There's a new magazine out of France, and it's kinda cool in that weird, hipster-y PoMo sort of way. It's called Yummy, and its calling itself a "JunkFoodDesignMagazine" (because spaces between words are so passé).
The magazine - and web site - are mostly en Français, but obviously, art transcends language, and all that jazz, so your lack of French-speaking skills will not hinder your appreciation - or revulsion - from the site.
The featured art runs the gambit from Whodonut?, Virginia Barre's slightly disturbing illustrations of people living in a fast food nation, to Show Her, which seems to be a big excuse for the artist to show photos of a half-naked woman in a rainstorm, occasionally holding a soda bottle (hence, the food connection, I suppose).
Go check it out - you might just be inspired to make some food art of your own. Or just be really grossed out.
As I flipped past Maxim, Shape, and Better Homes and Gardens, a new mag caught my eye the other day - Clean Eating. Come again? I flipped through it for a minute or so, but couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what "clean eating" was. The opposite of 'dirty eating?' (see picture at right for an example of what I imagined 'dirty eating' to be). Perhaps a way of eating without spilling anything on yourself. Sadly, this intrigued me.
So I went home and consulted my trusty ol' Interweb, and there it was: the unofficial definition of clean eating: "Consuming food in its most natural state...it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle approach to food and its preparation, leading to..." My eyes glazed over at this point (and by the way, why does every new diet define itself as a "lifestyle?" Can't anyone just eat anymore without defining themselves within a food "lifestyle?"
Anyway, I digress. From what I can tell, "clean eating" is just another way of saying "eat normal-sized portions of healthy, low-fat, fresh foods." Which everyone already knows. And like every di - er, lifestyle - there's a list of stuff to avoid (refined sugars, anything fatty, alcohol - y'know, all the tasty stuff) and a "seven-day meal plan" to get you started. Oh, and the best part: the token "Before and After" pics of a woman in a muumuu and then that same woman, 200 pounds lighter and "much, much happier." Because only thin people are happy, dontcha know.
Eh, I dunno. Maybe I'm jaded - and I'm sure Clean Eating could be a good source for new healthy recipes - but healthy eating and portion control are simply that. Stop trying to slap a label on it turn it into a book, movie, stuffed animal, or lifestyle. Just eat right, right? And have a beer or a cupcake once in awhile. Tell them Ellen said it's okay.
Cooking Light magazine recently named the healthiest - no, the fittest - no...okay, I'm actually a little confused as to the point of the rankings.
It named the cities that "best provide the resources people need to live healthful lives." Er...come again? The magazine claims that they ranked cities based on 15 criteria. Unfortunately, most of the criteria was either based upon implications (ie: one of the categories is how much "maintained green space" the cities offer, implying, perhaps, that more green space results in better air quality or a higher rate of exercise) even though we know that when it comes to healthy living, certain features do not necessarily correlate.
The actual data manipulation was as follows: "We ranked major metropolitan cities on the following 15 criteria, calculated on a per-capita basis, then grouped into categories--eat smart, be fit, live well--and factored on a four-point scale."
The other standards were pretty arbitrary, such as the amount of Whole Foods and Trader Joe's supermarkets and how many chefs work in the city. Basing a city's healthy standards on the number of organic food stores seems ineffective and a little naive - and going with the magazine's reasoning, a high rate of supermarkets could imply a greater number of cars, inactivity, pollution, and waste just as readily as it could imply healthy living.
If you are more concerned about spending time on your patio this summer than spending time in the kitchen, this super-simple recipe I came across for Lime Sorbet Margaritas might be exactly what you are looking for since no blender is required. Even better - you can tailor this drink to your own preferences by changing the flavor of the sorbet, or replacing the tequila with rum, vodka, or your favorite liqueur.
1 lime, cut into 8 wedges 1/4 cup sugar 2 pints lime sorbet (though any flavor can be used) 1/2 cup tequila
Rub the lime wedges around the rims of 8 stemmed glasses. Place the sugar on a small plate. Turn each glass upside down and dip the rims in the sugar to coat.
