I’m having a moment of schadenfreude at the recent backlash I’ve seen at the organic foods/eco movement. Or well, not precisely schadenfreude, but the warm glow that comes with seeing someone get a little of the comeuppance you’ve thought they’ve deserved for several years. Read the rest of this entry ?
I like old cookbooks for the same reason that other people like horror movies. It’s that frisson of terror you get at the thought of what might be waiting at the bottom of the stair, or what fresh culinary horror could be lurking at the turn of the page. I find Norman Bates’ smiling slyly and saying, “Mother isn’t quite herself today,” and recipes that call for cans of condensed cheddar soup to be equally terrifying. Read the rest of this entry ?
What I wanted was asparagus, so what I bought was a pineapple. No wait, I swear this makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t make strictly logical sense but there was a train of thought that lead from one to the other. Read the rest of this entry ?
Sometimes you come across a recipe that involves every ingredient in the kitchen and has seventeen steps and you know it will be fantastic because in the end you’ll have created something rich and decadent with layers upon layers of flavor – for example Coq au Vin requires marinating and straining and browning and braising and straining the sauce again, just about every dish in the cupboard and the end result is like liquid sin. Read the rest of this entry ?
Dear Editors of food magazines:
Please stop taunting me with your Spring ingredients and Spring menus. I know that America is a large country and that it’s probably Spring somewhere – California perhaps? But for those of us who are laboring in the frozen North, for whom the crocuses have only just this past weekend bloomed, Spring is still a long way away. Read the rest of this entry ?
I’m not the kind of cook who invents recipes. If I want a specific flavor combination I tend to go in search of a recipe that will provide that for me. I edit recipes on the fly sometimes – more cinnamon, less stock, a little heavier on the paprika – but I don’t do a lot of wholesale inventing. Usually if I think a recipe needs that much help I’ll go find a recipe that I think will actually work as written. However, this week I was well into my recipe before I realized how unworkable it was, and what I ended up making bears so little relationship to the recipe I started with I might as well have started from scratch. Read the rest of this entry ?
I acknowledge that I am not sane about the Oscars. I don’t mean about caring who wins – although I’ve seen more than a usual number of the movies up for awards this year and hoo boy did I have firm opinions about who shouldn’t win Best Picture/Best Director. Mercifully, the Academy chose to reinforce my faith in humanity this year rather than crush it like they did in 2006 so four years from now I won’t still be grousing about what should have won but didn’t. Sadly there were very few really entertainingly terrible dresses this year – which, let’s face it, is the real reason I watch the Oscars. There was far too much pale pink, and flesh-tones, and Miley Cyrus needed to stand up straight (apparently Lauren Bacall agrees with us on this, which is reassuring because it means that I could be turning into a classy dame and not just channeling my father) but nothing that approached the cheerful insanity of Bjork’s swan dress from 2001, although that is the gold standard for insane Oscar dresses and would be hard to beat.
All that being true, the reason I like entertaining for the Oscars is because it’s an excuse to experiment and make things I’m not entirely sure people will like (b’stilla), things that are just too rich for everyday (cauliflower tart), and things that are just fun (pickled grapes). The Oscars are a chance to fiddle with appetizers and try things in small quantities because I’m not entirely sure what they’ll taste like, and if they’re not entirely successful it won’t be disastrous because there are other things on the table to eat. Read the rest of this entry ?
I firmly believe that there should be a vegetable on the table at all meals. I don’t think it count unless it’s a green vegetable – or tomatoes, because tomatoes are totally a vegetable in my book. But, when it comes to eating them I tend to smother them with something else that’s on the plate to mask the taste – the sauce that came with the meat, or a forkful of mashed potatoes. I know I’m supposed to like my vegetables, and I’ve never served a meal that didn’t include a green vegetable (unless I’m cooking on a weekend and have run out of salad, in which case it’s possible that I’ll count tomato sauce as a vegetable). I just wish I liked them more, but honestly just not so much. Read the rest of this entry ?
The Food Network has a new show on called “The Worst Cooks in America”. I had hopes for it, mostly because the promo of the two professional chefs staring in horrified bemusement at the man who’d boiled a whole chicken was entertaining. The premise of the show is that they’ve found 12 of the worst cooks in America – as nominated by their friends and families – and in a couple of months they’ll turn at least two of them into cooks who can fool professional food critics into thinking they’re eating a meal prepared by one of the host chefs and not by one of the (presumably now formerly) worst cooks in America.
The promos for the show were really entertaining in a shadenfreude reality TV kind of way – seriously, who boils a whole chicken? Read the rest of this entry ?
For the past week Boston has been not only deluged with icy snow, but also with librarians. Or, put another way, ALA has been in town which means both that I’ve gotten to tag along to dessert parties at the Children’s Museum and meet M.T. Anderson, but also that we have friends in town some of whom are staying for Dinner. And, when I say staying for Dinner I mean she’s been planning on coming to Dinner for the better part of 18 months because apparently we’re fabulous, or notorious, I’m not entirely sure which. I voiced this opinion to her and was firmly told to stop being blasé about Dinner. Read the rest of this entry ?
Monday Night Dinner 
