I have a lot of people asking me about breads recently – perhaps its because I’ve been doing a lot of baking recently. In May, Violet and Duro, an American couple living here (and dancing tango night and day) in Buenos Aires introduced me to a great No Knead Recipe. They happened to make a great instructional video on easy bake bread (see below) and talk extensively about doughs ….

I’m really fortunate to have my small group of expat girlfriends. Unfortunately, we don’t get together on a regular enough basis – ususally one of the girls will send out an email letting the others know that it’s time to catch up. She will set the date (usually a weekday so as not to disturb our heavily packed weekend social calendars) and time (since we all work, dinnertime just seems to fit perfectly). This girl then has taken on the mother of all responsibilities -cooking for her friends who show up with bottles of wine or champagne or even sometimes a little dessert for the group.

I just started getting into Mutations, a book that I bought a few weeks ago when I was in Chicago. Javier first found it in the library of the Architectural School at IIT and it was so fascinating that we ended up buying it elsewhere. It has various contributors, including modern architect Rem Koolhaas with the Harvard Project on the City, Stanford Kwitter and Saskia Sassen.

I browsed through this book for hours at first, looking at the photos and statistics and thinking about how everything in this book relates to everything I learned as an undergraduate student of Anthropology some years back.

A few months ago I was given the honor to make the birthday cake for Javier’s 87 year old grandmother. I browsed my various cookbooks and favorite recipe websites looking for just the right special cake until my taste bud memory reminded me of one of the most special cakes of all – the carrot cake! How could I have forgotten this great standby? Well, it seems to be missing here in Buenos Aires even though all of the ingredients are here and it’s a really easy cake to make.

But I must admit, when I said that I was going to make a carrot cake for the birthday party, everyone seemed to say the same thing, “No! Cake with carrots? That’s disgusting!” And then they tried it.

One of the major things about traveling around Tokyo is the great distances that you need to cover to get from one district to the other. At first we were quite intimidated to use the Tokyo Metro mostly because we were so used to the Buenos Aires Subte with its 5 simple lines. We had seen the maps before arriving, but perhaps just hadn’t mentally prepared ourselves for trying to figure out how we were going to get to our hotel after 32 hours of travel from Buenos Aires. And to see in front of us a Metro map of all the lines going in every which direction and not a single map in Romanji (Japanese words spelled out using English letters), well, we became the typical confused tourists.