Place 2 scoops of sorbet in each glass and pour 1 tablespoon of tequila over the top of each. Serve with a spoon.
Note: They also recommend having soda or seltzer available to replace the tequila so kids have have their own version of this drink as well.
bConsumer Reports recently taste-tested four widely available brands of coffee - McDonald's, Burger King, Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts - to see where you could find the best coffee in the country. They were treading old water with their report, as both AOL and USA Today have done identical taste offs in the past. Unlike the previous tests, however, CR picked McDonald's as offering the best coffee of the bunch, describing it as "decent and moderately strong. Although it lacked the subtle top notes needed to make it rise and shine." USA Today, in their test, picked Starbucks.
Needless to say, you can do a lot better than McDonald's - no matter what CR says. One option is to brew coffee at home. With a little practice, you can beat out any store bought coffee, and it's less expensive in the long run. Another option is to try different local coffee houses, where you will be able to find a real cup of coffee, not just fast food coffee that is better than the rest.
New Yorkers can get started with the recommendations in the NY Post, where they didn't look too kindly upon CR's taste in coffee. Their top picks include Amy's Bread, 71 Irving Place and the MUD Truck.
Those are the words that Michael Pollan uses to open his piece, Unhappy Meals, from yesterday's New York Times magazine. The short statement is the very simplest way to condense the way that we are supposed to eat to ensure our continuing good health and reduce our risk for various health problems that are associated with food intake. After all, it seems like it seems like just about everything you put into your mouth can do something bad to your body, these days.
But this basic advice is deceptively simple. It is not always easy to find "real food" and it is hard to motivate yourself to keep away from favorites (meat, cheese, chocolate) for long periods of time. This is the issue that Pollan tries to tackle in his the 12-page long (online page length) article, where he looks at how, why and why eating became so complicated and if it is still possible to eat both nutritiously and well.
The newest issue of Cooking Light, which is their 20th anniversary issue, has the magazine's choices for the top 20 cities in the US, based on 15 criteria that they feel embody their "Eat Smart, Be Fit, and Live Well" philosophy. They looked at fitness, health and exercise data from the Centers for Disease Control, the number of parks and recreation areas (and how often they're used) from the Trust for Public Land, restaurant ratings from the Zagat Survey and James Beard Foundation, and the USDA's farmers markets listings. Everything was evened out on a per capita basis and the cities with the most of everything made the top cut.
One of the top ten cities will be featured each month in the magazine this year, so readers will have access to information about all the things that got the city their ranking.
1. Seattle, WA 2. Portland, Ore. 3. Washington, D.C. 4. Minneapolis, MN 5. San Francisco, CA 6. Boston, MA 7. Denver, CO 8. Milwaukee, WI 9. Philadelphia, PA 10. Tucson, AZ
While I have experimented with different butters in baking, I'm not sure that I'd want to participate in a butter taste test - particularly not when one of the tastings involves eating butters plain to "experience their melting properties directly on the tongue." That being said, I do appreciate the efforts of the tasters from Cooks Illustrated who participated in a premium butter tasting, eating butter both plain and on baguettes to try to pick out the top butter.
The butters tested all had butterfat contents of at least 82%, higher than the standard 80%, with the exception of Land O'Lakes, which was included as a benchmark. Every single butter tested - seven unsalted and six salted - were recommended including the non-premium benchmark butter, so it sounds like you can't go wrong by choosing a name-brand butter or a butter that is "european-style." The butters were ultimately ranked by preference, but not one was a loser:
A quality homemade cake is going to trump a cake mix cake every time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that cake mixes are never worth using. After all, they are quick, easy and inexpensive -- a tough combination to beat. In a recent issue, Cook's Country collected eight different brands of cake mix to see if any could come close to homemade.
