Welcome to Slices of Blue Sky!  On this site you’ll find my musings about a wide variety of topics — everyday home cooking, explorations of obscure ingredients, weird popular culture, and much more.  There’s a small chance the archives will look familiar, since much of the content was created under the banner of Mental Masala (2005-2016) and imported to this site in late 2016.

I grew up in mid-Michigan eating a post-war Midwestern diet: plenty of jello, crispy shell tacos, casseroles, and the like. It was all skillfully prepared, but came out of a fairly narrow cultural window. It wasn’t until I moved to Berkeley, California to go to graduate school that my culinary world opened up. I still live in Berkeley and enjoy cooking the excellent local produce, visiting the great outdoors, and digging for obscure information in the marvelous U.C. Berkeley libraries.

I’m a bit of a nerd and a researcher at heart, so while I’m researching and writing my posts I often go “down the rabbit hole,” digging up books and articles to find the answers to my questions (recently:  is millet used to make alcoholic beverages?  What is the story behind the filming of the 1970s TV show “Emergency” in Compton?).

Previously, I have written for several blogs that have disappeared (but are still available on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive):  The Ethicurean, Eat Local Challenge, and Growers and Grocers.

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This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic License. If you use any of my posts or photos, please let me know.

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