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Michael Laiskonis, formerly of Le Bernardin, makes his pastry chef interpretation of pizza. Pâte scurée, lightly candied cherry tomatoes, cream cheese spheres, etc.
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They are shocked by the rare flesh of the lamb, although it’s the most perfect I’ve ever tasted. (“Dangerous,” says Xiao Jianming, who refuses to touch it. “Terribly unhealthy.”) The sequence of delicious desserts is an irrelevance for these visitors from a food culture without much of a sweet tooth. (The only dish they relish, curiously, is a coconut sorbet.) They are also mystified by the custom of serving tiny,personal portions of food on enormous white plates, and find the length of this meal served à la russe interminable.
Culture Shock: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com
From 2005: three chefs from Sichuan enter the French Laundry… “World’s best restaurant” is in the palate of the beholder.
Source: gourmet.com
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B. was my first long-term boyfriend, and thus the first man I looked forward to feeding on a routine basis.
I had spent the first half of my twenties fumbling my way through a sort of boxed set of attractive but woefully unsuitable males. Our brief entanglements would be fun but underwhelming, and the food I cooked tended to function mainly as a prelude to carnality. It was a thrill to possess such a means of seduction, but it was short-lived; I always ended up doing the dishes on my own.
From Sex Cake to Spurned Salad
Since I grew into a fantastic home cook, every guy I saw long-term ended up gaining 10-15 lbs. And after breaking up, I knew he was over it when those 10-15 lbs would be gone.
I don’t miss dating, courtship, whatever but I do miss making someone fat and happy.
Source: gilttaste.com
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16 minute Thomas Keller tribute wankfest maybe worth watching or listening to in the background. If you don’t want to watch, most salient part is Keller won’t hire you if your golf game isn’t good, and he makes his hires caddy for him. That changed my view of him, for sure.
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The National Potato Council, which had opposed the attempts to limit the serving of potatoes, said that it was pleased with the new rules but that it still had some concerns.
“Despite the fact that Congress said the U.S.D.A. could not limit potatoes in school lunches or breakfast, we still feel like the potato is being downplayed in favor of other vegetables in the new guidelines,” said Mark Szymanski, a spokesman for the council. “It seems the department still considers the potato a second-class vegetable.”
New Rules for School Meals Aim at Reducing Obesity - NYTimes.com
Potato man is very passionate about the potato being treated like a second class vegetable. In the end, the potato’s civil rights were not violated. School lunches can still feature tater tots.
Posted on April 23, 2012 with 2 notes
Source:
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You’d see this brand-spanking-new KFC in the middle of this sea of brown shacks, and people were in there, loving the product,” he says. While there’s little doubt that the continent will be more challenging than China, he thinks it’s ripe for explosive growth: “Nothing shows that we’re more global than if we can build a business in Africa that no one else has.
KFC’s Big Game of Chicken - Businessweek
Fastfood colonialism. KFC sales are sagging in the US but booming overseas in countries such as China.
Posted on April 17, 2012 with 1 note
Source: businessweek.com
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A hot sandwich to go would be taxable, while a prepackaged, cold one would not — but a cold sandwich becomes taxable if it has hot gravy poured onto it. Cold foods to go are generally not taxable — but hot foods that have cooled are taxable (meaning a cold sandwich slathered in “hot” gravy that has cooled to room temperature is taxable). Cold, non-carbonated, non-alcoholic beverages to go aren’t taxable. Hot beverages to go are, but coffee and tea are specifically exempted from taxation. Soup, however, is taxable. Hot soup that has cooled? Still taxable. But, the BOE specifically informs SF Weekly, cold soups such as gazpacho are exempt.
Why Is Split-Pea Soup Taxable and Gazpacho Isn’t? - San Francisco Restaurants and Dining - SFoodie
Srsly, who wants hot gravy on a cold sandwich? Tax the shit out of them!
