Mission District Tour

Jan 25, 2012 by

    My students and I recently went on a tour of the San Francisco Mission District with Edible Excursions. Check out some photos from our adventures below. Write-up coming soon! [Show as...

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Recent Photos from Chinatown Tour...

Jan 18, 2012 by

Here are some recent photos from our field trip to Chinatown. I'm teaching a course titled: Eat Your Words, Adventures in Food Writing for the Epicurious. (See description here and check out our class blog here.) We'll go on three food tours altogether, one to Chinatown, one to the Mission District (tomorrow!), and one to the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley. I highly recommend checking out our Chinatown tour company Wok Wiz Tours. You can read a write-up I wrote last year of our tour here. It was fantastic. Enjoy the photos! [Show as slideshow]...

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So you want to be a food writer?...

Jan 4, 2012 by

Of course, I don't want to discourage you. But it's good to know what kind of world you'd be getting into before you make elaborate plans to spend your life savings on a website and six months hacking away at your computer while photographing and blogging about your gourmet lunches. To give you a more complete picture, check out this video here (it's just a couple minutes and it's SO fantastic!). And check out these blog posts written by one of our guest speakers, Sarah Henry, writer for the blog Lettuce Eat Kale: Will Write for Food and So you Want to be a Successful Food Writer? Here's how. And here's a video by Lauren Lipton called "Adventures in Food Writing." A...

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I Love Julia Child

Jan 4, 2012 by

I'm teaching a course on food writing, and Julia Child of course is the hero de jour. Since this is my second time teaching this course and I'm the daughter of a chef, I have something slightly embarrassing to confess: I have never watched The French Chef until now. I'm ashamed, really--how could I have missed out on this pure pleasure for so long? But in a way I also feel so excited, because I get to experience her for the first time, like finding a friend you feel like you've known all along. I showed a short clip of this episode to the students in my food writing class today, where Julia shows us how to make non-traditional eggs. I just LOVE this episode--both for its relevance today, its topic (I love eggs), and...

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Food Writing Exercises: Writing the Senses...

Jan 4, 2012 by

"There are three important apples that have changed the world," one of my former students said when Steve Jobs passed away: The one that Eve ate in the Bible, the one that inspired Newton's theory of gravity, and finally the Apple brand that Steve Jobs created. I always loved that insight (which was something she'd heard somewhere, in all honesty, but was great nonetheless). In fact, I'm writing this blog post (and experiencing gravity) on an Apple product right now. Because of its rich presence in literature and history, apples are a great food to use for a sensory writing activity because it's so laden with meaning and metaphor. So, today I used it in our food writing class as a writing prompt, and I thought I'd share the activity here on our website....

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