Local Chef Offers Classes, Event Catering & Recipes

Jeff Wampler of Eclecdish.com offers a series of classes from knife skills to how to create babyfood on top of at home catering and some really interesting recipes, but mostly he’s a stay at home dad.

Introducing the Kobe Beef of Strawberries

via Grub Street in New York Magazine

It’s Japan’s most expensive strawberry, and it’s currently in short supply, hence a $45 price tag for a box of seven to twelve.

Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie

via New York Times

there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

America’s Test Kitchen TV OnDemand

America’s Test Kitchen now has on demand video recipes.

Jacquespepin.net

Considering that Jacques Pepin knows the easiest and most reliable way to cook… well, everything!  This is a vital resource: The Recipe Index of JacquesPepin.net

City Food Magazine

City Food Magazine is a local foodie magazine for Vancouver. The Decmber issue has a cocktail advent calendar, and lists 99 new restaurants.

the vegetable orchestra

visit the vegetable orchestra homepage

The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens.

A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback

via New York Times

The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.

“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.

“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”

SF Comfort Food for the Hopelessly Hip

via gridskipper, six cozy restaraunts

San Francisco has a cure for what ails you: lots and lots and lots of primo high-end comfort-food joints, where no one harangues you about not being married yet, and you can drink alcohol without sneaking it into the house.

Into the Vegetable Garden…The evolution of a dish

from Grow Better Veggies: an essay By Chef David Kinch

Over time we have learned how we can use different elements of a plant at different times of its life: roots, stems, seed, flowers, buds, leaves, shoots, etc. The possibilities are endless. This changed things dramatically. We began to view the dish more as a concept, a mirror, and not just as a plate of food. We wanted customers to step into the garden, to enter it in their taste and in their minds when they ate the dish, to feel as if they transported themselves to the garden of which we are so proud.So we changed the name and called it “Vegetables from the garden, their vegetable juices.”