The LA Timesran a piece yesterday on blogs becoming a new tool in many chefs' arsenals, and how they're entering a blogosphere that used to be reserved for us commonfolk. The difference, according to the author? Primarily, style and choice of content: commonfolk tend to "natter about what they fed their boyfriends last night, and fuzzily photograph their latest batch of heart-shaped cookies" while REAL chefs tell the stories behind the food, taking more time to detail the food's inspiration and its history.
I beg to differ. I'm biased, yes, but I think our Slashfood Flickr group is a perfect example of primarily amateur photographers and chefs taking outstanding photos of food, ones just as good as any in a cookbook. And I think people read food blogs to take in the "nattering" about day-to-day life and how it fits in with what fix and eat. And chef's blogs can be personal, too - they don't all fit neatly into one (bread) box, as this author seems to imply.
The article details several chef blogs that have been making waves, and how the chefs are using their platforms to make a statement. For some chefs, like Alison Barshak, a blog is a way to show off and advertise your new restaurant under the guise of giving viewers a tutorial on opening up an eatery. For others, like Michael Laiskonis, blogs are a chance to describe eloquently, albeit verbosely, how they got the inspiration and found the ingredients for their extravagant meals.
Check out GD for tons of food-related info...it's amazing how often the topics of environment and food overlap, especially as farmers explore greener methods and more food goes organic.
When I was in college, I had this party trick that I would trot out ever so often. I would ask people to show me their favorite pen, and then I would intuit facts about their personality based on their pen choice. It worked best when people were slightly intoxicated, as a few well placed guesses could really wow them when they were slightly incapacitated.
Yesterday, Julia Langbein wrote a post on Gourmet's Choptalk that made me think about this old trick of mine. She claims that the best way to learn about a person or family is to take a peek at their coffee mug cabinet. Apparently, you can tell a lot about the people who live in a particular space by the type of mugs they have. Thinking about my own cabinet, I realize that my mismatched hand thrown mugs (mostly thrift store purchases), the freebie blue NPR mug and the one with my sister's face printed on it do say certain things about me.
About a year and a half ago, I posted about the work of photographer Michael Harlan Turkell, particularly his Back of the House Project, a great series of 25 very candid black and white photos of restaurants and their staff. Turkell recently dropped Slashfood a line, pointing out his photo blog, as well as what appears to be a new photo series called "mise en place". It had been a while since I checked Turkell's site, so the blog was news to me. It appears he's also been commissioned by New York City restaurant blog Eater to photograph the subjects of their "Gatekeepers" series, which profiles "the very folks that stand between you and some of your favorite impossible-to-get-tables." If you've ever worked in the restaurant industry, or if you're just a lover of food, dining and photography, do yourself a favor and check out Turkell's website as well as his blog.
No matter how irritating it is to have your favorite TV show interrupted with commercial breaks, the fact of the matter is that companies usually put a lot of effort into their advertisements and that some of them turn out quite well. Unlike ads with the King, or any of the other creepy fast food mascots, there will always be a handful that are actually enjoyable. Neatorama has a list of their top ten picks for the best cereal commercials of all time that list a couple of these types of commercials. Most of them seem to be from the early 1990s or before (which could be taken as a sign that breakfast cereal commercials are going downhill) and two of the top ten use the word "indubitably" somewhere in their descriptions of the food.
Number one is the Star Wars-themed C3PO cereal shown in the video above. Two more of the top ten (including the "indubitably delicious" Crispy Critters cereal clip) are after the jump.
Google is known for providing their employees with lots of perks, including good food for lunch. The Google cafeteria is quite well known at this point, offering everything from childhood favorites to top quality gourmet entrees. It is safe to say that prepacked sandwiches on either stale or slightly mushy bread will never make their way into the mouths of Google employees during lunch time.
You might not want to check it out before your own lunch break, though, just in case you decide that suddenly your own lunch looks a lot less impressive.
Some seem to think that restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow's grudge against NY Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni runs deeper than just one bad review. Chodorow has, after all, said that he feels his restaurants have always gotten the short stick from the reviewer. A recent piece on Page Six of the NY Post seems to confirm this, as Chodorow has just announce that Bruni is banned from all of his 29 restaurants.
