Many of you have, by now, heard of Twitter, the social networking tool used to post short messages to your friends about what you're doing at the moment. Loads of people use the service, and you can even follow Slashfood. But can you share a recipe in 140 characters or less (140 being the maximum amount of characters Twitter allows)?
Well, Cookbook sure thinks so. If you're on Twitter, you can follow Cookbook for regular recipe updates. For the most part, the recipes seem fine. In order to share a recipe in that number of characters, though, you've got to use as many shortcuts as possible, and that does make some of the recipes hard to follow, in my opinion.
Overall, though, it's a pretty neat concept. It's kind of like the Cartoon Kitchen on Serious Eats, only it's delivered right to you. What a way to bring cooking into the 21st century.
It was several years ago that I started thinking more carefully about the butter I was using in my cooking and baking. I switched to unsalted for baking and tried to get my hands on locally produced, organic butter for toast topping and sauce-finishing. These days I am positively addicted to the cultured butter from Vermont Butter and Cheese (not particularly local, but the best I've found around Philly).
Miss Ginsu has taken butter-tasting to a level far above my own measly explorations. Last week, she headed out on her bike and bought nine varieties of premium and imported butters, all unsalted (at least that was her intent, she did end up with salted Kerrygold butter unintentionally). Working methodically through all of them, she rated them on a graded scale. The winner of her test was Elle & Vire, an imported French butter.
During the years when I was going to school in Walla Walla, there wasn't much in the way of good food in town. Our options were the standard fast food fare, some greasy diners and a few taco trucks scattered around town (it was before the food and wine revolution that they've had over the last few years). However, the taco trucks offered some really fantastic fare, making me forever a fan of fresh tortillas wrapped around spicy beef, chicken or pork.
What got me thinking about taco trucks was this post on Serious Eats by Matthew Amster-Burton, in which he takes his four-year-old daughter to Tacos El Asadero, Seattle's best known taco truck that actually serves their grub on a bus instead of from a truck window. He got her a lengua taco, which impressed me, because I don't know any other kids who would willingly eat tongue. Apparently it made an impression on the little Amster-Burton, because when it was all over, she asked for a taco truck to be parked in front of their house. Don't we all wish for that?
Okay kids, it's time to dish. I know that there have got to be bunches of you who have taco truck stories. Let's hear them!
As I mentioned in a previous post, I love everything Rosemary. And I'm always looking for new ways to make pasta (especially since I've cut down on pasta in general and heavy sauces specifically), so I'm always happy to find a recipe where I can combine the two.
Like this recipe for Spaghetti with Rosemary from The Silver Spoon cookbook. Does that look great or what?
For the record, we never called it "pasta" when I was growing up. Never. It was always "spaghetti."
I grew up eating poached eggs. I liked it best when my dad would prepare them, as he always served them over a piece of toast that he had buttered and then cut into squares. That way it would be easy to get a bit of yolk-soaked toast with every bite (occasionally when I go home to Portland, I am still able to convince him to make me breakfast like this). Because of this early exposure to poached eggs, I never thought them to be foreign or complicated and when I was old enough to operate the stove, a pan of water and a slotted spoon, I started whipping them up myself. It wasn't until I read Julie and Julia did I realize that not everyone sees poached eggs as the deadly easy meal that I've always known them to be.
However, now that I know that some folks are challenged by the poaching of the eggs, I thought I'd try to help by pointing you all in the direction of some helpful information. Rob at B3TA tried four different methods for poaching eggs and, after much trial and error, comes to stunning realization about the utility of a pot of boiling water, an egg and some plastic wrap. Go check it out for yourself!
First there was the $14,500 dessert that was created by the Fortress Sri Lanka. Now Serendipity 3, home of the world famous Frrrozen Hot Chocolate, has decided to up the ante considerably with the creation of a $25,000 dessert. They announced the addition of the Frrrozen Haute Chocolate to their menu yesterday. The Guinness Book of World Records was quick to step in and declare it the most expensive dessert in the world.
The dessert is a combination of frozen cocoa and milk that that has five grams of 24-carat gold blended in. It gets topped with whipped cream, gold and a La Madeline au Truffe. It gets served in a goblet that is crowned with diamond and gold. Even the spoon is made from gold. For those of you who might be interested (!) know that the dessert must be ordered at least two weeks in advance, as everything is made to order (including that gold spoon).
Happy National Meatloaf Appreciation Day! If you haven't done so already, today is the time to take out your baking pans and your mom's (or dad's) recipe for meatloaf and put one together. Serious Eats (National Meatloaf Appreciation Day is their brainchild) is going to be posting meatloaf submissions throughout the day, so if you are looking for a little meatloaf inspiration, go check them out.
In order to get in the spirit of the holiday, I made not one, but two meatloafs. The first was a veggie-infused loaf that was close to what my mom used to serve when I was a kid. You can watch me make that one here. Another meatloaf I made strictly for Slashfood readers (and the happiness of my belly). Riffing on the traditional meatloaf recipe that calls for a variety of meats, I went with ground turkey and a Italian seasoned chicken sausage (1 pound each). Make sure to cut the sausage out of the casings and combine well with the turkey.
In a medium frying pan, I combined 1/3 chopped onion, 3 crushed cloves of garlic, 1/3 chopped green pepper, 2 chopped celery stalks (for crunch), one very finely grated potato (I used a microplane) and four large mushrooms, chopped (all chopping was done pretty finely). I cooked the veggies together just until they lost their rawness. I let them cool a little and then added them to the meat, along with a beaten egg, salt and pepper. I mashed it all together until combined and scooped it into a loaf pan. I baked it for about 50 minutes at 375 degrees. If you grate the potato finely enough, it gets really tender during baking, absorbing a lot of the juices. This one was a real winner.
A lot of our food traditions and habits we learn from our parents at an early age. Take pasta sauce. I come from a large Italian family, so we had spaghetti every single week when I was growing up. My mom made her sauce (my dad's recipe, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it was award-winning) and when we put it on the pasta, we put a lot. Not enough so it gets all watery and the pasta is swimming, but certainly enough to cover the pasta out to the edge (more than the photo above).
Now here comes Mark Bittman at The New York Times who agrees with this approach. While most cookbooks will tell you to make a lot of pasta and just add a couple of ladels of sauce in the middle of the plate, Bittman suggests you turn the amounts around and make twice as much sauce as pasta. Mario Batali, in a video from Serious Eats after the jump, disagrees.
If you are one of those foodies who entertains fantasies of going on a vacation of no holds barred eating, then you must check out this article, detailing the trip that Adam Goldman took with two buddies through Spain. They ate for two weeks straight, spending more than $17,000 (for someone whose current car cost but $2,000 that amount seems heart-stopping) on food, wine and booze and gaining nearly 25 between them.
They centered the trip around three Spanish Michelin-starred restaurants, Arzak, Mugaritz and Can Fabes, that are known for their outstanding eats and unique approaches to food. The descriptions of what they ate are fairly quick, but at the end of the article I still felt a little dizzy with all they managed to squeeze in. Sounds like a food-trip of a lifetime.
When I was a kid, my mom only made meatloaf occasionally. It wasn't in the regular dinner rotation and so when we heard it was on the menu, instead of complaining (ala Randy in A Christmas Story, singing-songing "Meat-loaf, beet-loaf, I hate meat-loat."*) we'd celebrate. My mom made good meatloaf, filled with grated carrots and potatoes, seasoned with spaghetti sauce spices and baked in a white stoneware loaf pan (also the vessel for many a loaf of banana bread). It was the kind of meatloaf that got even better the next day and made a really excellent sandwich.
Serious Eats has declared October 18th National Meatloaf Appreciation Day. They are inviting everyone to participate in the festivities. It's easy to be involved in the celebration. All you have to do is make a meatloaf before October 16th and take a picture of your creation. If you have a blog, post the picture and recipe and send the link to the folks at SE. If you're not the blogging sort, send the picture and recipe to them via email (make sure to go over and check their post for the complete instructions). They'll put up a round-up of all the meatloaf creations on the 18th.
If you are a Mario Batali fan who is starting to twitch and suffer from signs of withdrawal due to the fact that your favorite orange-shod chef won't be around to inspire and entertain you on the Food Network, fear not! He is now writing a regular column over at that bastion of online food writing, Serious Eats. It actually seems like a terrific way to get your regular dose of Mario, as his writing is punchy, appealing and natural-sounding. In his current entry, he offers up a recipe for Pasta Pomodoro that sounds absolutely delectable.
