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“Consuming Passions”: Hawaii…
It’s February, armpit of the year, when a girl’s thoughts turn to sunshine and maybe a pink parasol in her drink. We’re talking Hawaii here. We’re talking surfer boys with lean tanned bodies, endless waves and Technicolor sunsets. America’s improbable 50th state, a tropical island paradise plopped in the middle of the Pacific, is …[Read more]
In seafood shacks, at gourmet tables, and especially during a stomach-defying live-fish auction, Reggie Nadelson discovers the true—and a new—Hawaii. It's 5 a.m. at Honolulu's fish auction, and I'm eyeballing a quivering Hawaiian opah, a pink and silver moonfish, round and flat as a plate. 
Redesigning your mother's engagement ring is serious business. Reggie Nadelson travels to Gstaad and master jeweler Andrew Grima to get it done right. "Shall I surprise you?" Surprise me! Andrew Grima, a big man with a generous smile, sits behind his desk in his shop in Gstaad and scribbles a design for a diamond ring 
I love ice cream. I mean, I really love it, as much as sex, almost as much as Frank Sinatra, more than Manolos. I'll eat anything sweet and frozen (and have): yogurty vanilla ice cream in Red Square in the dead of winter as Soviet soldiers ate their own; an exquisite prune-and-Armagnac flavor at Berthillon, on Paris's Ile St.-Louis; Vassar Devils (hot fudge and marshmallow sundaes served on brownies) accompanied by many gin 
One grim winter morning, Kurt Wallander—the cop hero of Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers—gets the news that an elderly couple has been murdered outside the Swedish port town of Ystad. You can feel the damp and cold of the city, the area's melancholy, as Wallander drives across the raw, flat land to their farmstead. Like all the Wallander 
For her latest culinary adventure, intrepid cook-in-training Reggie Nadelson heads to Harlem, where she learns an authentic southern specialty from a revered master. The oil sizzles, snaps, crackles in the seasoned black cast-iron pan. The skillet feels a hundred years old, something seasoned with depth and age and history. Tentatively I pick