I am giving away a trip to Mexico! This all expenses paid (including air, hotel, and lodging) little getaway will take you to the Riviera Maya. Thanks to FunJet and Travel Leaders I am hosting a digital treasure hunt at paradisepursuit.com and on Twitter at @paradisepursuit. Check it out. All you have to do is follow the clues, solve a puzzle, and then go off and find the tickets. Register and start on your way today and by Sept. 25 one of you will be the winner of a killer vacation. Tell your friends; this is going to be a blast.

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Eater is rocking these days. If you don’t regularly log on to www.eater.com or subscribe to their national feed, you should. Their list of 2010 Fall Cookbooks alone is a great reason to do so. The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook is a killer, and ditto the Ferran book by Colman Andrews. Harold McGee’s new book is his most accessible and I think it will open up a whole new generation of cooks and readers to his material.

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I find myself once again in the uncomfortable place of apologizing for my lack of a blog last week, but I was wildly off the grid for two weeks. This is the busiest time of year for me in my other jobs, having just spent six of the last eight weeks traveling. I drove down the West Coast from San Francisco to San Diego, stopping at 30 different mobile food carts for my MSN.com series Appetite for Life and I shot four shows for the Travel Channel.

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I just got back from a riotous week on the road, traveling down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to San Diego. I ate at about 30 food carts and was amazed at what I found . . .

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We spoke with Donald Link recently, he’s the multiple James Beard award-winning genius behind all those great eateries such as Cochon and Herbsainte and the author of Real Cajun.  We asked him how its going down in the Crescent City regarding the seafood industry. 

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Sorry for the delayed posting but it’s been a busy week or two of travel. I did Nightline (it aired last Tuesday night, check it out at abcnews.com) and recording some Iron Chef America episodes in NYC (judging, not cooking). Nightline, like the Fallon show on NBC, has gotten sooooo much better over the last year; it’s not even a semblance of its former self. I would say much of this has to do with the new crew and the hard work of a great group of reporters and producers. I am biased, but John Berman and the Beard Award winning producer Sarah Rosenberg are doing some great stuff. Not to mention the new focus on food at Nightline has me feeling all warm and fuzzy. 

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Well it's safe to say that it appears as though the absolute worst place on earth to open a restaurant is downtown.

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I hope you all caught No Reservations last night on the Travel Channel. Tony Bourdain aired his Heartland episode and I think it's one of the best hours of food TV I have seen in a long time.

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Ringo has parted company with chef Ryan Aberle. It is extremely rare for this to happen in the first 90 days of a restaurant's operation. It’s particularly puzzling since owner Jim Ringo so heavily touted his confidence in his chefs by also making them his general managers (an experiment now ended).

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Summer is here and the time is right for dancing in the streets; barring that, don’t walk, but run to Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. and get your barrel grill. What a sweet grill and great looking to boot. Click on the “furniture” section on their site. Go to Big Ass Hot Dog if you expect a crowd this weekend at the cabin. I love this stuff. If you want a great drink recipe for the grill this weekend, check out andrewzimmern.com and get the Southside recipe. Awesome.

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