If you had to come up with your dream job, what would it be? Philanthropist? Rock Star diva? Four-Star chef?
Readers of this blog might be hard pressed to come up with one to beat this job description: Keeper of all things culinary for the New York Public Library, main branch. It's a gig that combines academia, literature, history, urban legend, folklore, whimsy AND food.
And the lucky woman who actually holds this job writes a blog, too. Rebecca Federman, whose official title is Social Sciences Bibliographer, is the wit behind the always fascinating Cooked Books. In her travels as "keeper of all things culinary" for the library, she helps maintain the library's culinary studies, culinary history and cookbook collections, as well as the library's 30,000 restaurant menus (and you thought those all ended up in your lobby). The result is a blog you don't dare approach unless you have at least several hours of reading time at the ready.
I've seen meatloaf baked in bread pans and meatloaf baked in free form shapes (mock lobster, anyone?). But I've never seen anyone think to bake up a meatloaf in a tube pan until I was scanning through my RSS reader last night. But if anyone was going to think of a bundt meatloaf, I'm not surprised that it came from the minds of the chefs/bloggers behind the site Ideas in Food. They are always thinking creatively about food and manage to produce a number of interesting (and I'm sure tasty) dishes. I think that this is what I'd like to eat for dinner tonight.
Interesting piece over at Slate from Paul Levy, about the state of food writing. He says that food writing today is too "macho," and filled with too many "foodie shock jocks" who swear and write too casually (he singles out Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay, and Bill Buford).
The food writing that's in vogue today consists chiefly of a bellow of bravado. It's a guy thing, sure, but (with a few honorably hungry exceptions) these scribblers mostly ignore what's on the plate. They view themselves as boy hunters and despise sissy gatherers, thrive on the undertow of violence they detect in the professional kitchen, and like to linger on the unappetizing aspects of food preparation. The gross-out factor trumps tasting good as well as good taste.
Hmmm...really? I think one of the good thing about this increased interest in food and all the food blogs is that you hear a lot of different voices. There's plenty of the stuff Levy likes still be written. Even here at Slashfood we try to mix up the voices a bit.
The most interesting article of the day (in my opinion, of course) is from Regina Schrambling who ponders the anonymity of restaurant reviewers from professional journalists to bloggers (and if you happen to recognize a mysterious half face on the article, yes, that is yours deliciously!)
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).
One of my favorite food blogs is The Wednesday Chef, written by Luisa Weiss. She mostly cooks and posts recipes from the foods sections in the New York and Los Angeles Times (although the picture of the Fennel and Olive Salad you see above is from Nigel Slater's "Kitchen Diaries"). Her pictures are gorgeous but real, she alerts her readers to any changes she made from the printed recipe and she is always honest about how she feels about the results of her cooking efforts.
Her latest post is particularly appealing to me because in it she tells of the scent memory that a recent trip into a cheese shop triggered, taking her back to childhood visits to a cheese shop in Germany with her mother.
Have you guys heard of the food blog The Pioneer Woman Cooks? I find that site, penned by Ree, totally addictive. Whenever a new post from her pops up in my Google Reader, I stop what I'm doing in order to see what she's created. She has a really quirky sense of humor, amazing photographic skills and the ability to use as much butter as Paula Dean.
In her most recent post she made a pasta primavera, photographing each step along the way (she must have incredible natural light in her kitchen, because those pics look gorgeous), including the dicing of the onion, the smashing of garlic and the whisking of the sauce.
One of the things with which I have fallen in love in recent history is squash blossoms. When I first encountered these, I was slightly turned off by the idea of eating such giant flowers, even though I wasn't unfamiliar with edible flowers. It's just that the edible flowers I've eaten in the past have been small things that have been tossed in with salads.
For some reason, this picture of squash blossoms over on food blog Big City, Little Kitchen makes me want to sit out on a sunny deck with a glass of lightly chilled wine and a plate of these things, as prepared in the recipe for Fried Squash Blossoms in the post. The cool thing is that the recipe, though uses the standard stuffing of ricotta cheese, uses cornmeal as the breading.
But don't feel left out, he probably hates you too! If you run a food blog, that is.
