Since we married more than thirty years ago, joining lives and careers, we’ve also always shared a passion for what we cook at home and eat when away. When business offers us the opportunity to travel, we enjoy sharing the exploration of regional, national and international cuisines wherever we get a chance to go.
In our spare time we’ve run food-oriented websites since the 1990s, and—when not elsewhere discussing the art and business of writing with our readers and viewers—have spent a lot of time talking about what’s on the stove at home and on tables abroad. As we now prepare to retire our oldest food site, we’re working on creating a new place to host our many recipes and food posts that have until now been scattered across multiple platforms.
1952
Diane Duane is born in Manhattan. For the next twenty-five years she writes, goes to school—physics in college, psychiatry in nursing school—and (due to her mother having been a truly terrible cook) isn’t very good at it herself until a couple of gay friends teach her how to properly use a kitchen.
1956
Peter Morwood is born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, and taught how to cook by his mother, becoming one of very few Northern Irish men who (in those days) knew anything about how. His knowledge of food lore stands him in good stead among more helpless friends while getting his Bachelor’s Degree, as well as in his RAF officers’ mess, where the Boss (Squadron Leader) was another foodie.
1977-83
Diane sells her first novel to Dell Publishing’s science fiction line. Peter sells his first novel to the fantasy line at Century Publishing in the UK. Each goes on to write various novels (and some screenplays) before they meet.
1985
Diane is introduced to Peter at a science fiction convention in Glasgow. They meet several times more over the course of the year, fall in love, and (while offsite from a Star Trek convention in Birmingham) Peter proposes to Diane at a Chinese restaurant in Coventry, between the hot and sour soup and the lemon chicken. Diane immediately accepts, even though the lemon chicken wasn’t that great.
1986
The two move to Los Angeles as Diane finds herself writing for Star Trek while also story-editing an animated TV series and eating way too much fast food. Having co-written a Star Trek novel with her on their honeymoon, Peter goes on to make many friends in Hollywood for his unmatched ability to imitate the “British nobility accent” over the phone and get friends better tables at fancy restaurants in Beverly Hills. (Especially that one with the great chicken soup recipe.)
1987
Exhausted by their showbiz work and in search of a quieter lifestyle, the two move back to Europe and settle in Ireland, where Peter’s Mum passes the secrets of her famous soda bread recipe on to Diane. The couple also begin an exploration of cooking and recipes from the Continent that will form the core of the household’s anchor website, EuropeanCuisines.com.
1998-present
Peter and Diane write more books, cook thousands of meals at home in rural Ireland, teach each other their culinary secrets, and feed a lot of other people along the way. In between times, they eat pizza in just about every country in western Europe. (A map with recommendations will follow…)
Please be patient with us during January and February of 2025 as we start pulling in recipes and food postings from many sources around the web. In particular, some of the postings on Tumblr may be difficult to dig up/out due to poor tagging and the increasing (AI-related) unreliability of Google’s search functions.
We look forward to having at least a couple of hundred vintage posts and recipes on site here by the end of February 2025.
Also please note: we are members of the Amazon Affiliates program. If you follow an Amazon link from one of our pages and buy something there, we get a tiny “royalty payment” from that. Just so you know.
Thanks for your interest!