Food writer and restaurant critic Moira Hodgson has served up a delightful memoir of meals and wild adventures around the world, sprinkling in recipes along the way.

The daughter of a British Foreign Service officer, Moira Hodgson spent her childhood in many a strange and exotic land. She discovered American food in Saigon, ate wild boar and snails in Berlin, and, when she returned to England as a teenager, learned how to prepare potatoes in every imaginable guise from her eccentric Irish grandmother. She was seventeen when her father was posted to the United Nations, and in New York was introduced for the first time to oysters and cheesecake. Soon, drawn to a more bohemian life, she moved downtown, where she served elaborate meals to artists and writers from the closet-sized kitchen of her Greenwich Village apartment. She lived in Chiapas, Mexico, where she learned to make quesadillas on a charcoal brazier; in Lapland, she cooked on a Coleman stove in the back of a VW bus; and at the farmhouse near Marrakesh where she stayed in Morocco, she dined on mechoui, a whole lamb that was baked for a day over coals in a pit in the courtyard. Hodgson quickly earned a reputation as a discerning critic and an intuitive, entertaining writer. Today, her columns in the New York Observer are widely read by knowledgeable New Yorkers.

IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME reflects Hodgson’s talent for connecting her love of food with the people and places in her life. It also proves her a talented storyteller, with wit, humor and an eye for detail.