Hi, it's Mark Bitman, and welcome to food. As always, you can email us at food at

food at markbitman.com. This week, more importantly, you can find our new website at mark bitman.com or at bitman project.com

where you'll find a bunch of new features on this beautiful new website including

an easily searchable recipe database that will be growing

over time and quickly we hope.

All the recipes on that allow you to go into cook mode meaning your screen won't go dark when you're cooking from a recipe that's on your computer,

and allow you to keep your own private notes within much easier to print than before.

We'll be adding more and more features in the weeks and months

to come. Next week there'll be a gift guide with just books, plus our recommendations

for the best cookies to make right now.

The new site is really gorgeous.

I encourage you to check it out and subscribe to the Bitman Project

as well as through this podcast. We'll get back to that conversation in a minute, but first I want to talk about

something that lots of people ask me about when it comes to global cuisines.

There is something magical about eating a cuisine in the place where it

originated. One of the reasons for that is that the dishes that define

a cuisine are built around the produce that's native to a place. It's why the

feta and tomato in a Greek salad

taste so perfect in Athens, or the artichokes in olive oil in Rome are to die for.

They have a certain sweetness and tang that you can get close to but not easily replicate.

And not surprisingly, one of the best ways to get a sense for how something should taste

is to visit a region of the world and sample a dish in several forms

...