Of fritters, ceviche and a woman’s right to cook

Thank you Karina Arrue and The Green Magazine for featuring The Cooking Diva this month!

Food blogging is a thriving enterprise these days; with over 48,000 blogs in theu.s. dedicated solely to culinary pursuits, these palatable web diaries are changing the way we relate to food. From popular blogs like Chocolate and Zucchini to Gluten-free Girl and Smitten Kitchen, there is bound to be a self-proclaimed foodie on the net, armed with the recipe needed to satisfy your precise hankering—say for an artichoke and goat cheese mille-feuille—at any given moment.

Their growing number leads me to believe that a small culinary miracle occurred when I stumbled upon the Cooking Diva a couple of months ago. I was looking for a recipe for carimañolas, a yucca fritter made in my father’s homeland, when I first came across Chef Melissa De Leon’s charming blog, and I have been a regular visitor since. The 30-something Panama native drew me in with her knowledge of Latin American cuisine, which is a rarity on the Internet—especially in English—despite the food blog boom. While her perspective on cooking is exceedingly cosmopolitan, no doubt a product of many years of living and traveling abroad, her voice is refreshingly warm and lacking the pretension often found in elevated culinary circles.

Open the PDF file with the complete article...Download MarApr08_DailyBREAD.pdf

by Chef Melissa - CookingDiva · April 03, 2008 · 06:53 PM
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