"$240 rack of veal, $220 shoulder of pork and a $200 whole king salmon
for four to eight people ... nearly 20 antipasti ... more than a dozen
pasta dishes, one with a
jalapeño pesto, another with a tripe ragù, another with partridge ...
more than 15 other entrees, including duck wrapped in porchetta; guinea
hen with pumpkin; squab with wild arugula ..." Frank Bruni expresses no small amount of awe over the expected offerings at Del Posto, the
latest New York mecca from Mario Batali and Joseph "Son of Lydia"
Bastianich.- A holiday job at Manhattan wine emporium Sherry-Lehman is more than just a part-time money maker – it's a real wine education. "Some people offer to go through the course and work the holiday rush free," Frank J. Piral writes. "Some wine enthusiasts...have offered to pay to be allowed to work there." If you're looking for a similar education but live somewhere West of New Jersey, Eric Asimov has a raft of books you might be interested in.
Mario Batali and the $240 rack of veal: NYT Food and Wine in 60 Seconds
Continue reading Mario Batali and the $240 rack of veal: NYT Food and Wine in 60 Seconds
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Nigella Lawson and other stars: NYT Dining & Wine in 60 Seconds
Nigella Lawson pops in to seduce us with her typically tactile elegance. On pie crust: "I know the idea of pie crust can sound frightening, so it is good to
start with crusts that do not need to be rolled out. They can be
fashioned simply by using the two hands you were born with." Mmmm ... hands...pie...Nigella...- Frank Bruni gives Cookshop, a restaurant seemingly obsessed with ethics, two stars: "So you can sip, sup and simultaneously congratulate yourself, all of which might be a bit much but for this: You can also have a merry, heedless time ... Cookshop renders its call to conscience as a murmur, audible to anyone soothed by the sound and ignorable by those who just want to chow down."
- You can have famous chefs come to your home and cook dinner for you and your friends! Guys like Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller! They'll totally come over and make tuna tartare and Colorado lamb, while you hang out and drink wine with your guests! There's only one catch: you have to be filthy rich.
- R. W. Apple, Jr has a long, fascinating primer on mid-century food critic Clementine Paddleford, one of the first ambassadors of good food in the U.S.
- Julia Moskin travels to Maine for a nine-course meal, in which locally grown potatoes appear in every course. The locals blow away a few popular potato myths: "People always say that Yukon Golds taste buttery, but they actually taste like potatoes ... It's just that people have become used to tasteless potatoes, and 'buttery' is a compliment."
Continue reading Nigella Lawson and other stars: NYT Dining & Wine in 60 Seconds
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Turning leftover scraps and bones into stock
You can make stock out of virtually anything – even vegetables – but the richest, most flavorful stocks are carnivorous in nature; their preparation requires any kind of bone, or any kind of scrap of anything that used to be meat. I tend to eat a lot of poultry, so I often have a box or a bag full of discarded chicken bones in my freezer. This is a non-issue now that I live alone, but when I started making stock, I lived in a ramshackle apartment in San Francisco's Nob Hill with a revolving cast of art students and assorted miscreants. Until my boyfriend appended a note to the front of the freezer (I think it read something along the lines of "Leave Karina's Bones Alone"), my scraps were constantly disappearing to end up in someone's Keinholz-influenced assemblage. Later, I shared a tiny two bedroom in the East Village with a decidedly non-culinary professional type. One evening he had four or five people over, and everyone was drinking beer in the kitchen. I came in and opened up the freezer, and a clear tupperware full of chicken carcasses fell out. Conversation halted just long enough for a communal gasp. "It's .. they're ... chicken bones. For, um, making stock," I said. I started looking for a new place to live the next day.
Nowadays, it's my apartment, my bones. But my living-alone-ness is a bit of a double edged sword: a bachelorette can only eat so many chickens, so I rarely have a huge pile of leftover bones. I totally intended to make a turkey this Thankgiving, but plans changed. This demo is based on the remnants of several chicken-based meals, but you could easily substitute your whole turkey carcass – as long as you can find a big enough pot.
Continue reading Turning leftover scraps and bones into stock
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Thanksgiving overdose: NY Times Dining & Wine in 60 Seconds
Marian Burros says the only way you're going to get through Thanksgiving is if you start cooking a week in advance – unless, of course, you want to have a Karina Longworth Thanksgiving, wherein you eat beer and organic macaroni and cheese in front of the TV and give thanks for living alone. But if you go for the former, here's a list to get you started. Or else, you can book a reservation. Meanwhile, Kim Severson offers the single most important Thanksgiving truism I've ever heard: "No one remembers the turkey unless it is bad."- Forget the pumpkin pies this year, says Julia Moskin – how 'bout apple-stuffed puff pastry?
