For that end of the summer or Labor Day party drink look no further than sangria. And look no further than this piece I wrote on preparing Spain’s iconic drink for two sophisticated, naturally sweetened versions of it. Included are two recipes — for red wine sangria and also one for white wine. I guarantee that you will be squeezing the last drops of liquid from the fruit.

I am pleased to share that my essay on the glories of fresh sardines, written for the literary magazine Tin House, has been selected for inclusion in Best Food Writing 2010. I will be sharing space with some of my favorite authors, including Colman Andrews, Calvin Trillin, Ruth Reichl, Alice Waters, and Frank Bruni.

The official blurb says:

A new edition of the authoritative and appealing anthology, comprised of the finest culinary prose from the past year’s books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and Web sites. With food writing and blogging on the rise, there’s no shortage of treats on the buffet to choose from, including selections from both established food writers and new stars on everything from noted gastronomes to how to fry an egg, from erudite culinary history to delectable memoirs. Evocative, provocative, sensuous, and just plain funny, it’s a tasty sampler platter to dip into time and again.

Best Food Writing 2010 features top-notch writers like Colman Andrews, Calvin Trillin, Ruth Reichl, Alice Waters, Frank Bruni, and many others.

The book will be published in October. Pre-order it here.

Just in time to preempt a whole flood of emails about cousins and bosses’ kids visiting town this summer is a piece I wrote in the new in Virtuoso Life magazine. My picks.

On a high-end note: staying in the new Mandarin Oriental Hotel might be above the budget of most, but dinner at Carme Ruscalleda’s Moment’s Restaurant in the hotel is a worthy splurge. Eat there and you will see why she is the only female chef to have 5 Michelin stars. Well, 5 for now. More to come with Moments. Guaranteed.

I am pleased to announce that I have just signed a contract with my publisher—Chronicle Books in San Francisco—for a new book on the rich, sensual, and sophisticated cooking of Morocco. My fourth cookbook for Chronicle, it will slide into the long deadline of The Country Cooking of Spain I am currently working on.

The book will contain around 80 recipes, a lengthy introduction on the foods, people, history, and geography of the country, and an extremely detailed glossary of Moroccan ingredients. As well, it will have 100 images from around the country capturing it diversity. I will be taking these on my travels as well as shooting the finished plated food shots. The book is slated to be published in 2012.

Although one can speak of a singular, unified “Moroccan cuisine,” each region has its own dishes and cooking styles that reflect a distinct geographic location, climate, and history. The goal is to get beyond the classical Fez- and Marrakesh-style cooking that fills most Moroccan cookbooks, and traveling to places that will offer other angles on what exactly “Moroccan cooking” means—from the Rif Mountains to Laâyoune, from coastal Asilah and Safi to the date-filled oasis of Zagora, from rustic Berber cooking of the High Atlas to the Spanish influences in the far north, from the dizzyingly complex flavors to Fez to simpler ones of the nomads in Sahara… Morocco, it seems, has it all.

Such scope means extensive travels around the country. I have traveled quite broadly in the country over the past decade but for this project I am aiming at 8 to 10 days a month “in country” focusing on a region at a time. These trips have begun and will continue into next spring.

I will be adding a page to this site soon with more details on the book, notes on my travels and updates on the books’ progress, and perhaps even a recipe or two that I am working on. Check back here from time to time.

Today, February 22nd, I am featured as Author of the Day on Cookstr. Click around the site. You can find a handful of recipes from La Paella plus thousands more from some great chefs from Rick Bayless to Alice Waters.

My arroz de pollo made Cookstr’s 10 comforting casseroles. Julia Child’s Scalloped Potatoes and Anya von Bremzen’s Lamb with White Beans and Tomatoes sounds pretty good, too.

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I will be a guest on Martha Stewart Living Radio’s Everyday Food talking about rice — all types of rice — on Thursday, February 18th, at noon Eastern Standard Time. Tune into Sirius Channel 112/ XM Channel 157 to listen live!

A posting in today’s Daily Beast on Moroccan tajines.

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I have an article on that Spanish liquid gold, olive oil, in the current issue of Virtuoso Life magazine. Click here to see it in eBook form.

It opens like this…

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!