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Finer Dining Through Chemistry
JOHN McINTYRE
on Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli, and the
molecular gastronomy revolution.
Galletas de Arroz y Parmesano by Charles Haynes http://bit.ly/zN9djn (Some rights reserved)
Colman Andrews
Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food
Gotham Books, October 2010. 301 pp.
Ferran Adrià, Albert Adrià, and Juli Soler
A Day at elBulli: An insight into the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adrià
Phaidon Press, October 2008. 528 pp.
Lisa Abend
The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli
Free Press, March 2011. 295 pp.
Ferran Adrià
The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià
Phaidon Press, October 2011. 383 pp.
El Bulli, known among chefs and the people who follow them as the best restaurant in the world, performed its final dinner service last summer. Since then, the man behind the restaurant has been busy, among other things, teaching a culinary physics course at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In what forum or form we will next experience the food of chef Ferran Adrià is a mystery. But in the meantime, we have reading material and time to sort out just how much the man has altered the international culinary landscape — and which of his innovations will be but beautiful, passing follies, a chef’s bravado that called on ephemera like air and foam to bring him the fame of the world.
Sometime around the year 2002, public consensus conferred upon Adrià the title of Greatest. For little more than the chance to chop his garlic, world-class chefs left their nests and headed to Spain to work at the globe’s most famous restaurant, the place that had pioneered what the chef called avant-garde cuisine. There, Adrià and his staff playfully mixed flavors and ingredients and served them up in unexpected forms, as in an early dish of smoked tuna with gelatin triangles made from tomato, licorice, and pistachio and garnished with figs and pine nuts. In the service of deconstruction, he has forgone carrot soup to serve carrot air with mandarin orange accents (made with the help of a siphon bottle equipped with nitrous oxide cartridges). Another dish, a concentrate of green peas that arrived in a spoon, looked and moved exactly like an egg yolk: it was dinner as trompe l’oeil. International travelers flocked to the tiny town of Roses, where they were told not only what they were eating, but how to eat it. Serving a single strand of spaghetti and parmesan, a waiter might instruct: “Try to do it complete. Put it in your mouth and suck.”
Posted on April 4, 2012 via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS with 8 notes
Source: lareviewofbooks
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I had sensed that extracting this industrial miracle food of yesteryear from the dustbin of kitsch might have something to teach about present-day efforts to change the food system; that it might offer perspective on our own confident belief that artisanal eating can restore health, rebuild community, and generally save the world. But, really, it was reactions like Hana’s that I wanted to understand. How can a food be so fake and yet so eagerly eaten, so abhorred and so loved?
The Believer - Atomic Bread Baking at Home
Simple sliced white bread—a yeasty tabula rasa—as the rosetta stone for 20th century American culture. Germophobia, xenophobia, red scare and our current orthorexia are all projected onto its uniform whiteness. (Is it too much to read into Wonder Bread and artisanal bread as the culinary equivalent of Kurtz’s Intended and mistress in Heart of Darkness?)
When I used to eat wheat bread, I did crave, once in a while, a grilled cheese made with Wonder Bread and Kraft single slices, pressed flat with a steak iron. Also, if there is bread served with saucy BBQ, it must be industrial sliced bread, white or tinted brown.
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Another vintage Fritos P.O.P. display of elegance one doesn’t usually associate with Fritos.
(Image via Smithsonian)
I was laid off 2 days before my birthday in 2009, a dismal blessing. I miss health insurance and payroll, but I haven't bought bread since the pink slip because I have time to bake.
Sometimes I'm a serious job hunter, sometimes a serious slacker, but mostly, I'm an underemployed, freelance Jaqueline of many trades including writing and dogsitting. Either way, I scrapbook my finds and activities here for your benefit and amusement.
Follow me on Twitter if tv/movie/pro-cycling spoilers and unplanned live tweets won't hail on your parade. And yes, I do work blue so don't be huffy with me if you don't like cursing or merciless roasting of public figures.
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