Hey everyone and welcome to Food. I'm Kate Bittman. We're so glad to be here and please remember that if you have questions or feedback you can email us at Food at mark bitman.com please also check us out online at bitman project

dot com our new site is growing by the day now with more than 500 of mark's best

recipes last week kary wrote about the versatile more than 500 of Mark's best recipes.

Last week, Carrie wrote about the versatility of brown rice cereal.

She used it to make a crunchy accompaniment to a Kimchi salad.

She used it in a caramel apple cobbler, so basically everything but

cereal. And Mark wrote about his current enthusiasm for mushrooms on toast

using dried mushrooms. Plus Tucker Shaw on good enough being good enough when it comes to cooking.

That's Fitmin Project.com. 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 it cuisine are built around

the produce that's native to a place.

It's why the feta and tomato in a Greek salad tastes 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

from lots of different neighboring areas. Then you can

appreciate the local variations as well. And the most efficient way to do that, for

me at least, is the first-class experience of a Regent Cruz.

I was able to do that on our recent all-inclusive tour of Asia.

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