There’s always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

~~John Updike ~~

Here at Gherkins & Tomatoes, I indulge my obsession for the life-giving nature of cooking and growing and eating food. My focus is global and historical. I write about what interests me, mostly books and cooks.  Essentially, it’s all about “culinary exile.“^©

Food always has been a big part of the amazing life I’ve lived. So have cookbooks. I literally live surrounded by walls of cookbooks, over 3500 of them.

Starting with Peace Corps in Paraguay — then years in Mexico,  Honduras, Haiti, Morocco, and Burkina Faso, working as a nutritionist — with months of traveling in Europe sandwiched in between, all those on-the-ground experiences turned me into a citizen of the world and an admirer of the women who worked impossibly hard every day to feed their families. I’m also a Southerner, transplanted from Washington state, and it’s been 26 years off and on that I’ve called the South my home region. My genes are English, descended from some of the earliest settlers at Jamestown, namely Richard Pace and Thomas Lane. Full circle, you might say.

That experience underlies everything that I write about, overt or not.

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The title of this blog,”Gherkins & Tomatoes,” sprang from the title of the eponymous painting by Spanish painter Luis Melendez’s painting, 1772, Prado, Madrid, one of the first European renditions of tomatoes.

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For more about the creator of “Gherkins & Tomatoes,” go to Details.

To contact Gherkins & Tomatoes, please send an e-mail to gherkinstomatoes@hotmail.com or leave a comment on one of the posts.