They were quick to point out that none of their testers were fooled by the store-mix cakes, easily identifying the unusually uniform crumb and the ultra-fluffy texture that is created by the emulsifiers and other additives in the ingredients. Even so, five out of the eight mixes were still recommended: Betty Crocker Super Moist Butter Recipe Yellow Cake, Betty Crocker Super Moist Golden Vanilla Cake, Pillsbury Moist Supreme Classic Yellow Cake, Betty Crocker Super Moist Yellow Cake and Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Butter Recipe Golden Cake. While the textures and colors of the winning cakes varied slightly from mix to mix, all had nice butter and vanilla flavors that make them worth eating, and only a very minimal (if any) artificial-ness to their flavor.
The cake mixes that didn't make the cut were panned by tasters for both poor texture and "insipid, stale" flavors. If you're going to buy a cake mix, stick with one of the brands above and avoid Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Classic Yellow Cake ("a 'spongy Twinkie' "), Jiffy Golden Yellow Cake Mix ("dry and terrible") and King Arthur Flour Vanilla-Butter Cake Mix ("grainy, crumbly ... strong almond extract aftertaste").
Many of us only use a large roasting pan a few times a year and even though the meals we are using it for are holiday dinners, where to is important to try to get the food as perfectly cooked as possible, it is hard to justify spending $200+ dollars on a pan that gets so little use. Cook's Country tested some inexpensive roasting pans, all under $100, to see if they would do just as good a job as the more expensive pans while staying in our budgets.
Each of the pans they tested was designed to work both on the stove-top, so they could be used to brown meats, and in the oven or under the broiler. They chose pans with a minimum size of 15" x 11" inches, to accommodate largest turkeys. Overall, they strongly preferred pans that had sturdy, upright handles, which were easy to grip and did not interfere with the way the pan fit into the oven by adding an extra 2-3 inches to the length. They also found that stainless steel pans with aluminum cores offered the best heat distribution, while plain stainless steel could be a bit spotty when it came to browning. Their top picks were:
Cook's Illustrated is definitely one of the best resources for any food-related technical questions. They test everything - from ingredients to recipes - exhaustively, so you are basically guaranteed a good result just by following their meticulous instructions. Most of the sections on their website require a subscription, so unless you get the magazine through the mail or register with them, your access to their vast resources will be limited to the few things that they keep in the free section of their site. Fortunately, a great article called Mastering Turkey Gravy is available just in time for Thanksgiving. They talk about equipment, as well as the major components of the dish, before getting down to the recipe and the technique. Their recipe calls for a quick turkey stock, a roux to thicken the sauce and the addition of the pan drippings to get the maximum flavor. Take a look at the whole article before the season ends ad it goes back behind the pay wall.
In this month's issue of GQ magazine, food guru Alan Richman took a glossy, 8-page look at the food of New Orleans post-Katrina. The idea sounds like a good one, so why is the article so controversial? The problem is that the piece was not gushing, not exactly sentimental and, in parts, not accurate about the city and its food.
To date, the vast majority of the pieces about New Orleans have been stories of survival and of working to restore the city to its former state. People rebuild their homes and lives. Restaurants struggle to clean up, reopen and attract customers. Richman writes some about the touching, uplifting parts and the grassroots movements of people to get their lives back in order, but does not write exclusively about the uplifting parts, in fact stating that "New Orleans shouldn't exist," referring to it below-sea level elevation right on a vulnerable coastline. In another controversial assertion, he says that Cajuns originated in Canada, which is true, contrary to what some of his critics have said. However, Richman also states that he doesn't think Creoles ever really existed, but the term applied to a definite and large group of people in the city. He explains his position in the GQ podcast, by the way.
