I am not a fussy eater. This makes finding things to eat in foreign countries both easy, and exciting. I especially love the reaction from local people when they learn you have tried a special and often unpopular local delicacy, and enjoyed it. I'd like to share with you some food experiences I have had in the past few months.

Move over azuki and sweet sticky rice. While Japanese pastry chefs may have started using cocoa a few centuries after the West, this once foreign flavor has captivated Japan's confectionery world.

Amid the din of a dozen kids beating batter, squeezing lemons and bustling about a commercial kitchen, Luca Lawandos expertly cracks an egg and separates the yolk from the white using the shell.

Table No. 1 from the famed New York City restaurant Elaine's has sold for almost US$9,000 at auction.

When he spent his days smoking crack cocaine and helping women sell themselves, Brandon Hicks had little occasion to ponder an herbed goat-cheese tartine.

If the restaurant world had farm teams, Chez Panisse is where the talent scouts would hang out.

When a friend gave Joey Redner a taste of a beer that had been aged with Spanish cedar — the wood used to wrap and box cigars — he knew it was an idea worth stealing.

Nestled in the lush countryside of western Belgium, the abbey of St. Sixtus is home to 22 Trappist monks who have chosen a life of solitude and silence ruled by the sixth-century Benedictine principles of “ora et labora” — prayer and work.

RABAT -- Standing on the side of a road in a hectic north African capital may not be what most people would consider the ideal place to eat boiled snails.

A Rembrandt drawing stolen from a California luxury resort hotel and reportedly worth US$250,000 has been found in a church, though the thieves are still on the run, officials said Tuesday.