Sometimes I wish I could go back and be a kid all over again these days. Because they are making some really cool stuff for kids right now. Take, for instance, this game that Matthew Amster-Burtonwrote about today on Serious Eats. It is called Crazy Chefs and is a game where the point is for players to complete the dish on their card. They turn over tiles until they match up all the ingredients. When I was a kid there was nothing that made me happier than pretending to grocery shop, cook and eat my plastic creations. I particularly remember a plastic fried egg that I served to my parents over and over again. These tendencies are part of the reason it surprised no one when I started writing about food.
I once had a boyfriend who could not tolerate the taste or smell of hard boiled eggs. I remember learning this the hard way, after I had made a really terrific, labor-intensive salmon salad (with freshly poached salmon, not canned). We sat down to eat, and as he put the fork into his mouth, a terrible looked passed across his face and he looked like he was about to retch. The fork beat a hasty retreat back to the plate, and he looked at me with a very serious expression on his face and asked, "Does this have hard boiled eggs in it?"
These days I try to ferret out whether someone is a picky eater before I get too attached, but I've discovered that just about everyone has that one thing that they just can't stand to eat. For some folks, it has to do with a texture and for others it's the association that makes it objectionable. My mom doesn't care for pepper and my dad hates the combination of crunchy and creamy (think ice cream with candy bits in it). My list is fairly short, consisting only of shrimp (as I have a highly inconvenient allergy).
What's your objectionable ingredient? Has your list gotten short as you've gotten older? How do you handle it if you are served something that contains this item?
Everyday, as I work through my collection of food blog feeds, I keep a running list of the posts that I think are interesting or could become a prompt for a blog entry. I turn many of them into posts here, but I always have a few leftover at the end of the day. Towards the end of the week, I've got a whole bunch of unused links hanging around. Today I'm giving those orphaned links another chance at blog-life.
Serious Eats writes about a recent article in Dwell magazine about iconic kitchen items, ranging from the classic Peugeot Pepper Mill to the angular Bialetti stove top espresso maker (I love mine).
Still on the topic of cooking gear, Baking Bites points readers in the direction of an article over at PC Magazine that lists the 10 Weirdest Cooking Gadgets. I think that the Zero Gravity Spice Rack looks pretty darn nifty.
Yumsugar offers advice on how long things should be kept in the fridge and reminds us to label items with the date on which they were opened so to be better able to judge when things should be thrown out. I have to admit that I am often lax in the fridge purging department.
I admit that I am a novice when it comes to fried foods (making them that is, not eating them) but Elise's post on Simply Recipes for Buttermilk Fried Chicken has me seriously contemplating giving it a shot.
Last weekend my sister sent me a link to the website for Jungle Jim's, an enormous international market in Fairfield, OH. They carry more than 100 varieties of honey, have a section of the store named for Robin Hood and actually offer tours of the store for those who can't navigate the place on their own. It makes me want to plan a vacation around visiting that store (Ohio isn't that far from Philadelphia).
I went to get ice cream with some friends last Saturday afternoon at an ice cream parlor/old fashioned candy store. Walking around looking at the candy brought back so many memories of childhood. I remembered tying red licorice shoe laces around my fingers only to nibble them off, or sucking the syrup out of the insides of the edible wax coke bottles.
Craig Kanarick over at Rockmade makes art that has a similar effect on me as did that candy store. He takes close-up, gorgeous pictures of candy. Some is carefully arranged and some is scattered a bit more haphazardly, but the effect is always delicious looking. The picture of the Starbursts above makes my mouth water for that particular candy. I can totally recall the taste, even though I haven't had them in years, just by experiencing the picture. It is much lower in calories that way.
A lot of our food traditions and habits we learn from our parents at an early age. Take pasta sauce. I come from a large Italian family, so we had spaghetti every single week when I was growing up. My mom made her sauce (my dad's recipe, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it was award-winning) and when we put it on the pasta, we put a lot. Not enough so it gets all watery and the pasta is swimming, but certainly enough to cover the pasta out to the edge (more than the photo above).
If you are one of those foodies who entertains fantasies of going on a vacation of no holds barred eating, then you must check out 
Chocolate-stuffed bananas on the grill
Tyler Florence welcomes new daughter
Beware kids' menus!
