Fred and I ate at an Ethiopian restaurant, The Red Sea, in Charlotte on Monday night. My son has traveled throughout all of Africa and has told us he enjoyed eating in Ethiopia. This is the closest Fred and I will probably ever come to tasting a bit of Ethiopian and Eritrean culture.

“I hate driving to Gastonia to see my children. It’s too much time in that car by myself and gives me too much time to think,” Sandra McCray said.

Fred has known about Midway Barbecue for a long time. It’s been reviewed in “Garden and Gun” and “Southern Living” magazines as one of the great barbecue restaurants in the South. Midway is in Buffalo, South Carolina, on Highway 215 right off the Union, S.C. bypass.

While over there I found great comfort in their Ecuadorian nanny’s cooking. Her name is Charro and she speaks Spanish, but not English. She cooked all the family’s meals with a South American flavor and flair. I picked up many of her recipes during my visits.

Seven aspiring chefs with a craving for culinary put their kitchen skills to the test as they competed for tuition scholarships on Saturday, March 2, 2013, at The International Culinary School at The Art Institute of Charlotte, a campus of South University. At the end of the day, three finalists stood triumphant.

Bob Davies leads a brand strategy firm called Candescence. He’s also a father whose son baked a cake as a chemistry project – not to record the chemical interaction in cake batter, but as an artistic interpretation of the structure of an atom.