Slashfood

Mario Batali and the $240 rack of veal: NYT Food and Wine in 60 Seconds

Karina Longworth — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:02:01 EST

Filed under: Wine, East Coast, Restaurants, Newspapers, New Products

"$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.

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

Karina Longworth — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 20:32:45 EST

Filed under: East Coast, Vegetables, Raves & Reviews, Newspapers, How To

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."

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Turning leftover scraps and bones into stock

Karina Longworth — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 14:03:42 EST

Filed under: Poultry, Recipes, Boiling, Leftovers

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.

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Thanksgiving overdose: NY Times Dining & Wine in 60 Seconds

Karina Longworth — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 18:31:30 EST

Filed under: Newspapers

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."

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Milk, comfort and money: NY Times Dining in 60 Seconds

Karina Longworth — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 14:03:36 EST

Filed under: Wine, East Coast, Restaurants, Dairy, Nuts/seeds, Newspapers, Stores & Shopping

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?

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Harlem and Lemons: NY Times Dining & Wine in 60 Seconds

Karina Longworth — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 21:12:19 EST

Filed under: Wine, East Coast, Science, Recipes, Fruit, Pork, Cocktails, Trends, Newspapers

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.

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French firm fails to trademark scent of strawberries

Karina Longworth — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 15:28:01 EST

Filed under: Mediterranean, Science, Business, Fruit

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]

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Gettin' Boned: NY Times Dining In in 60 Seconds

Karina Longworth — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:54:24 EST

Filed under: Restaurants, Recipes, Steaming, Newspapers, New Products

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.

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Pumpkins: Ruining at least 2 holidays for 3,000 years

Karina Longworth — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:01:52 EST

Filed under: East Coast, British Isles, Fruit, Lists, Fall Flavors

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?

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Pizza Day Winners

Karina Longworth — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:04:48 EST

Filed under: Site Announcements, Pizza Day

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!

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Hacking Food: The All-Pizza Diet

Karina Longworth — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:30:28 EST

Filed under: East Coast, Grains, Vegetables, Fish, Cheese, Hacking Food, Pizza Day

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

Karina Longworth — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 13:00:20 EST

Filed under: Lunch, Dinner, Mediterranean, Grains, Vegetables, Fish, Cheese, Baking, How To, Pizza Day

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!

Karina Longworth — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 07:26:50 EST

Filed under: Site Announcements, 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]

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Don't forget - Pizza for Prizes!

Karina Longworth — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 20:01:50 EST

Filed under: Pizza Day

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]

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50 States of Cheese

Karina Longworth — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 16:02:35 EST

Filed under: East Coast, West Coast, Cheese, Midwest Rural, Midwest Cities, Stores & Shopping, Southern States

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.

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The Augmented Kitchen

Karina Longworth — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 09:38:28 EST

Filed under: Science

My least favorite thing about living with roommates? My tubs of mint pesto and envelopes of sliced Austrian speck get buried behind walls of Budweiser tall boys and half-eaten cartons of Chinese food - if they don't get pilfered first. Maybe if we had one of these augmented kitchens, I could at least save time poking through the chaos everytime I want to make a sandwich. Our friends at Engadget explain that it's now possible to trick your appliances out with "data visualization" - meaning, you can project useful information like recipe details, or the contents of your fridge, on your kitchen surfaces. I think I'll hold out until the software finds a way to shock sticky fingers before they make their way into my 4-year parmesan.

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Slashfood Pizza Day - later, but better

Karina Longworth — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 10:35:50 EST

Filed under: Site Announcements, Pizza Day

We decided we needed a little extra time to ratchet Pizza Day up to the appropriate level of madness. Slashfood Pizza Day will now occur on Monday, September 26. We've got some really cool stuff planned: recipes for all kinds of pies, from French to Korean to Vegan; a frozen pizza taste test; an interview with a guy who went on an all pizza diet for 3.5 months - and lost weight; and much, much more.

