Top Recipes of 1999

Congratulations! If you're reading this right now, you survived Y2K.

What's the best part of finally reaching the year 2000? Not reading any more "Y2K-Survivalist" food articles. Bring on the crisp greens, the fresh herbs, and the worldly spices! To heck with beef jerky, freeze-dried corn, and Tang. I want real food.

In celebration of real food, here's a selection of favorite recipes from 1999's Kate Global Kitchen. They don't use any of the survivalist stockpiles stashed in your basement, so save the cardboard cuisine for an earthquake or other natural disaster. With any great luck, you'll never have to use those shrink-wrapped packets of astronaut and Mt. Everest food at all. (If you ever invested in them in the first place.)

Top Recipes of 1999 Looking back, I realized that some of you are new readers, but quite a few have been with us for several years. To recap the history of our site, it was in 1994 that publisher Thomas Way and I created the very first food and cooking e-zine on the web. More than five years later, we're not only still around, but in 1999, the Global Gourmet added the Versailles World Cookbook Fair award for the Best General Food and Wine Website to our list of kudos.

Bryan Miller of the New York Times recently hailed us as one of web's top three food sites, calling us "quirky and informative... a strong and entertaining site"—a description that we find rather appropriate. Quirky is not bad. At least it's not predictable.

And being unpredictable, I have no idea what I'll be bringing you in the year 2000. I can guarantee I'll fill your plates with more tastes of the world. But what would you like to see here? A particular style of cuisine? More background articles on spices or unusual ingredients? Romantic food and travel pieces? Cooking tutorials? Send me your thoughts on what you want to learn about in Kate's Global Kitchen in 2000, or what you've enjoyed in the past. I can't reply to all the emails, but by sharing your desires as part of our ad-hoc team of advisors, we can make this an even better site for the future.

In the meantime, bookmark today's column and give these recipes a shot. If you cook one a month for the next year, you'll have tried them all and tasted a little bit more of this exciting, wonderful world.

Now that's a New Year's resolution worth keeping!

Happy New Year, and a Delectable New Millennium...

Kate Heyhoe
The Global Gourmet

Kate's Global Kitchen: Recipe Favorites from 1999: