I want to improve my photography as much as my cooking. Nika, from Nikas Culinaria and Curt from Bucky’s Barbecue and Bread have teamed up to develop an on-line course on food photography. The first lesson is up and it starts from the basics. Something apparently simple, as adding light to a scene with a flash can be tricky. A pile of almonds may be well lit, but the crannies and the background may be dark.…

There are over 12 billion web pages. And that excludes the deep web. Finding cool pages is hard, and there are web sites that help you out by aggregating other pages. Find a site with tastes like yours (or better, cooler than yours) and you have a great bookmark. Cool hunting started out in 2003 as a collection design related web pages and posts and has grown into a well visited site with postings on fashion, art, and design.…

Great summer workshops are one of the perks of academia. Some of these workshops become the gathering place for the influentials of a field. The workshops at Cold Spring Harbor defined DNA science. So it is with the workshop on molecular gastronomy at Erice. This small medieval village in Sicily is the home of the Ettore Majorana Centre, which hosted the first meeting on molecular gastronomy. Organized then by Nicholas Kurti and today by Hervé This, the workshop bring together the who’s who of the field every two to three years.…

I must be the last one on the web to have figured this out. But just in case I was next to last: A fun way to surf food blogs is to go to Taste spotting the food related eye candy web site from Jean Aw and friends. Anyone can submit an image for review. If the editors like it, it goes to the front of the queue. If connections were fast, visual web browsing would be the way to surf.…