- Celery root and maple? Florence Fabricant is as shocked as you are.
- Frank Bruni breaks up the Thankgiving overload by paying a visit to Aburiya Kinnosuke, a new Midtown restaurant that's attracting a following of Japanese businessmen. "This restaurant was clearly delighting them, sating them and offering them something much closer to, and more consistent with, what they would get in Tokyo than what they would get in TriBeCa. That caught my attention, and my own delight kept me coming back for more."
Continue reading Thanksgiving overdose: NY Times Dining & Wine in 60 Seconds
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Milk, comfort and money: NY Times Dining in 60 Seconds
According to Kim Severson, some brands of organic milk "are processed so that an unopened carton can last for months." Apparently, Horizon isn't one of them – remind me, some time, to tell you the story about The Day I Made Macaroni and Cheese and It Turned Green.- Marian Burros on the problems of buying food-related gifts online: "Some items require more than unwrapping, and no company should assume that the customer knows how to roast its heritage chicken or that there's more than one way to make its potato pancakes."
- Today in The Minimalist: "The flavor of peanuts is as distinctive as that of any nut, and it isn't even a nut, it's a legume."
- Suzanne Goin has published a cookbook based on her Sunday Suppers at Los Angeles' Lucques, called – wait for it – Sunday Duppers at Lucques. It's classic comfort food, or as Nick Fox puts it, "basically Mediterranean with a few Mexican touches. Let other chefs reach around the world for inspiration; Ms. Goin doesn't even use soy sauce."
- There's a new, gourmet, all-pizza joint in town called Slice, and even Florence Fabricant can't help but try to puncture its pretentions: "The white brick and black tile suggest the East Village more than the Upper East Side, until you see the prices."
- Eric Asimov tracks down the "uncommon wine shops" of New York City, including Uva, a dark little place known locally as the only place to get wine in Williamsburg on a Sunday. Unless you know something I don't?
Continue reading Milk, comfort and money: NY Times Dining in 60 Seconds
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Harlem and Lemons: NY Times Dining & Wine in 60 Seconds
The last time I was in Harlem, I ate soggy macaroni and cheese in a cafeteria above an H & R Block. I subscribe to the "pizza and sex" theory when it comes to mac and cheese, but if you don't, here's a guide to Upper Manhattan's non-soul food options. - Lemon may not be the most common desert island food, but as Amanda Hesser writes, it "is seasonless, sourceless, immune to fads, a commodity untouched by the shifting culinary winds ... Every cook, rich or poor, uses the fruit."
- I just moved into an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where, amongst the Polish delis and hipster taverns, the obvious standout is an Italian shop called, simply, Pork Store. The sign portrays a pig in a bowtie, holding up an Italian flag in defiance against his butcher. I guess I should get to know that pig intimately, because, as Josh Friedland puts it, "recently, restaurants have been helping the pig make a strong comeback, feeding an increasing appetite for all things porcine, from lardo to speck to regional-style barbecue."
- Melissa Ceria follows the custom wine movement. One of her stops is the headquarters of Crushpad.com, from which one customer brags, "My guess is, if you took my wine and put it in front of Robert Parker, he wouldn't be able to tell that an amateur is making it."
- Who wants a really baroque cocktail involving Concord Grapes, nutmeg, and black peppercorns? Julie Besonen has you covered.
Continue reading Harlem and Lemons: NY Times Dining & Wine in 60 Seconds
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French firm fails to trademark scent of strawberries
The European Union's second highest court has dismissed a claim from a French firm seeking permission to trademark the smell of fresh strawberries. Eden Sarl, who wanted to use the scent to infuse all manner of products, from leather goods to face creams, maintained that although there are many different kinds of strawberries, each with variations in taste, all fresh strawberries smell the same. The court, employing evidence procured by "smell experts", dismissed that argument; apparently, scientific evidence concludes that "strawberries can in fact have up to five different,
distinct scents." This is not the first time a firm has tried and failed to trademark a scent; in fact, the only naturally occuring scent to recieve EU trademark protection is freshly cut grass. But the real question is this: who on earth would want a strawberry-scented leather couch?[via Boing Boing]
Continue reading French firm fails to trademark scent of strawberries
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Gettin' Boned: NY Times Dining In in 60 Seconds
Joel Robuchon has returned to the world of haute cuisine after nine years away. Joel Robuchon at The Mansion, the latest restaurant to open at Las Vegas' MGM Grand, is, like most of the rest of the casino in which it is housed, "is full-scale, damn-the-torpedoes, three-stars-or-bust Robuchon, worldly, luxurious, costly."- According to Frank Bruni, Ninja New York is "a visually histrionic smorgasbord of undistinguished food and a discordant bill that can easily exceed $100 a person with tax, tip and drinks."
