BREAKFAST ON KALYMNOS

That's a big bowl of fresh Greek yogurt with black cherries and melon drenched with local honey -- breakfast on Kalymnos, the island where we recently touched down for a week. We stayed in Emporios, a village at the very end of the main coastal road, where goats roam the hills feeding on the thyme, oregano and rosemary that grows wild. So the meat here comes pre-seasoned and all those wild herbs help cancel out the eau de goat. The goats wear bells around their necks, each tuned slightly differently, so the goatherds can tell which goat is where. The result -- a daylong goat symphony from the hills.

The family that keeps the goats and the bees invited us to join them one afternoon as they made their rounds. A pretty steep hike, especially for flatlanders from Florida. Thousands of years ago, the rocky facade above Emporios served as a fortress when the locals had to fight off invaders, and the sanctuaries they carved out from the mountain still hauntingly remain, like armored faces looking out on the sea. The payoff comes at the top -- a view for the ages.

Faces from the road

These are some of the good people we met during our week on Kalymnos, Greece. Kalymnos is the island of sponge divers, and back in the early 20th century, when the Mediterranean sponge beds began to decline, many Kalymnians moved to Florida. They settled around Tarpon Springs, founded the now-famous Greek community there, and started sponge diving in the Gulf of Mexico. Everywhere we went on Kalymnos, whenever we told folks we were from Florida, we heard something like: "My great uncle Stathos, he lives in Tarpon Springs. You know him?" Next stop: Tarpon Springs. There are a lot of people we have to look up...

Confessions of a Food Writer

Here follows the introduction for GUT CHECK. And it includes one bombshell revelation about my former life (after the jump):


I’m a lucky guy. I get paid to write stories about eating food. It’s a pretty good scam. And if I could somehow figure out a way to get paid for, say, breathing air or getting dressed in the morning, I’d jump all over that, too.

            Come to think of it, I have gotten paid to write about breathing air and getting dressed in the morning, but that’s a whole ‘nother book. This one is about food. It’s also about love and loss and hopes and dreams and life in far-flung places. It’s about people I’ve known and people I admire and people who bug the bejesus out of me. It’s about food I like and food I don’t like (a very short list) and food that makes my skin crawl just to think about (and I mean that in a good way.)