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My favorite television program at the moment is The Amazing Race. In case you have never watched this U.S. program, it's a reality/adventure show where 11 teams of 2 (the combinations vary from married or dating couples to parent and child, roommates, best friends, and so on) race around the world and try to end up being the first at each leg's destination. The final winner wins $1 million. It's really a fun show that even many reality genre haters like.

I never finished my musings on food during my summer trip to England, and in the meantime I spent a month last November in the U.S., partly in New York. Before it totally disappears from memory, here is a brief roundup, from a foodie perspective of course.

Before we proceed, you should know that I am an ex-New Yorker, and had a fairly specific food agenda this time around, which included the following:

Hi everyone! Well it has been a while since I posted, and I've gotten many comments, emails and IMs wondering if I'd stopped updating this site. Well, I haven't. I've just been very busy with other stuff.

I've also been wanting to update the design for some time, and this past week I finally got around to that task too. The new design is a bit less busy than the old one (I think anyway), and it feels ready to accept fresh new entries now!

At the moment, I’m trying to lose some of that weight I put on during my vacation where I indulged in the delights of suet pastry and other things (And well, there’s some pre-vacation gain there to lose too.) This means of course that dreaded word, dieting. I do prefer to use the term “food intake adjustment” though. It sort of sounds more scientific.

I am off to England via France (we are driving there...) early tomorrow morning. I will be totally offline during that time (I really need a break from the computer, since I work with it all the time, so I'm not even bringing my laptop...), but I'm hoping to gather some good food tales while I am there.

Just a quick note: I haven't been posting lately here because I hurt my left arm recently (and I am left handed), and doing any kind of serious cooking with one arm is sort of difficult. :) I hope to be cooking and posting more as soon as I can though.

The appeal of a buffet is rather obvious. It’s that notion of having no limits. No limits, unlimited, all you want—all you can eat. Human beings respond to the notion of no limits very positively.

And yet…about 99% of the buffets I’ve encountered are pretty bad. Food is either dried out horribly (such as chicken, or the surface of sushi rolls), is overcooked (such as…chicken again, or fish), or smothered in an insulating blanket of sauce that effectively chokes out any kind of real flavor.

People in the northeast and mid-Atlantic states of the U.S. are now experiencing an assault of cicadas, that only occurs once every 17 years or so. No such insect attack here in Switzerland fortunately, but one sort of "bug" we see a lot of around this time are chocolate Maierhäfer, or May (June) bugs. They come in all sizes, from tiny foil-wrapped ones to monster bugs up to around 30cm long with bristling legs, which frankly look way too scary to eat to me.

Being a chocoholic and living in Switzerland can be a dangerous thing. Just going to the supermarket, one is confronted with row upon row of high quality chocolate, the type that you'd have to pay a premium for in the U.S. Aside from perhaps the cheapest brands, most Swiss chocolate bars in the US $1-2 range are delicious.