A burgeoning trend on the culinary horizon and Chef Marcus Samuelsson's mortal foe, buckwheat has been making recent ripples on the food scene. What is buckwheat? What is it used for? And what does the Preston County, West Virginia Volunteer Fire Department have to do with it?

Read on to find out...

Dine daily on a full serving of fresh news every morning.  Why?  Because it’s cheaper than your morning latte and more informative than your average nutritional label.

Toothsome Tuesdays

• Our favorite Thu Tran is throwing another Food Party down in Brooklyn.  Episode premieres January 11th.

• Speaking of colorful shows centered around food and puppetry, this old, Japanese gem reminds us why kids + food = awesome.
  

• Confused, single dude has a girlfriend and is in search of a platonic lunch date.  Resumé, facebook profile and a list of references are a plus, I'm assuming.   

• While most other servers are just barely scraping by during these hard times in the restaurant industry, one lucky waiter gets a momentary reprieve in the form of $1,100.

• I present you the one blender to end all blenders.

• Ironically enough, it might not be the sugar in the sweets that are causing all that hyperactivity, eczema and asthma -- but something even more insidious, indeed.

• If you're sorry for adding an industrial chemical to milk and baby formulas to make them appear richer in protein and thusly poisoned hundreds of thousands of people and killed 6 infants in the process, perhaps it is best to express the sincerest of apologies...via TEXT MESSAGE.

 Photo courtesy of monkeytown

--Alice Shin

Eats.com is excited to introduce a new feature to Foodie News, Behind The Reviewers. We've contacted restaurant reviewers from across the country to learn more about different cities' food scenes, as well as what it is like to review restaurants for a living. Hope you enjoy!

This week: S. Irene Virbila, Los Angeles Times

What path did you take to get into food journalism and restaurant reviewing?
I was part-owner of a café in the years after college where I did just about everything—kept the books, baked mornings, bussed tables, and when we got a wine license, bought the wines. Also, cooked.  Later I was hired as one of the opening cooks for a more ambitious restaurant. When I hurt my back lifting a heavy stockpot, I had to give that up and decided to concentrate on wine.

I went to the culinary school in San Francisco, then to Paris to do a sommelier training for junior sommeliers already working in Paris restaurants. During that time I traveled through the wine country in France and Italy. Once I realized I didn’t really want to stand around a restaurant with a tastevin around my neck, or start looking for a job when I returned to San Francisco, I wrote a book proposal—by hand (I didn’t have a typewriter). Three publishers wanted it and so that’s how I started writing. At that point, I was writing articles for New West, then California magazines, San Francisco magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, etc.

When the San Francisco Chronicle critic took maternity leave, she asked me to substitute for her writing the restaurant reviews.  It was never my intention to become a restaurant critic.  But I did pinch hit for her from time to time while I freelanced all over the world, writing articles on food, wine and travel for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wine Spectator, Food & Wine, etc. for 15 years.

In 1994, the Los Angeles Times called and asked if I wanted to interview for the position of restaurant critic. My first instinct was to say no.  But I did, in the end, go for the interview and got the job.

What do you enjoy most about your profession? Least?
I enjoy discovering wonderful little restaurants and/or talented young chefs and bringing them to the attention of readers. I don’t like writing bad reviews.

After purchasing a box of crackers from a grocery store, Debra Rogoff found a lot more than crackers...she found $10,000! Rogoff notified the police, who originally thought it could be part of a drug ring. The box of money was later determined to be the life savings of an elderly lady, who thought that the box of crackers was safer than the bank.

The woman had mistakenly returned the box, and the store restocked it rather than composting it. Who knew that Annie's Sour Cream and Onion Cheddar Bunnies could be so valuable?