Our readers were a big part of why Grilled Cheese Day was an unqualified success, and so, once again, we want you to get involved. To that end, we're raising the stakes just a little bit: we're giving out $25 Amazon gift certificates to the best pizza submissions in three categories: Most Creative Pizza, Most Bizzare, and the overall best-of, the Editor's Choice. So post your pizza creations on your own blog (if you don't have one yet, it's probably time to give Blogger a shot), and leave us a link in the comments on this post. We'll be showcasing the best entries throughout the next week in the lead up to the big day. Have fun, be creative, and we'll see you at our pizza party!

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Frank Bruni: Bouley badly staffed, but so what?

Karina Longworth — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:34:11 EST

Filed under: East Coast, Restaurants, Newspapers

Earlier this week, Page Six warned that New York Times critic Frank Bruni was scheduled to review Bouley Bakery and Market - around the same time that chunks of staff were said to be defecting. Bruni's review hit the paper's today, and to say that he noticed a problem or two at Bouley would be an understatement. As with most of his reviews, Bruni sets the tone right away: "The tiny restaurant on the top floor of the new Bouley Bakery and Market doesn't operate by the rules and rhythms of most establishments of its kind," begins his lead. "It operates by the rules and rhythms of David Bouley." Bruni says that on one of his visits, a class being conducted in the upstairs dining room was held over, and customers who arrived at the restaurant's ostensible 6pm opening time were sent away. "It was still closed at 6:30 and then at 6:45, when several fresh arrivals were told that service might begin in 30 to 40 minutes. None of the employees really knew."

Still, Bruni makes it clear that "for any diner able to muster the right sort of patience - in other words, lots of it - there were payoffs aplenty." Bruni reiterates Gael Greene's quip that Bruni is indeed behind the stove most nights, but then thank god for the blessings of poor staffing: "For all Mr. Bouley's eccentricities and all his woes over recent years, the man can cook."

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Fries with your Fermented Shark? NY Times Dining & Wine in 60 Seconds

Karina Longworth — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:30:28 EST

Filed under: East Coast, Vegetables, Cheese, South Asia, Northern Europe, Recipes, Australia, Raves & Reviews, Stores & Shopping

All you need to know about The Tasting Room is contained in this paragraph: "We want things to taste like what they are, to be recognizable," he said, as corn simmered on an induction burner in nothing more than milk and cream. When passed through a sieve, it became a liquid velvet version of itself, a perfect foil for an aromatic white wine." Read more only if prepared to drool.
Iceland wants in on the American food market, and they're starting with Whole Foods, who will start selling products like Hofdingi (cheese) and smjor (butter) this year.
Australian chefs are calming down and going back to basics; R. W. Apple Jr goes to Sydney and files a report.
Eating raw isn't easy: before she could get started Julie Powell had to pick up "a tabletop dehydrator, an industrial-strength juicer, a mandoline and some nut bags for soaking and fermenting nuts." Thanks, but I'll pass.
The Minimalist teaches you how to make Vietnamese, cilantro-based stark sauce.

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Lush Life: The George Clooney Method

Karina Longworth — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 16:01:14 EST

Filed under: Vodka, Lush Life, Raves & Reviews

I remember a Sunday brunch a while back (I want to say it was at Fada, only because most of my Sunday brunches are) where the entire conversation revolved around why I wasn't nearly as hungover as my friends, even though I had downed just as many drinks as they had the night before. "It's The George Clooney Method," I said. The trick? Stick to vodka. I've read more than one celebrity profile wherein Clooney explains that he's sworn off all brown liquors and sweet or fruity mixers: he drinks vodka, either straight up or mixed with soda because, as he says, "It's a much cleaner hangover." I don't *always* follow the George Clooney method - obviously most decent dinners are accompanied not by straight vodka but by at least one variety of wine, and I do really enjoy a good scotch - but when I do play the Clooney way, it tends to work pretty well. Now, of course, George Clooney is no medical doctor, and anyway, neither he nor I are claiming that vodka sodas are in any way good for you in the long run. But if you're worried about your morning headache the next time you're out drinking, you might want to give The Clooney a try. Of course, if you're *that* worried about it, you might just want to leave the heavy drinking to the actors and the bloggers.

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