I'm the new Southern Cooking Editor at BellaOnline

That's right y'all. I've got another new gig--"Southern Cooking" editor over at BellaOnline.com. Check me out here. I spent a little over a year writing about chocolate for the website's food and wine channel, waiting for this topic to open up. And now it's mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.
All those grease-spattered recipes I inherited from my mother and grandmothers will now be unleashed on the web. (And none too soon--some of the recipes are so faded I can barely read them and in a year or two they could be as lost to time as fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.)
Coming up in the next few weeks will be recipes for George Washington's birthday cake (a delicious cake with cherry and walnuts that I've never found anywhere else), directions for soups and winter vegetable casseroles and even a little White Trash cooking. And in the summer there will be barbecue and potato salad and strawberry shortcake with honest-to-God shortcakes and not those mushy sponge thingies they sell at the grocery store.
Stop by and bookmark the site.

Huffington Post on the Most Romantic Spot in Paris

The Ponts Des Arts bridge with the love padlocks. Read more about it here and click through the slideshow.

Must have been that extra slice of buche noel.

The official kilogram kept in Paris and used as a standard, is gaining weight. And nobody quite knows why. The full story here.

The word of the year is Hashtag

The American Dialect Society is at it again. Click here for their roundup of best new words on Mental Floos.

Vulcan's Fire Salt

Do you know the kind of damage you can do with a $50 gift certificate to The Spice House?  A lot.
I've been trolling through their catalogue and already have a list of six things I'd like to get, including green mango powder, which I've never tried and have been wanting to.
This hot salt (Vulcan Fire Salt) caught my eye though.  It pretty much has everything a spice blend should have.

A site that will give you the inside scoop on Paris

Heather Stimmler-Hall's blog, Secrets of Paris, has been online since 1999. Her publishing company, Fleur de Lire, publishes (among other books), the Naughty Guide to Paris.

Download Paris Pastry App

New for the new year: our favorite foodie expatriate, David Lebovitz (Living the Sweet Life in Paris) has a Paris Pastry app you can download (through iTunes) of his Paris Pastry App.