Louisa Chu, who writes Movable Feast, says her blog is 'the diary of an itinerant chef'. And itinerant she is. When we first came across her (at movable-feast.com), the former journalist was attending a professional course in cuisine and pastry at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris - she was on scholarship from the James Beard Foundation. After the course, she went to work at the Michelin three-star Alain Ducasse Plaza Athenee. In France, she also worked at Les Ambassadeurs at the L'Hotel de Crillon and was a 'fixer' for Anthony Bourdain's (pictured, with Chu) television show, No Reservations (she took him on a tour of the meat market at Rungis, in Paris).

Chu eventually made her way back to Chicago, in the United States (where her family live) on a circuitous route that included working for a season at El Bulli, the three-star restaurant in Spain. Some of her more recent blog posts have been about working as a chef in Alaska, being a fixer for Bourdain in Chicago and judging on Iron Chef America.