Entries from September 2007 ↓

a PopMatters Television Feature

Before I started my research — two weeks of watching cooking series — I assumed that today’s tv cooks, even if they possessed Child’s technical prowess, wouldn’t be nearly so endearing. I was partly right. In fact, many vibrant personalities host cooking shows, as well as numerous exceptional culinary teachers. Few individuals are both.

This friday’s luciousness comes from our new favorite, ideas in food

IDEAS IN FOOD: a blog and so much more

As for what we will be putting in my steamed buns, we may try BBQ eel or perhaps smoked lobster salad. Or even chewy hot fudge and macerated strawberries, raspberries and lemon cream or cajun steamed shrimp with crisp green onions and remoulade. The possibilities are endless…

Delighted to stubble upon Ideas in Food, an extraordinary blog full of photos, recipes, ideas, notebooks… cumin lemonade, white pepper panna cotta, and more strange and wonderful ideas.

in the New York Times

Gelatin filtration is a way to make sparklingly clear liquids that are intensely flavored with … well, whatever you like: meats, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, breads, any and all combinations of ingredients.

via NPR

One day I was in the kitchen rubbing salt onto some slices of fresh eggplant and tossing them in a colander. My husband paused to watch.”Putting lipstick on a pig, huh?” he said.

a recipe by Anthony Bourdain

You’ve made meat loaf, right? You’ve eaten cold meat loaf, yes? Then you’re halfway to being an ass-kicking, name-taking charcutier. “Ooooh…pâté, I don’t know.” Please. Campagne means “country” in French — which means even your country-ass can make it.

Notes of a Gastronome in The New Yorker

Gordon Ramsay, the only chef in London honored with three stars by the Guide Michelin, is not a monster. Ramsay, who is also the host of three uniquely adversarial in-your-face television shows (“Hell’s Kitchen” in the United States; “The F Word” and “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” in the United Kingdom), is not the most abusive person running a restaurant. And although a British undercover documentary once captured him in mid-torrent, profanities flowing in a diatribe directed at a young intern, earning Ramsay the title of one of the country’s “most unbearable bosses,” the people who work for him show a tenacious, irrational-seeming loyalty verging on love. But he does get angry, helplessly and uncontrollably angry—not an earthly anger but something darker—and has trouble knowing how to stop.

via Slate Magazine

Or consider when I went to Macau to eat a Cantonese dog dinner for the Wall Street Journal. I wrote that “the meat had dark skin attached to it, was quite fatty and looked like pork … chewy, and had a very strong, though not disagreeable flavor.” Today’s foodie-writing fashion would demand that I confess that I’d never seen anything more repulsive than Rover’s skin. I’d need to itemize what happened to the tongue, brain, and genitalia of the—it turned out—stolen dog (and I’d need to go into grisly detail about the dog-napping itself, as well as its butchery).No, today’s market does not allow for food writing that aims to be allusive, playful, or elegantly simple. The prevailing style is like polenta or steel-cut oats: coarse.

via Epi Log: The latest in Food News, the Culinary Arts & Cooking

You obviously like food. And you must like reading. Hey, you’re just like me! But if you’re a true gastro-bibliophile, you’ll no doubt take issue with at least some of my picks below. Please, I invite you to beg to differ. What’s missing?

from the TV Review in the New York Times

Mr. Ramsay emerges as though he were Gwyneth Paltrow making an inspirational visit to a fat camp. Everyone around him just looks so shabby, seems to be so shabby. Peter’s, a family-run Italian restaurant in Babylon, is a mess because no one gets along. The eponymous Peter is a big clown of a guy who bleaches his teeth, squanders his money and seems to operate in an uninterrupted state of remorse over never having achieved his calling as an extra in “Goodfellas.”