiver. The vibrant colors would evoke one’s remembrance.”

Remembrance, indeed. This design will be hard to forget.

“Let’s go see a PowerPoint Presentation” is probably one of the least common phrases muttered when discussing with friends what you’re going to do and where to go for an entertaining night out, however on Tuesday the 29th of April 2008, creatives, designers, architects and people hip to the scene will get together at the Konex Theater to watch 14 people present their PowerPoint Presentations and partake in the worldwide phenomenon of Pecha Kucha (pronounced ‘Peh-chak-cha’).

Pecha Kucha Night was originally started in 2003 by Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein - two architects based in Tokyo who wanted to give their architect friends an opportunity to discuss their ideas, projects, designs and inspirations. However to curb the long-winded speeches of the presenters, they decided to impose some rules: first of all a presentation had a limit of 20 slides presenting images and each slide could only be played for 20 seconds. This limits each presentation to exactly six minutes and forty seconds - hence the Japanese word ‘Pecha Kucha’ roughly translated as ‘chit-chat’.

During the following years, Pecha Kucha Night has evolved into a global phenomenon - reaching 122 cities worldwide and sharing the intellectual and creative climates of each region with the attendees. One of Buenos Aires’ famous Pecha Kucha presenters is singer-songwriter Kevin Johansen who last presented in December of 2006. This coming Pecha Kucha’s line up is boasting architects, visual artists and musicians all preparing to share their motivations with Buenos Aires on that night.

So by all means, check it out - it promises to be rather fast-paced and definitely not the boring PowerPoint Presentations that we (unfortunately) have become accustomed to at our jobs. But maybe attending a Pecha Kucha Night can inspire us to change that!

So check out these links to find out more about Pecha Kucha in Buenos Aires and around the world:

http://www.pecha-kucha.org/

http://www.pechakucha.com.ar/

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-09/st_pechakucha

The design of the National Library of Argentina is dominated by color, texture and its imposing structure. It is one of Argentina’s most notable modern structures and well-suited for Argentina’s largest library and the library with one of the most important collections in South America.

In 1960, poet, essayist, writer and chief librarian Jorje Louis Borges called for a new building to serve the growing collections. Three hectares were set aside by national law for the building between Avenues Libertador and Las Heras, Austria and Aguero. The work was awarded to architects Clorindo Testa, Alicia D. Cazzanica and Francisco Bullrich. The cornerstone was laid in 1971 and the work was completed and inaugurated in 1992 by the President Carlos Menem.