Bob Harned

    Friend of Food Talk, Bob Harned, has a new website that features the music he sings on my program - Candlelight and Wine, Scotch and Soda, If I Knew You Were Coming (I'd've Baked a Cake), Black Coffee, etc. You can now buy, through Bob's company, Pink and Blue Music Publishing Company, a CD called "Eat, Drink, and Be Singing," and another one, "Harned Sings Harned", that features the songs of Bob's father, Alfred Marion Harned. You can also buy the sheet music to Bob's father's songs. He was a big band arranger in the 1930s and 40s and the composer of many tin-pan alley songs.

Cosa Bolla in Pentola

    Kyle Phillips, About.com's Italian food guide, writes a regular newsletter that covers not only eating, cooking and drinking, but Italian life and culture as well. The son of an American archaeologist, Kyle grew up in both Philadelphia and Florence, then settled down in his adopted country with a Florentine wife (she' a physician) and they now have a son. Kyle writes about all of them, plus his beloved in-laws, and what's on the minds as well as stomachs of Italians. He only sometimes tests the recipes he offers, but he has excellent taste and a good eye for formulas that work. His forté is writing about wine, and his mandate is to guide us to other sites about Italian food, which may prove to be even more useful.

Ardent Spirits

    Written by Gary Reagan, my personal bartending guru, former bartender himself, and writer of drink manuals, this site has many recipes for traditional and non-traditional cocktails along with tips for making perfect drinks. You can also apply for a free (yes, free) three-day cocktail mixing class called "Cocktails in the Country." Should you win a scholarship, you will be whisked away in a limousine to Cornwall-on-Hudson where you will stay in an inn for two nights so you may be fed well and take mixology classes all day. How glamorous!

Table Wine

    If our "Wine Buys" aren't enough (read about them nearly weekly in The Maven's Diary), check out this site devoted to finding great bottles for under $20, as well as other stuff about wine. Most wines are actually way under that price - in the $10 to $15 range. The wines are explained well, including background information, maps, notes on taste, nose and drinkability.

Esperya

    Esperya, which is an ancient Greek word for "west," as in the islands called the Hesperdes, and a name the Greeks called Italy, which was to Greece's west," bills itself as the "Italian food experience." I find this website invaluable, as it features a wide range of artisanal (hand-made) products that are difficult, if not impossible to find in stores in the United States. I mean, where else would I get organic extra-virgin olive oil from Cilento, south of Naples in the province of Salerno. Now that's esoteric. It is well-organized by type of product and subcategorized by region. You can even use a search engine to check if they a carry specific product. Products range from the aforementioned rare olive oils through raw milk cheeses, pastas from family-run factories equipped with antique apparatus, tempting honeys, preserves, candies, and cookies. Prices are high, but then these products are rare. Delivery is fast and every item comes beautifully packaged and with a card describing it. Great for gift-giving.

Arthur Avenue Specialties

    Arthur Avenue has long been a Mecca for great Italian products. If you can't make it to Arthur Avenue but still want the taste, you can now buy many of the foods from home via the internet. Log on to this website for, for instance, great homemade mozzarella delivered to your door the day after it was made, well-made fresh egg pasta, cured meats such as dried sausages and fabulously funky pancetta with or without hot pepper, hard-to-find fresh meats such as baby lamb and goat, and much more. This service is reliable and professional. Prices are reasonable. Shipping is fast.

egullet

    Steven Shaw, who calls himself "the fat guy," (see his personal site, www.Fat-Guy.com) is the New York moderator for this fascinating network of "foodies" who discuss topics as varied as where to get the best burger to what the scene is like at Balthazar, the stylish SoHo French brasserie. Log on and voice your opinion. Anyone can post a comment, which is of course a good thing and a bad thing. Who can you trust? That's always a big question on these interactive sites.. New Jersey is also well represented in its own forum hosted by Rosie Saferstein, a restaurant reporter for New Jersey Monthly Magazine.

Road Food

    Michael and Jane Stern are chroniclers of popular culture and may be the funniest food writers in America. Their regular columns in Gourmet magazine are only half of it. Their books, not only on food but on subjects as diverse as Elvis Presley, Roy Rodgers, and the dog show circuit, are another piece of their personality. Their website, which proclaims that it is "exclusively devoted to finding the most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America,' is another product of their clever minds. Known for eating low on the hog, I am always interested in their food finds, even when I can't agree with their taste. As an interactive site, Road Food, offers the opinions of many unknown eaters as well. It's fun, it covers the whole nation, but I wouldn't necessarily travel to North Carolina just to follow up on a correspondent's pick for best hot dog.

Zagat Surveys

    If you don't have a Zagat guide - get one! They are an invaluable source for restaurant listings, including the addresses, phone numbers, type of food, and prices at the most important restaurants of any given city. Reviews are assembled from surveys sent in by regular citizens who have eaten at the specific restaurant. I don't find the reviews totally reliable (in New York), and it's bothersome that the editors sometimes make qualitative remarks about restaurants not reviewed by surveyors (for instance, restaurants that have not opened by press time), and sometimes top restaurants remain on the top because they were there before, but it is still an excellent resource. In the meantime, if you need to look up a specific restaurant or would like to browse restaurants from most major U.S. cities, try the Zagat website. Everything in the books is there, too.

Homemade Gourmet Pizza

    This is the most comprehensive website on the subject of pizza. Anything and everything you would want to know about pizza, and many things you didn't know there was to know, is on this site. There's a comprehensive history of pizza, links to other histories of and essays on pizza, recipes for home cooks who want to make their own heavenly pies, a list of book recommendations that contain information on or recipes about pizza. And, if you are looking to grab great pizza around the country, check out this site's varied and informative pizzeria listing.

Savory Sojourns

    My friend Addie Tomei (yes, as in Marisa's mother) is the creator of this unique company that hosts food tours throughout Manhattan and New York's other boroughs. You can choose from over 15 different tours, ranging from Chinatown to Hell's Kitchen. You can also work with Savory Sojourns to create your own itinerary. Addie's tours expose you to all the notable food facts and places of a neighborhood and include fascinating history lessons and tastings. Most tours include lunch.

Zarela

    My friend Zarela Martinez, owner of two restaurants, Zarela and Danzon in Manhattan, host of "Zarela! La Cocina Veracruzana" (a PBS cooking program), and author of several Mexican cookbooks (the latest is Zarela's Veracruz), created this website so she may share ideas on modern and traditional Mexican foods and customs. From the website's flamboyant colors emerges real substance. Included are Zarela's favorite restaurants, a forum for asking questions, and even a good selection of Zarela's recipes, not to mention Zarela's catering menu and other information about her businesses.

theatlantic.com/food/

    Corby Kummer is a senior editor at the Atlantic and also that magazine's food writer. Corby's always informative and insightful reports can be found on this page of the Atlantic's web site. A winner of many food journalism awards, Corby's specialty is Italian cooking and he must be one of the country's leading experts on coffee. His book, The Joy of Coffee, changed my life. Now, not only can I tell the difference between good coffee and great coffee, but I know how to brew it properly.