Well, it’s been a year in the making, but today—on the eve of Saint Phanourios’s feast day—the first leg of my journey with this Greek Orthodox saint and his cake has come to a close. (If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, please click the links in the right column or the main navigation, under “Projects,” that take you to the Phanourios Charity Project page.)

You may have noticed the scoreboard I’ve kept in the blog’s sidebar. Maybe you’ve watched its numbers grow, and now you’re wondering what’s up with the question mark. Well, I can easily count the number of cakes (phanouropita) that I’ve baked to honor Saint Phanourios, but there is no way to reliably quantify the mystery or blessings, the grit or gratitude that belong to my story of the past twelve months.

If you want to read that story, plus get my favorite recipe for this traditional Greek nut-and-spice cake, you can do so over at Leite’s Culinaria, where my personal essay, “Saints, Cakes, and Redemption,” has just been published.

I’m dashing this announcement off in a rush, on my way out of town for a few days, but as soon as I’m able, I will update this post with some acknowledgements. There are so many people to thank.

For now, I’ll leave it at this: Sas efxharisto, Agios Phanourios. Thank you Saint Phanourios.

WHO CAN TELL the weight of love? In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, I spent some time reflecting on this profound question, and my answer has been published today as part of a feature over at Leite’s Culinaria. I’m thrilled that my writing was selected for inclusion by David Leite and the new deputy editor of Leite’s Culinaria, Renee Schettler Rossi: they are food writers and editors for whom I have the utmost respect. It’s also kind of nice that you’ll find my piece right after the “declarations of kitchen love” written by Clotilde Dusoulier of Chocolate and Zucchini and David Lebovitz of Living the Sweet Life in Paris.

Following is an excerpt. For the full story, please skip over to the feature, Ode to a Microplane, at Leite’s Culinaria.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Our coupling in the kitchen was never meant to be. He, a Frenchman with a love of his mother’s metric-system recipes. I, an American raised to recite the number of ounces in a pound, married already to a set of dry-measure cups. We wanted to feed each other aphrodisiac-laced meals cooked in collaboration. We’d pour champagne and preheat the oven. But metrics are from Mars, measuring cups from Venus. . . .

Read the continuation here.