For those of you wondering how the Chodorow plans to ban someone whose looks are supposed to be a secret, just know that restaurant staffs make it their business to unmask restaurant critics whenever possible, many kitchens will have a wall of critics and other notable people to keep an eye out for. Chodorow's employees have an extra reason to look for Bruni because Jeffrey has offered a free trip for two to the Caribbean to the first person to recognize him. As insurance to make sure he is seen, Chodorow plans to post a photo of Bruni on his personal blog sometime soon.
For the past couple of years, there has been a growing interest in getting local foods whenever possible, largely because it is perceived as helping the local economy, being better for the environment and better for your health (assuming the local food is organic, etc., not factory-farmed). There is one food - a drink, actually, that has strongly resisted this trend, where "'distance and exoticism are marketed as advantages": bottled water. Fiji, one of the more expensive store brands, is now the number 2 selling premium bottled water in the US.
At $1.50 and up per bottle, Fuji is not cheap. Some will say that a thing is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it, but others wonder how much the water is really worth. A reader asked Triple Pundit what the true cost of a bottle of Fuji water was. Sustainability Engineer Pablo Päster responded, calculating the (approximate) production and materials costs of a 1L bottle, travel/shipping expenses for shipping both full and empty bottles and, of course, the water itself. In the end, it comes down to a cost of approximately $.22 per bottle, leaving a $1.28 (or more) profit for the manufacturer and retailer.
One of the side effects of blogging about food is that you start to want to play around with platings and presentation a lot more than you would if you were not photographing your meals. Joe, from Culinary in the Country, for example, augmented his already attractive Chocolate Crème Caramel with some extra caramel rounds along the outside of the plate and a little freeform sugar sculpture on top. The overall effect is great and really brings the look of the dessert up to restaurant-quality - and probably an expensive restaurant, at that.
The crème caramel itself is actually quite easy to make. The most difficult part for someone attempting their first one is to not burn the caramel before you pour it into the empty ramekins, as it can be sensitive. The "crème" part of this dessert is made with soy milk and bittersweet chocolate, held together with eggs, just like the traditional versions are. The chocolate will cover the soy taste, for anyone sensitive to it, but using soy milk will make the dessert a lot lighter than if it were made with cream.
And if you have somehow managed to overdose on chocolate from Valentine's Day, you might want to check out Elise's recipe for Rose Petal Flan instead!
Erielle, who blogs at Fancy Toast, wanted to know if there was a mandoline support group somewhere that she could join because she just couldn't get the hang of using hers. A mandoline is a kitchen tool designed to make slicing up vegetables into thin, even strips, almost effortless. Potatoes, apples, cabbage and other firm fruits and vegetables can be placed into a (usually) metal holder and are quickly run across a very sharp blade that neatly cuts them into pieces. It is more precise than a grater, but the concept is similar.
Most find the process of using a mandoline to be very clear cut, but judging from the comments on the post, there are many people who have experienced the same type of frustration as Erielle in attempting to use their mandolines. Coming to the rescue, in the comments section of the original post, was none other than OXO - the maker of the mandoline in question! They are offering mandoline lessons to anyone who needs a little assistance in New York City at OXO in the Chelsea Market and at the upcoming housewares show in Chicago in mid-March. Even if you're already experienced with your mandoline, it might be worth taking up their offer to pick up some extra tips. Check Erielle's comments for the contact info if you have any other OXO tech questions.
A good popover should be slightly crisp on the outside, tender and slightly custardy on the inside, and must be attractively puffy. There are specialty pans available for making them, but as with most specialty pans, it's hard to know whether buying them is worth the price. I don't make popovers very often, so I almost always use a regular muffin pan, as I did when I made eggnog popovers over the holidays. But the argument for using the specialty pans, neatly summed up in the above photo of the Fanatic Cook 's mile-high popovers, is compelling. The muffin-made popovers met the textural characteristics that are desirable in a popover, but they simply cannot compete when it comes to the towering heights that the specialty pan popovers do.
With this in mind, I would certainly consider investing in a popover pan if I made popovers more than once or twice a year. The results, clearly, are impressive and the pans don't take up that much room. I'll just keep them with my wide array of specialty and shaped cake pans....
I'm embarrassed to admit that it never occurred to me to put a chocolate drizzle on oatmeal raisin cookies. I always kept my chocolate and raisins separated (though I have mixed chocolate and dried cranberries with near-reckless abandon) when it comes to oatmeal cookies. If a picture is anything to go on - and a mouthwatering photo often is - then I have been missing out.
