Some photos taken at the legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company by Lauren Goldenberg just before Christmas. It was a cold and wet night, but the evening was intimate, in the softly lit upstairs room among used books. Notre Dame glowed out the window just across the river. A most magical place to read. And a perfect place to launch Rice Pasta Couscous in Europe!

Catching frogs beside Principato di Lucedio, south of Vercelli, northern Italy. July 9, 2009 © Jeff Koehler.

I am on the road right now in northern Italy, on assignment in the rice fields of the Po River valley – roughly between Milan and the mountains of Piedmont. That means I’ve been eating lots of risotto. But where there are rice fields there are frogs and I’ve been eating a lot of those, too.

Yesterday I had lunch with Countess Rosetta Clara Cavalli d’Olivola and her son Paolo of Principato di Lucedio – not just one of the finest rice farms in northern Italy but also the oldest (I wrote about them in Rice Pasta Couscous). We went to a small trattoria called La Bucunà in Fontanetto Po and had frogs with onions in a rich vinegar sauce and then a stunning risotto with Barolo and sausage.

Back at Lucedio, Paolo had one of the older women who live on the farm show me how to catch frogs. Using an old cane pole with a piece of prosciutto tied to a 4-foot-long piece of string, she bobbled it on the surface of a slow-moving ditch that edges a rice field and made clicking noises with her mouth. When a frog took the big wad of prosciutto in its mouth she yanked it up. The surprised frog came flying out of the water and through the air and she was able to catch it in her hand.

Well, most of them. Those she missed had us flaying around trying to grab before they could leap back into the water.

She put them in a cotton pouch tied to her waist and took them back to the farm, where they would be prepared for dinner.

In Aiguafreda, Montseny, Catalunya. June 28, 2009 © Jeff Koehler.

The spiced pears are brought out for dessert at Jnane Tamsna in Marrakech. June 2009 © Jeff Koehler.

A woman walking along Av Marginal in Maputo. April 2009 © Jeff Koehler.

Squid in Maputo’s Mercado Municipal. April 2009 © Jeff Koehler.

Afternoon light in the old station by the port. Barcelona, March 10 2009 © Jeff Koehler.

Driftwood resting on a radiator heater. Barcelona, February 2009 © Jeff Koehler.

Catalans celebrate Dimecres de Cendra (Ash Wednesday) by eating coca (flatbread) topped with roasted vegetables and sardines. Barcelona. February 25, February 2009 © Jeff Koehler.

Catching the train north. Estació de França, Barcelona. February 24, 2009 © Jeff Koehler.