“Ask yourself this: Which is more important to you? Who is on the bus with you or where the bus is going?”
Now, my answer to that question was and is “who”. And that got to apply to some new fun changes in my life. As of July 2005, I set out, for an indeterminate amount of time, traveling. I had said that I was now an “itinerant traveler” and went and looked up the definition to make sure I’d got it right. Turns out that that’s redundant – itinerant means either as a noun someone who travels from place to place, or as an adjective, the same. I was merely an itinerant. E-mail, instant messaging, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, have become the methods of communication with my friends and family back in “the States.”
These days I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with the “who”, my husband, Henry Tapia. We have a lovely little duplex apartment in the Recoleta neighborhood, with two patios and a garden. I run what here is called a restaurant a puertas cerradas, or closed door restaurant, called Casa SaltShaker, but prefer to think of it like the dinner parties I used to run in New York, the Second Sunday Supper Circle. The “motto” is “Food. Wine. Conversation. New Friends.” and several times every week I bring together people from all over the world, from diverse backgrounds, of different ages, to eat, drink, converse, and, hopefully, make amigos, over the dinner table. Henry helps me out in the restaurant most nights, but his primary passion and career is teaching tango and folklore dance.
I’m not going to get into a detailed bio and work history, suffice it to say, I’m a trained chef (originally via apprenticing, later through Peter Kump’s Cooking School, now the Institute of Culinary Education), a trained pastry chef and baker (Roberto Goni’s Escuela de Pasteleros), and a certified Advanced Sommelier (Court of Master Sommeliers), and have a Higher Certificate from the Institute of Masters of Wine. I’ve worked in both award winning and unnoticed restaurants since 1973, with a few years off here and there to try my hand at other things. I’ve had both my food and wine lists win awards and garner ink in national and international press and magazines (primarily US and Argentina), and even more electrons, have been spilled over both. But I’ve probably spilled more of each writing things myself. I’ve been writing since my first journalism and creative writing classes in high school (thank yous go out, respectively, to Brad Spencer and Oakley Winters, my teachers in those), wrote for my high school paper, a local “underground” paper, and newspapers and magazines ever since. I went through a “phase”, no, that’s not fair, I gave a turn at performing at stand-up comedy at one point, and I’ve got clips from some of my shows here. And, not particularly relevant to what I do these days, but I went to University of Michigan for a BS in Bio-Psychology and thrust an incomplete stab at a PhD in Clinical Psychology at Long Island University.
Mostly, these days, I write about food and wine, and a bit of travel, but the “historic” archives include a bit of other stuff too – GLBT issues, humor, space exploration, and more. The intent of this website is to bring together an archive of all of it, bit by bit, along with various scribblings that I just feel like collecting here. I’ve written three books, one a Spanish-English and vice versa food and wine dictionary: SaltShaker Spanish – English – Spanish Food & Wine Dictionary (Bilingual) (English and Spanish Edition)
Last note about this website. Obviously, if you stop to think about it, blogging didn’t exist at the time when a good percentage of these articles, menus, etc., were written or happened. But I decided for organizational purposes it made sense to date things to when they happened, and here and there I’ve added commentary that is obviously from my perspective looking back from today.