The Fanatic Cook posted the recipe for these Oatmeal Raisin Cookies just the other day. The cookies themselves are a healthier makeover of the classic cookie recipe found on boxes of Quaker oatmeal, with significantly less sugar than the original recipe called for and whole wheat pastry flour instead of all purpose. The reduction in sugar sounds like it would be worth a shot for anyone watching his or her intake, although the chocolate-drizzle strategy could certainly be applied to just about anyrecipe you choose.
The idea behind most food websites, food blogs included, is to write about good food. Good recipes, excellent restaurants and tasty products are among the things frequently written up on these sites. Wild Recipes has a slightly different goal, however. The site is dedicated to the weirdest, most outrageous - by which they usually mean disgusting - foods that people actually eat.
Old fashioned scrapple, Rocky Mountain oysters, head cheese and brains are all included on the site, but there are far stranger dishes than the ones that simply involve cooking the less appetizing bits of animals. For example, how would you feel about a Spam milkshake (pictured) with anchovies, mustard and beer? Or would you be likely to put a few slices of Cheddar cheese in your morning coffee then "slurp down the glob of melted cheese" once you've finished off the liquid? Granted, the cheese coffee is unappealing in a way that is different from the "oysters," but that doesn't make it any less disgusting.
Most of the entries have recipes should you be so inclined to try them and there are seven pages of dishes to choose from, and just about all of them are accompanied by a story describing how the submitter first came across the dish.
Hungry for a month is a blog that chronicles a month-long experiment to see what it would be like to eat for $1 per day.
Rather than purchasing one dollar of food every day, Evan chose to purchase small quantities of food at a time, from the grocery store, that still stayed within the overall $30 budget. He did not use extra spices and the only "free" things he ate were those that seemed like they would be free and available to the average person, like free coffee at the office, salt taken from restaurants, sauce packets from Taco Bell. He did not eat other free food that was offered.
The experiment, which avoids political or even generalizes social commentary, is fascinating to read about. Make sure you start with the introduction, then begin at day one. You'll hear about what the meals were like, how he budgeted and a couple of interesting revelations about the way we eat.
And what about the money he saved? You'll just have to read through to the end to find out what he did with it.
Red beans and rice doesn't sound like a very exciting dish, but the staple of Louisiana cuisine can actually be elegant as well as delicious, as long as you put as much care into making yours as BWJones did with his version of the dish. His recipe calls for rice, red beans, onion and a lot of spices, including sage, thyme, bay leaf, cayenne pepper, garlic, paprika and chipotle. His is topped off with crawfish, seasoned generously with Old Bay (not to be confused with Old Spice), although some would say that sausage (andouille, in particular) or ham sets the standard for the dish. The meat can be left off entirely for a less expensive or vegetarian version of the dish.
This is an easy recipe to master and an extremely versatile one. Not only can you play around with the spices, increasing and decreasing the heat, but it can work both as a side dish and as a main course.
The LA Times ran a piece yesterday on blogs becoming a new tool in many chefs' arsenals, and how they're entering a blogosphere that used to be reserved for us commonfolk. The difference, according to the author? Primarily, style and choice of content: commonfolk tend to "natter about what they fed their boyfriends last night, and fuzzily photograph their latest batch of heart-shaped cookies" while REAL chefs tell the stories behind the food, taking more time to detail the food's inspiration and its history.
Some seem to think that restaurateur 
For the past couple of years, there has been a growing interest in getting local foods whenever possible, largely because it is perceived as helping the local economy, being better for the environment and better for your health (assuming the local food is organic, etc., not factory-farmed). There is one food - a drink, actually, that has strongly resisted this trend, where "'distance and exoticism are marketed as advantages": bottled water. Fiji, one of the more expensive store brands, is now the number 2 selling premium bottled water in the US.
Erielle, who blogs at 
The idea behind most food websites, food blogs included, is to write about good food. Good recipes, excellent restaurants and tasty products are among the things frequently written up on these sites. 
Hungry for a month
May is National BBQ Month and National Hamburger Month
Cupcakes, not for dessert (unless beef is your idea of a treat)
Because eating French Fries in the car is so tough