Vanilla is the best selling ice cream flavor in the US. Not only is it popular as a stand-alone flavor, but it goes perfectly with so many other foods: brownies for brownie sundaes, apple pie for apple pie a la mode, root beer for root beer floats, etc. In this month's issue, Real Simple magazine did a taste test of vanillas and picked out their favorites in six categories, thoughtfully including some options for those who don't eat regular, full-fat ice cream:
Best old-fashioned: Ben & Jerry's Vanilla
Best organic: Stonyfield Organic Gotta Have Vanilla Ice Cream
Best gelato: Ciao Bella Vanilla Gelato
Best low-fat: Breyers Double Churned Light Creamy Vanilla
Best low-sugar: Breyers Double Churned No Sugar Added Vanilla
Best nondairy: Whole Soy $ Co. Organic Vanilla Bean
Unfortunately, they didn't list all the brands of ice cream that they taste-tested. It would have been interesting to see what the runners up in each category were, but the list can still be used to stock the fridge with everyone's favorites.
Back in April, we noted that Reader's Digest bought Allrecipes.com and there was some speculation that they might change the user-friendly site for the worse, especially since they said that they planed to use it as "the main portal to its other magazines and websites." So far, there really have been no major changes to the site, but it appears to have just undergone a major facelift. The new site (there is a site tour so you can figure out how to use it) seems to have given a much more prominent space to affiliated magazines and advertising partners and also seems to put more emphasis on the few top-rated recipes from every category. The biggest change is in layout. Instead of the fairly well-spaced pages that we were used to, where all of the non-recipe content was grouped on the right side of the page, it now seems that every bit of the screen is utilized, drawing attention away from the recipe.
They still have a great recipe database, though, so whether you like the new layout or not, there are still plenty of reasons to use the site.
It has been several years since the lever corkscrew design first catapulted to popularity, going from a gadget that was almost strictly for big wine drinkers to a staple in any home that also has a bottle or two of red. The style was popularized by the Metrokane Rabbit corkscrew, but there are any number of similarly designed openers available today. The last time that Cook's Illustrated put these openers to the test was about 9 years ago and in their most recent issue, they decided that it was time to revisit them and see how some of the more expensive brands stacked up to some of the less expensive newcomers.
Their "ultimate opener" was the Screwpull Trigger from Le Creuset, which has a unique mechanism that adds an extra grip to the cork, ensuring a fast and clean uncorking. But out of the 13 models, 12 made a respectable showing, so CI's conclusion seems to be that you will do fine with almost any lever-style wine opener. Their advice, if you're not going for their "ultimate" model, is to try to select openers with longer handles, which will make removing the corks easier.
There's a new magazine out of France, and it's kinda cool in that weird, hipster-y PoMo sort of way. It's called Yummy, and its calling itself a "JunkFoodDesignMagazine" (because spaces between words are so passé). 
If you are more concerned about spending time on your patio this summer than spending time in the kitchen, this super-simple recipe I came across for Lime Sorbet Margaritas might be exactly what you are looking for since no blender is required. Even better - you can tailor this drink to your own preferences by changing the flavor of the sorbet, or replacing the tequila with rum, vodka, or your favorite liqueur. 
bConsumer Reports recently taste-tested four widely available brands of coffee - McDonald's, Burger King, Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts - to see where you could find the best coffee in the country. They were treading old water with their report, as both 
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
The newest issue of 
While I have experimented with 
A quality homemade cake is going to trump a cake mix cake every time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that cake mixes are never worth using. After all, they are quick, easy and inexpensive -- a tough combination to beat. In a recent issue, 
Many of us only use a large roasting pan a few times a year and even though the meals we are using it for are holiday dinners, where to is important to try to get the food as perfectly cooked as possible, it is hard to justify spending $200+ dollars on a pan that gets so little use. 
In this month's issue of GQ magazine, food guru Alan Richman took a glossy, 8-page look at the food of New Orleans post-Katrina. The idea sounds like a good one, so why is the article 
Vanilla is the 
Back in April, we noted that 
It has been several years since the lever corkscrew design first catapulted to popularity, going from a gadget that was almost strictly for big wine drinkers to a staple in any home that also has a bottle or two of red. The style was popularized by the 
DIY Foods: Making homemade sausage
Cakes so amazing they'd be hard to cut into
Fruit juice: An invitation to diabetes?