- I love Hawaiian sea salt – at least, the orange stuff I put on seared ahi is awesome. But, according to Florence Fabricant, there's this black stuff that you can put on pumpkins. And off I go to Dean and Deluca...
- When the weather gets like it's been in New York lately – brisk, but not yet icy – all I want to eat is slow-cooked meat. The Minimalist has a recipe for steamed Moroccan lamb shanks that sounds like exactly what I've been craving.
- Nothing says "Halloween" like a nice bone stew. Julia Moskin talks to Jennifer McLagan about her new book.
Continue reading Gettin' Boned: NY Times Dining In in 60 Seconds
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Pumpkins: Ruining at least 2 holidays for 3,000 years
When I was growing up, my mother would vacillate wildly between a general disinterest in homemaking, and balls-out displays of domestic mania that would put a certain former jailbird to shame. Holidays were always pretty reliable when it came out to bringing out the monster, but the fall holidays were, no question, the worst. Come Christmastime, she'd surely return to her usual policy of household maintenance (i.e.: let the help do it), but from mid-October to the end of November, she went holiday hogwild. Halloween involved entire weekends spent carving rooms full of jack-o-lanterns; Thanksgiving meant a trip to the costume shop, so that the whole family could take pictures dressed as Pilgrims. It would all invariably start with an afternoon trip to the pumpkin patch, where we'd pick enough squashes and gourds to feed a small vitamin C-deficient army. "Why?" I always wondered. "Why does my mother's sudden, cyclical taste for homemaking have to necessarily involve such a weird-ass specimen of vegetable?" (Well, maybe I never thought "weird-ass", but you get it). When pressed on that very issue, my mother would invariably respond with those patented parent "I don't know" obfuscators: "It's just tradition." Twenty years later, I thought it was time to look into that "tradition". Here's what I found:- According to this University of Illinois page, jack-o-lanterns stem from an Irish myth about a guy called "Stingy Jack". Jack (or Stingy, if you prefer) invited the Devil out for a drink but, true to form, didn't want to pay. He convinced the (apparently very gullible) Devil to turn himself temporarily into a coin so that they could get the drinks. But Stingy, instead of paying for the drinks, put the Devil/coin in his pocket next to a silver cross - making it impossible for the Devil to return to his regular form. When Jack eventually died, God didn't want him in Heaven, and the Devil was pissed, too, so he was forced to roam the earth for all of eternity with a burning coal stuck in a turnip. The History Channel has more.
- It should be noted that said cable channel's library of "spooky recipes" is pumpkin-free.
- Pumpkin Patch says that the Irish replaced Stingy Jack's turnips with pumpkins once settled in "The New World". Though some form of Halloween has existed for 3,000 years or more, but it really caught on in North America in the 1800s.
- Pumpkin Nook doesn't know much about how pumpkins got all caught up in Thanksgiving, but they do advocate for making the orange monsters "our national fruit."
- It's light on the Pumpkinania, but this is a pretty good summary of the evolution of Thanksgiving.
- The first pumpkin pie? Pilgrims apparently used to "scoop out a pumpkin, fill it with milk and pumpkin flesh and cook it for hours in hot ashes, often adding spices and syrup to make pudding." Uh, yum?
Continue reading Pumpkins: Ruining at least 2 holidays for 3,000 years
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Pizza Day Winners
Thanks to you guys, Pizza Day was a rousing success. And thanks to our crack team of bloggers who spent all night mulling it over, we're happy to announce the winners of our contest. Drumroll please...Most Creative
We loved Stephen Cooks' Slashfood-specific interpretation, with Gorgonzola, rosemary, soppresata and walnuts, but this Calamari Goat Cheese slice earned extra credit.
Most Bizarre
How can we not give props to this Cantonese-style BBQ pork, bean sprout, Shanghai bok choi pizza with mabo tofu sauce from the Revecess Blog?
Editor's Choice
We loved all the entries, but one turned Slashfood Headquarters into one big puddle of drool. Congrats, Traveler's Lunchbox! Your Fig and Prosciutto Pizza wins the grand prize.
If you're one of the above winners, please contact us for info on how to collect your prize. Thanks to everyone for entering, and reading Slashfood!
