"food and drink" news and stories

Up until, oh, about six to eight months ago, I stubbornly refused to eat Vietnamese food. If everyone else in the party felt like Vietnamese, I'd surrender, but not quietly, and would make it clear throughout the whole meal how much I hated what we were eating. I don't like cilantro, I don't like its combination with lime juice (which is completely ignored when eating Mexican food, of course), and I mist certainly did not like fish sauce.

However, after all that "hmph!"-ing, I must shamefully admit now that I am quite addicted to pho. There is something about the steaming hot broth that is so paradoxically refreshing in the summer, and yet so warm and comforting in the fall and winter. Though I am not afraid of beef, I never order pho with any of the sliced rare beef combinations. It might have to do with the fact that the places I've eaten pho are always tiny little dives. But even if we were in the King's castle eating pho, i'd still order the tofu pho because I love it.

There are a few articles in the Seattle Times' Food & Wine section this week -- restaurant Carmelita seems to be related to every other restaurant, experts offer tips on how to live a Champagne dining lifestyle on a beer budget, the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia holds a Wine Festival -- but the real highlight of this week is pumpkins.

They're not talking about those hulking orange orbs that we use to carve Jack O'Lanterns. They are gushing over the much smaller Sugar Pumpkins, which are the star in a whole host of pumpkin recipes, from pie to soup: Flaky Pie Dough, Maple Pecan Pumpkin Pie, Maple Pecan Topping, Pumpkin-Chocolate Chip Muffins, and Curried Pumpkin-Peanut Soup. And to kick it all off? A cocktail of course -- the Pumpkin French 75.

It is autumn. The days are shorter, the nights are longer. The air is cooler. The leaves are turning all shades of yellow, orange and red. And do you want to know What We're Eating? A cake from the Tropics! It doesn't make sense, but somewhere on this planet, it is sunshine-y and warm, and a decadent homemade coconut cake filled with layer-upon-layer of luscious whipped cream and fresh pineapple, mangoes and kiwi, then covered with pretty toasted coconut is perfect!

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The best way to hard-boil and egg is to...remove the water?

British inventor Simon Rhymes has created a gadget that uses four 500-watt lightbulbs to cook the eggs, rather than boiling them in water (though we all know that we don't actually boil the eggs in water, right? We just let thim sit in hot water). Rhymes' gadget cooks eggs in six minutes, then automatically chops off the top to allow people to dip their toast in the egg.

So, this is different from say, sticking your eggs in high-heat oven...how?

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Flatbreads are the most consumed bread in the world, whether eaten plain, or as part of a dish: Thyme Bread (Manaqish bil-Za'atar), Moroccan Flatbread (R'ghayef), Turkish Meat Bread (Etli Ekmek), Yemeni Fried Bread (M'lawwah), and Yemeni Cilantro Chutney (Z'houg).

The Working Cook keeps within the Mediterranean theme with Chicken and Eggplant Kofte with Bulgur, then does an Asian Spicy Shrimp with Lemon-Peanut Kale & Rice. The Moveable Feast also does Asian with a Mu Shu Vegetable Wrap, and Vijay Bist, owner of Amber India restaurants in Mountain View and Santana Row, shares his recipe for Konkan Steamed Mussels.

There's a whole slew of new restaurant openings around the Bay.