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My God, I nearly lost my mind as I worked my way through Bill Buford's "Heat", BR's most recent Food Book Club selection. The relentless temptation provided by the book's tantalizing tales of delicious Italian delicacies (lardo, anyone?) taunted me from beginning to end. What about you?

For those of you that haven't been following along, “Heat” chronicles a middle-aged writer's bumpy ride through the sweaty NYC kitchen of the bold and boisterous Chef Mario Batali.

So the time has come to party, Batali-style! We'd love to have you join us on Tuesday, March 4th at the remarkable

Buffalo Rising's second Foodie Book Club choice is “Heat” by Bill Buford. Though it was published in 2006, it remains a popular topic of conversation amongst foodies.

Bill Buford has worked as a magazine editor for most of his life, most notably as The New Yorker's Fiction Editor from 1995 – 2002. “Heat” chronicles his adventure as an indentured “kitchen bitch” to Mario Batali at Babbo during the height of “Molto Mario”. Buford chose this fate himself, an eager homecook and gourmand, he talks Batali into taking him on as an extern, a position generally held by a student just out of culinary school.

Unlike our previous book club choice, the thoughtful and cha…

A few months ago we introduced the Buffalo Rising Foodie Book Club. Our main goal was to introduce food-related books that we thought would be of special interest to our readers. After YUM had spent a month or more talking about CSAs and the locavore trend, we picked Barbara Kingsolver's “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle- A Year of Food Life” as the book to kick off our adventure.

“Animal, Vegetable, Mineral” chronicles Kingsolver's family as they uproot themselves from the parched Southwest and move to greener pastures in the Southeast. There they undertake the process of growing and raising most of their food themselves, sometimes supplementing their diets with goods grown and handmade locally. Kingsolver's tale takes us through the process of planting and harvesting a garden, caning and preserving, sourcing local products- even making cheese. The content is augmented b…

Calling all locavores. Well...not really. We're looking for anyone who's interested in or has an opinion about the locavore movement/trend. As many of you know we've just finished reading our inaugural book for the BR Foodie Book Club; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Which means, it's time for our in office podcast. We'd like to invite a few readers to join BR staff and special guests in the BR office on Thursday, November 29th at 6:30pm. That's only a week and a half away. If you'd like to be a part of the podcast please send us an email. You don't necessarily have to have read this month's book, if you're particularly passionate about eating locally, we'd love to have you. Th…

Here on YUM we find ourselves dipping into discussions about celebrity chefs, food-related television programs, cookbooks and food industry-themed novels. We've discovered that many of our readers are regulars in the ever-expanding world of the food blog, some even have their own. As foodies it seems that it is not only our palates that connect us (and sometimes define us), but also our passion for the culture that currently celebrates food on every possible stage, in every imaginable forum.

Here at YUM headquarters, we've decided that a book club is really what we need, especially in light of all the talk that Barbara Kingsolver's latest release stirred up on our site and elsewhere on the web.

We've set aside approximately six weeks for each book in our winter series. At the end of each session, we'll host an in office podcast featuring six readers, BR staffers and specia…