Yeah, the chef doesn't like food blogs. He says he doesn't usually hate anything, but food blogs "live by different rules," as he explains. He's ticked that food bloggers are too snarky and hide behind an anonymous name or alias. That's not true with most of the food blogs that I happen to read, but whatever. Batali does indeed have some good points about blogging though, not just food blogs but blogging and journalism in general. He even gets in a dig at the people who published the essay.
There's an article in The Sacramento Bee that's been syndicated that says that food blogs are becoming popular! Of course, that's something we've known for a long time now, right?
The piece states that there are 48,000 bloggers right now, though doesn't really specify if that means there are 48,000 blogs or 48,000 people blogging (many blogs have several authors). And what is the big revelation in the piece? Readers read food blogs to get recipes, reviews, and ideas! Wow!
I often wonder why blogs are still seen as some alien concept. Some nice coverage for some good blogs though, including Chocolate and Zucchini and Cakegrrl (in the pic).
Our sister site Engadget gets some nice press in the piece, but Slashfood isn't even mentioned. I'm sure that's just a typo.
Since writing about the Pea and Mint Soup found on an Italian blog the other day, I've been finding an endless stream of amazing food blogs from various locations around the world. This recipe for (what translates to) Cassava Cream with Crab is from the beautiful website Mixirica in Brazil, and though it is written in Portuguese, the picture itself is worth a thousand words regardless of which language you happen to speak. Again, translators, we can use your help. Please feel free to write the recipe in the comment section below.
There's a new kid on the blogs, you might be thinking. But look a little more closely and you'll see that Baking Bites is actually an old friend who's gone through an extreme makeover. Our very own bakerina Nicole Weston's personal food blog, Bakingsheet has been transformed (of sorts - technically, Bakingsheet is still out there) into Baking Bites, with a different name, a fresh look, and all kinds of delicious new things. Take a peek!
Because food bloggers for a fairly tight-knit community, recipes often speed through it very quickly. The self frosting nutella cupcakes originally posted at Baking Bites, for example, when from blogger to blogger, spawned a theme day devoted to them and continued to make the rounds. Most recently, I discovered a vegan version at Vegan Feast Kitchen. The point here is that bloggers lot to share, and while that particular recipe made its way around on its own, others get a little push. Chocolate Intensity got that push. The one above was made by Culinary Concoctions by Peabody as part of a mini event in which eight different bloggers all made the same recipe, adding their individual take on it in some cases. It's interesting to get so many different reactions to one recipe at the same time, as well as to see the differences in the techniques of all the bloggers. The one thing that didn't change was the positive reaction to the rich chocolate cake. The mini-event may be over, but the consensus seems to be that as long as you like chocolate, you can't go wrong with this dessert.
Our pancake roundup this morning only included eight delicious recipes that were sure to tempt just about everyone to get out their frying pan and make up a batch. But as tempting as they may have been, most of the recipes presented there would not be good choices for gluten-free eaters because they were almost all flour-based. In fact, most pancake recipes are. Fortunately, there happen to be a lot of equally delicious gluten-free pancake options out there that ensure everyone who wants to can celebrate Fat Tuesday (a.k.a. National Pancake Day).
The easiest GF option is a pancake mix. Jay used Kinnikinnick Pancake Mix to make the lovely stack pictured above. There are many mixes out there to choose from, including Bob's Red Mill, which is widely available at Whole Foods Stores.
If you want to make your own, try using an alternative flour, as was done in these Rice Flour Crepes or Almond Flour Pancakes. You can find several more GF pancake recipes here, which use buckwheat, quinoa, potato flour and other gluten-free bases.
We know that for every subject related to food, there are at least a half-dozen food blogs. Baking? Our very own Nicole rules the blogosphere with Bakingsheet. Gluten-free foods? Try Gluten-free Girl. Restaurant reviews? Extreme eating? They are all out there.
And who'da thunk that there would be so many food blog based out of Indianapolis? Here is just a sampling of blogs to browse through, after the game, of course, when Indianapolis wins!
If you had to come up with your dream job, what would it be? Philanthropist? Rock Star diva? Four-Star chef?
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But don't feel left out, he probably hates you too! If you run a food blog, that is.
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We know that for every subject related to food, there are at least a half-dozen food blogs. Baking? Our very own Nicole rules the blogosphere with 
DIY Foods: Making homemade sausage
Cakes so amazing they'd be hard to cut into
Fruit juice: An invitation to diabetes?
