"Slate" news and stories

Food writer Regina Schrambling says she's finally found a phenomenon even more annoying than Rachel "Yummo" Ray: Precocious kiddie foodies.

Writing in Slate, Schrambling points to some of her main offenders: New York Times' fawning coverage of 12-year-old "restaurant critic" David Fishman, the Times' new "Cooking With Dexter" feature written by food editor Pete Wells about his kitchen exploits with his 4-year-old son, and NPR's 5-year-old Chef Julian, the world's "youngest celebrity chef." These kids are not just being cooed at for their cuteness, she says, they're actually being held up as inspiration for adult chefs.

Schrambling claims that A) Kitchens are not nurseries - they're dangerous places filled with knives and boiling oil - so we encourage kids to cook only at the peril of their forearms and fingertips, B) Kids have less-developed taste buds, naturally craving high levels of salty and sweet, and therefore are less likely to come up with anything truly remarkable to adult palates, and C) The younger you are, the smaller your food memory bank, so a 5-year-old is probably not going to know a "good" burger from a "bad" burger.

"On a larger scale, the trend emphasizes the worst of the food frenzy today: the celebration of celebrity and novelty over authenticity and seriousness," Schrambling writes. "...Today chefs barely out of high school are competing on reality cooking shows, and the bar keeps being lowered, with Internet exposure for every little Thomas Keller."

I find over-precocious kids annoying in general, and I think that any parent who holds up little Ava or Aidan as a paragon of culinary sophistication is totally silly. At the same time, I think it's great for kids to get in the kitchen and learn a thing or two about food. Better than sitting in front of the X-Box eating Cakesters (I'm sure Schrambling would agree). And if having a few kiddie chefs on TV helps encourage a greater respect for food, that's great. Though I'm unlikely to be trying out any of their recipes any time soon.

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For weeks now, everywhere you turn, it has been Thanksgiving as far as the eye can see. Here at Slashfood, we posted three menus, a bevy of side dishes and some excellent suggestions for wines to drink with your meals. At The Kitchn, they've been talking pie since November 1st (that's a lot of pie). Ree, The Pioneer Woman, has photographed so many Thanksgiving recipes I'm astounded she can still bear to be in her kitchen. And every newspaper section in the country has written about turkey, apples, pumpkins and cranberries ad naseum.

The thing is that for all these recipes, tips, suggestions and turkey tricks, how many of us actually vary our Thanksgiving day menu from year to year? I'm serving up a meal this year for the holiday that is very much like the one I've eaten with my family since I could first gum a couple of spoonfuls of mashed potato.

Over at Slate, Regina Schrambling has written a piece that describes just this conundrum - food sections, blogs and magazines who feel the need to reinvent the holiday each year, when most people turn to the familiar recipes they've been making for years. It's a good read that will get you in the mood to head to the kitchen and cook up your Thanksgiving favorites.

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Check out this hilarious essay, in which Slate's Sarah Dickerman outfits her kitchen with molecular gastronomy tools in an effort to see whether her picky, veggie-shy 4-year-old is more likely to eat broccoli that's been turned into a gelatinized orb.

Dickerman buys a $200 Texturas kit, produced by molecular gastronomy king Ferran Adria of Spain's El Bulli, which contains calcium gluconolactate, powdered xanthan gum, agar agar, and lecithin, along with a giant syringe. She and her son mix and stir the various powders like mad scientists, producing tomato spheres and tadpole-shaped broccoli balls (pictured).

Does he like it? Not so much. Carrot juice "air" is more successful. Plus, all the weird, slippery gelatinized, foamed food, the kid's ready for some real dinner.

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Slate -- my favorite web site on the internet after Slashfood -- published an article today about the possible decline of Spanish avant-garde cuisine. The article lists numerous factors contributing to the "death" of the movement, including the overuse of foam, popular demand and democracy (meaning the fact that people can recreate the culinary experiences in their own kitchens). It contends that the mainstream has caught up with the movement, rendering it no longer new or exciting.

Fortunately for those of us who enjoy this type of food, the article ultimately concludes that Spanish avant-garde cuisine will likely meet the fate as trends like Asian fusion and California cuisines: some elements will fade away, but others (like foam) will simple become part of the "culinary vernacular." Phew! Anyone think otherwise?

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Last weekend, I attended a party featuring home-brewed beer. A fellow party-goer remarked that most home-brewed beer parties usually take the same form: everyone complements the brewer, then proceeds to dump the home-brewed stuff in the sink and head to the keg. But the beer at the this party was actually decent, even borderline inspiring (I swear I'd try to brew some myself if I didn't mind foul smells so much).

Anyway, home-brewing is on the rise -- and it may even be responsible for the return of mead, a honey-based alcoholic beverage. According to an article over at Slate, foodies and local brewers (home-brewers included) have spurred a renewed interest in this libation. You may remember mead from such things as the turn of the last millennium, when we all drank some during the banquet celebrating our successful pillage of the enemy castle.

Sadly, the author of the Slate article ultimately concludes that mead is unlikely to re-enter the mainstream completely, so it looks like I'm going to have seek out artisan brewers to get my berry mead. Unless anyone wants to home-brew some for me?

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