KITCHEN TORO

Why Toro? The name is Arthur but working in a kitchen, things get abbreviated, and with the Italian background, I'm often "Turo." With a name like Bovino, and a May birthday it's not far from Turo to Toro, the bull, in Italian, as well as one of my favorite things sushi, toro, that fatty tuna cut I could eat daily.

I'm bullish about food, my favorite color is red, thus, above, left, El Toro Rojo, the new patron saint of Kitchen Toro.

My earliest travels were via the ingredients in the kitchen: my mother’s Italian-American kitchen in Long Island, my Polish-American grandmother’s kitchen in rural Massachusetts and when my family moved to Hong Kong, our cook, Ah-Hing’s kitchen. Watching these women cook, I developed an adventurous palate and a passion for food and cooking which I have decided to follow professionally.

For the past 5 years I have worked at The New York Times as a news assistant in many of the newspaper's different sections where I have done fact-checking, page layout, proofreading, stringing work and reporting. I was the assistant to the paper's first public editor, Daniel Okrent, and most recently worked in the Dining Section where I did fact-checking, research and page layout. I began a 10-month, thrice-weekly Classic Culinary Arts program at the French Culinary Institute in January 2006 in pursuit of my passion for food in the kitchen and on the page. I'm beginning this blog to chronicle my culinary adventures.