photo by ashley at notwithoutsalt.com

In more recent years, I’ve become a salt fiend.  I don’t know why the sudden change, and didn’t realize it until every margarita order was specified with, “Please make it heavy on the salt.”  I used to chastise my father for adding salt to everything, making sour/grossed-out faces every time he added his favorite seasoning to a dish.  Salt, to me, was something that tasted “icky.”  What can I say, I had (and have) a perpetual sweet tooth in my youth.

However, my love of salt has become recently apparent, and I am always searching out savory-sweet recipes that incorporate a little sel in their making.  A recent recipe hunt caused me to stumble upon Not Without Salt, a blog by a pastry chef named Ashley, which celebrates all things salt-ified.  Her photography (which is always what draws me into any blog) is exquisite, and her recipes, inspiring.  A recent post about Bacon Caramels made its rounds through my office, where co-workers and I equally drooled and marveled at the combination.  Knowing how much I love Salted Caramels, I just might have to give these a shot…

It’s been a little quiet around here, lately, and I apologize for that.  This past week has been crazy between packing for my trip to Costa Rica, helping organize a bar night fundraiser for my team’s 3-day Walk for Breast Cancer (please donate here if you’re so inclined), and celebrating my impending doom entry into spinsterhood 25th birthday.  I kid, I kid.  I’m very excited to be turning a quarter-century old.  I’ve learned a lot in the past two-and-a-half decades, even more in the past 2 years, alone.  I feel 25.  I embrace 25.  I’m ready to be 25.

Am I where I thought I’d be in life at this age?  Heck, no!  And I couldn’t be happier for it.

Anyway, I wanted to give a blog shout-out to A.J. Rathbun, but this time for Amazon.com’s Al Dente blog.  AJ is a kitchen buyer at Amazon and contributes to their fabulous kitchenware/cooking blog.  He was so kind as to give my blog a shout-out on there, and linked to that gorgeous Kirsten Lepore film I’ve talked about.  Check it out!

All right, I’m off to get fabulous and drink wine and eat Italian food at Pomodoro with some of my closest friends.  Ciao bellos!

Are you a curry newbie and can’t seem to remember how to distinguish between green, yellow, and panang?  Check out All The Curry, a site developed one night by friends Brendan and Justin.  The website is a one-trick pony, but does so engagingly well.  With a striking graphic of 5 different curries (green, massaman, red, yellow, and panang), you can scroll over each for an explanation and evaluation of flavor.  Mmmm… those tubs of curry are giving me a craving.

Also, I recently joined the world of Twitter for the food-blogging gig.  You can follow me at @keynotesbecca, if you’re Twitter savvy.  Which leads me to my next thought, this: Twitter on Paper.  Ingenious.  And very tongue-in-cheek if you think about it.  The creator of the site, which launched yesterday, will literally take your chosen tweet, write it down in some artful manner, and mail it to you.  For free.  For the cost of exactly nothing, he will make you a beautifully designed paper version of your tweet.  I’m entirely entertained by this idea!  I think it’s endearing and a totally welcome harbinger of the whole technology-backlash I envision taking place sometime soon.  But more on that later… I need to eat.

Looks like everyone has soup fever!

TheKitchn.com has declared February as Soup Month.  They’ve been posting a brilliant array of fabulously sexy soup recipes (just in time for Valentine’s Day, no less).   As always, the site has gorgeous photographs and recipes posted every day.  Definitely check it out!