Continue reading Pizza Day Winners
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Hacking Food: The All-Pizza Diet
I met Vladimir Cole, editor of the video game blog Joystiq, about a week after he had come to the end of a 3.5 month all-pizza diet. That's right: for three meals a day for over three months, Vlad ate nothing but pizza (or a strictly-defined derivative thereof). In our chat that night, he told me a range of stories – from blowing wads of cash at Spago to forming a minor addiction the Sullivan Street Bakery – but what most impressed me was that he actually lost weight on the diet. Like, a good deal of weight, Like, 20 pounds. I caught up with him over instant messenger a couple of weeks later to find out how he did it.
Slashfood: I guess the obvious place to start is: why a piizza diet?
VC: Well -- I was eating with some friends at Pepe's in New Haven (best pie in the world, FYI: bacon-clam-garlic white pie) and was talking about how much I loved it. I must have had more than my share of beer because I found myself saying something along the lines of ,"I could eat nothing but this for the rest of my life and die happy." One of my buddies said, "I bet you couldn't" and I was like, "I bet I could" and it devolved from there, with me agreeing to a 3.5 month pizza-only diet.
Slashfood: Why 3.5 months?
VC: Well, actually it was 314 consecutive meals. 3.14 = pi. Like pizza...
Slashfood: Oh, interesting...
VC: We just thought it'd be funny. Terms of the bet: I had to eat nothing but pizza. Any other food would have to be liquid form... So technically, I could have put a burger in a blender and drank it smoothie style, but that would have been gross.
Continue reading Hacking Food: The All-Pizza Diet
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Pissaladiere: Pizza goes French
I'll tell you right now: I don't bake. The oven in my apartment only sporadically works, and even if it was more reliable, I'd have zero patience for it. I also don't have enough mouths to feed, on a regular basis, to make the preparation of baked goods - which are almost always high-yield and perishable to a fault - a reasonable pursuit. So in order to participate in Pizza Day, I had to scramble on many counts.
Getting someone to let you come over to their house in order to make an extravagant meal with which you have little or no expertise is a tricky thing. You don't want to just call up said friend and say, "Yo, can I bake a pizza in your oven?" You want to make it seem like it's going to be something of an event, magical and a little confusing – essentially, an evening in itself. So one night Kat and I were at M Shanghai, and, as we debated whether or not any type of food could possibly taste better alongside a dirty vodka martini than M's giant, juicy pork dumplings, she gave me the opening I needed:
Kat: Hey, how's Slashfood going?
Karina: Great. Oh, I was going to ask you - tomorrow night, can I make pissaladiére at your house?
Kat: Piece of la-di-what?
Exactly. First you stun them, then you go in for the kill.
You can look at the entire photo documentation of the process - including more than one brutally unflattering picture of yours truly - here, or else let the selects below suffice.
Continue reading Pissaladiere: Pizza goes French
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Welcome to Pizza Day!
Do not adjust your computer screens: you have entered Slashfood's 12 hour marathon of wall-to-wall pizza posts. From all-pizza diets, to frozen pizza taste-tests, to pizza recipes, gadgets and reviews, we're going to try very hard to leave no pizza-stone unturned. And, remember - we want your pizza, too. We're still accepting entries for our three-tiered contest through the end of the day, and if your entry is the Most Creative, Most Bizarre, or Overall Best -Of, you'll win an Amazon Gift Certificate. So send us your slices and stories, and keep checking back throughout the day for more pizza madness - who knows, we might even surprise you.
[image via Slice NY]
Continue reading Welcome to Pizza Day!
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Don't forget - Pizza for Prizes!
As you know, Monday is Pizza Day here on Slashfood, and as part of the festivities we're handing out $25 Amazon Gift Certificates to the Most Creative Pizza, the Most Bizarre and the overall award, Editor's Choice. So make a pie, take a pic, and leave us a link! We'll announce the winners on Monday, so check back then.
[image via Brandon Eats]
Continue reading Don't forget - Pizza for Prizes!
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50 States of Cheese
Our friends at Gadling turned us on to iGourmet's 50 States of Cheese, a guide to, well, the best cheeses from each United state. It's no surprise that a state like Wisconsin produces several notable cheeses, but it's nice to see some of the more unlikely suspects (like Juustoleipa, a Finnish cheese similar to Halumi that doesn't melt when grilled) highlighted. Even Alaska and Hawaii are represented, the later by Diabolic by Surfing Goat, a disk of chevre marinated in olive oil and "exotic ingredients like jalapeños, Thai dragon chilies, Bhudda Hand citron, Malabar peppercorns, and garlic." I was a little surprised, though, to only see one cheese from New York - and it's not even from Coach Farm, which, to my mind, is the best goat dairy in the nation.Continue reading 50 States of Cheese
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What Can I Get You Folks? - Eating Out for Thanksgiving
In Defense of Guy Fieri
'Top Chef Vegas' - And Then There Were Five
