The Tipsy Table

Everyone has an opinion about food and wine and travel. I have my opinions, you have yours. Thetipsytable.com is my opportunity and my forum to express my opinions about all things related to food, fine wine and sprits and travel and to ask for your opinions in return. Consider this to be a food and travel bloggers version of the “Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park” because all constructive opinions will be appreciated, considered and probably published. Variety of opinions, after all, are the spice of life.

I am Donald Newman, (Thejamandjellyman.com), a psychologist liberated from owning a large social service agency after selling it in 2005. I fashion myself to be a “bonvivant and raconteur” because I really do know quite a bit about food, have traveled well and can tell entertaining stores about each. My passion is food and fine drink, of all kinds, (excepting maybe some kinds of offal and all insects!), and I have wandered around 49 of the United States and more than 35 foreign countries. In fact, my beautiful wife Kathy and I were married on Mykonos Island, Greece. Why? Because it was easier than getting married in Italy. A perfect example of not letting the “grass grow under one’s feet”, I have lived in Indiana, Texas, Arizona, Oregon, New Hampshire, Maine, Little River, California and Kaua'i, Hawai'i. I am spending most of my time in California these days, but still manage to venture out and about. Although Kathy is finished moving, all of these places have influenced how I approach food, recipes and cooking and, boy howdy, the stories I could tell about being “from away” while living in Maine or not having the correct “drachma” to pay an elderly bathroom attendant in Athens-”You no pay, you no go!”.

My professional food and cooking credentials are probably too many to mention or of little import. However, I am proud to be a protege of Ms. Madeleine Kamman and hold a Chef/Teaching Diploma from her professional cooking school. The Madeleine Kamman way continues to inspire me and I approach my cooking, recipe development, food writing and culinary life with her in mind. Madeleine is my “cooking mother.” Along the way and in between stints practicing as a psychologist, (a man and his family have to eat!), I have been an Executive Chef on both coasts, become a Master Food Preserver in Oregon, attended “From Cow to Cone”, the Penn State University Ice Cream Short Course and founded and ran “Coyote Kate’s: Classic American Confections” in Carefree, Arizona. My boardwalk fudge, peanut brittle, almond butter toffee and chocolate truffles, of all flavors, are to die for. Sometime in the middle of all of that and when I was living in Maine, I served as a food consultant to the Harry and David Company, the Royal Riviera Pear folks, out of Medford, Oregon. The famous pear variety, by the way, is Comice.

I will be the guiding force and voice behind Thetipsytable.com. The Tipsy Table will be inert however, without your contributions. Although I have boxes and boxes of recipes that I want to rediscover, refine and share, your cooking stories and recipes are vital to this collective. In turn, life is too short not to experience our universe so the nomadic side of me will share stories of the road, as well. I will have either lived or experienced all of the things that I will write about and will live vicariously through the things that you share with Thetipsytable.com. So, what are you cooking and drinking, where have you been and where are you going?