There is a wonderful profile of Madeleine L’Engle in the April 12 issue of The New Yorker. Unfortunately it is not online. Written by Cynthia Zarin, who spent and perhaps spends a lot of time with her subject, the article gives you a sense of the unique personality of a remarkable woman and writer. It takes you along the path of her life story and how it affected and formed her characters and conflicts. Her family reveals that her fiction is in many ways more truthful about her life than her non-fiction memoirs.

Good grapes make good wine, but there’s also a lot to be said for the wood that makes the barrels. At $250-$600 each, a wine barrel is an investment that a winemaker will select carefully, looking at the variables of origin of the wood and the amount of toasting over a fire that the cooper gives the inner surfaces. Tight-grained wood, found in colder climates, is desired. Experienced winemakers know what flavors different oak species will create. The toasting of the wood is akin to caramelizing onions in cooking. Flavor, that will later be imparted into the wine, is created as the wood is scorched.

Living further north means our cable provider provides us with CBC Television. They show a lot of hockey (in season of course). And while ABC relegated its World Figure Skating Championships coverage to weekends and a few hours on ESPN, CBC ran consecutive evenings of coverage. It was during the skating that I noticed all the commercials promoting “Hockey Night.” It sounded like Monday Night Football or Must See TV. I started wondering — is there really a Hockey Night in Canada or is it all a marketing fabrication? Of course the answer is on the web. Hockey Night in Canada has been an institution on Canadian television since 1952 and prior to that on radio starting in 1933. Fans of the show are as devoted to it as they are to the sport it covers, and you can read laments from homesick Canadians and raves from current devotees across the web. You can get a ringtone of the theme song for your mobile phone. You can purchase special HNIC jerseys. You can sign an online petition to keep your favorite HNIC broadcaster. This is no marketing hype. It is hockey (night) in Canada.

An article on different types of salt mentioned a couple types I wasn’t aware of. Danish smoked salt has a Viking heritage, from the days when salt was made by boiling sea water in a metal pot over an open fire. The wood smoke imparts a smoky flavor, and different woods make a difference in the taste of the salt. Black Salt (Kala Namak, Sanchal) is used in Indian snack foods, and, from what I can gather on the web, comes from mainly from Pakistan and is ground from mineral salt deposits. Its color ranges from pink to dark purple. Mentioned in another article is Peruvian Pink Sea Salt which comes from an ancient, underground ocean and is colored by bacteria and algae in the ponds fed by the ocean. It is hand harvested and transported to town on burros.

A forty pound cat? His owner fed him 4.5 pounds of meat a day. I’d say that low-carb diet was a failure. The elderly owner is now in a nursing home and the cat is in a shelter on a strict diet.

As much as I enjoy reading Amanda Hesser’s serious work (with most of her Food Diary entries excluded from that grouping in my mind), I was taken aback to see her filling in as the N.Y. Times’ restaurant critic. I suspect she is well known and recognized in restaurant circles, and although not all critics have been anonymous, it is a preferred qualification for the role. Well, the foie gras almost hit the fan last week when the Times published an “Editor’s Note” to set the record straight on Hesser’s review of Spice Market. Owner Jean-Georges Vongerichten has been a subject in Hesser’s feature writing since 1998, according to the Village Voice, and he provided a complimentary blurb for her book. Critics of this interim critic think she should have skipped reviewing what amounts to a friend’s business. And, unfortunately, in reading this week’s review I had to wonder at her ability to effectively judge a restaurant’s service when she may be easily recognized. The waiter brought her a free half bottle of champagne claiming “I forgot to serve it to another table, and I didn’t feel like taking it back to the bar.” Get her out of the restaurant critic gig, and back to the features before all is lost.

The Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, with the L.A. Times pulling in a total of five. No winner was chosen for the category of feature writing for the first time ever (other categories have gone unrewarded before).

Back in January I mentioned the nine Fabergé eggs from the Forbes’ collection which were to be auctioned off this month. Out of the fifty Fabergé eggs believed to have been made, eight are unaccounted for, and Forbes Magazine has done a round-up of their suspected whereabouts. One was part of a set of Russian treasures that were taken on a tour of U.S. department stores in 1934 to be shown and sold. It may be sitting in a display case somewhere in the U.S. lacking its provenance. Maybe your grandparents have “a sapphire cherub pulling a two-wheeled chariot (possibly gilt silver) containing a golden egg set with diamonds” sitting on their mantle? There are tantalizing descriptions of two other missing eggs: one is decorated with “diamonds, emeralds, rubies– topped by both a large colored diamond and a cabochon sapphire”; another is a gold hen with rose-cut diamonds holding a sapphire egg in its beak. As for the Forbes’ eggs, Sotheby’s announced in February that the entire collection, which included other Fabergé creations, was sold to Russian industrialist Victor Vekselberg. Vekselberg has established a foundation to bring Russian treasures back to his country. The selling price was not disclosed. (via snarkout)

All seven British Airways Concordes put out to pasture for the pleasure of the viewing public have now been sent to their new homes. The final list of display locations: Heathrow Airport, Manchester Airport, Filton in central England (location of the factory), Grantley Adams Airport in Barbados, Seattle’s Museum of Flight in Seattle, the Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum in New York, and, as of this week, the Museum of Flight in East Fortune, near Edinburgh.

The International Home & Housewares Show held in Chicago last month had a wide enough range of interesting new products that news coverage varied on what was noteworthy. One common point was the continued use of silicone products with fancy-shaped molds for baking, silicone knife handles, and even an oven mitt on display. The Toastabag was mentioned often. It’s a reusable bag that can brown a cheese sandwich in your pop-up toaster. KitchenAid fans may appreciate a new set of attachments that turn the stand mixer into an ice cream maker. But at $99 retail, it’d better have some mighty advantages over the typical $49 ice cream makers. The carefully designed Garlic Twist claims to minces garlic without fuss or muss. And the QuikTop turns soda cans into bottles, complete with the ability reseal using its handy coaster/cup/top.