Another random snapshot from my friend Tom back in Connecticut.

Work has me bogged down as I prepare for a project scheduled to start in a couple of weeks. I take off for Tucson on Friday. I was on cruise control until obstacles were thrown in my path by our customer which I can not discuss for many reasons including the desire of continued employment, confidentiality, and non-disclosure agreements. Anyway, I will not have a lot of time to post this week. I should be able to catch a breather when I arrive in Arizona and take a day or so off to visit some family and friends before project begins.

In the meantime I have been hooked on reading Bill Buford's Heat and I think the subtitle encapsulates it well: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. The former fiction editor of The New Yorker and author of a book about soccer hooligans (Among the Thugs) dives in as an apprentice to Mario Batali. This is a very funny book and hard to describe as it is part history, part biography (of Batali), part auto-biography etc... Take my word it is worth it. It even inspired me to attempt a recipe (pork chops) from one of Batali's cookbooks with a mixed degree of success. Anthony Bourdain sums up Buford's book better then I could here at Amazon. Read an excerpt here.