Burgers on parade

Incredibly bad taste. I hope you hate the 9/11 reference as much as I did. Jeez.

Also, A great list of vacation spots. You probably knew most of this, but interesting to see it complied in one place.

Finally some new content on Culinary Intelligence. com

Read our review of the Henckels Four Star II Santoku (an Asian cooking knife shape) on the Culinary Intelligence site.

Reading List, Lately

On the off chance that anyone cares, I thought I'd list a few of the things I've been working my way through (especially since some of them were Christmas presents that I haven't adequately thanked people for.)

• 
  Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore; Jennifer Mclagan Nice big cookbook on the topic of, well, bones. Of course, there's roast marrow bones, lots of stock recipes, and more.
  
• Secret Ingredients, The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, David Remnick This is a lovely compendium of stuff from the whole history of the New Yorker. Note that the the 1939 article about "beefsteaks" cited in this NYT piece is included in the book.
  
• Cooking for Kings, Ian Kelly. Charming, well researched life of the Mario Batali of the early 19th century.
  
• The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin. This link is to a modern version - I read a facimile of the 100-year anniversary (1925) translation of Brillat-Savarin's 1825 original. Chatty, with little "physiology" in it, but still the original, in many ways.
  
• The Falklands War 1982 (Essential Histories). Quick Survey of the Thatcher/Galtieri war whose most useful outcome was ending Al Haig's career.
  
• 
  The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 (Essential Histories). Another quick read, catching up on a conflict that I more or less ignored in the 80's, when it was happening.
  
• The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905 (Essential Histories) A refresher course, as a run-up to the following.
  
• 
  The Czar's Last Armada, Constantine Pleshakov. Gossipy, Russian - point - of - view tale of the dispatch of the 2nd (and later, 3rd) pacific squadrons of the Czarist Navy from the Baltic, half way around the world to fight the Japanese. Led to the first real naval battle of the 20th century, and marked the emergence of Japan as a naval power.
  

A word about these "essential histories;" they come from Osprey Publishing, and are usually well-written, furnished with a small but adequate set of maps and illustrations, and are pretty well-edited (although the Iran-Iraq book transposes "Iraq" for "Iran" in one caption, confusing me mightily for a while until I figured out it was a mistake.) If you want a quick briefing on a war or a campaign and they have a title for it, you could do a lot worse.