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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jun 29, 2005 14:34:33 GMT -5
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jun 29, 2005 15:01:29 GMT -5
BOOK REVIEW Probing the tragic end of a star French chefBy Lylah M. Alphonse, Globe Staff | May 30, 2005Chefs are the rock stars of France. So when Bernard Loiseau, a king of modern French cooking and a darling of the French media, killed himself in February 2003, the country reacted with disbelief. Rudolph Chelminski's ''The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine" examines Loiseau's suicide in the context of French culinary history, delving deep into the mad passion that seems to drive many master chefs. Loiseau, 52, shot himself at home after finishing the lunch shift at his restaurant, La Cote D'Or, one of only 25 in the country awarded three stars by the legendary Michelin Guide. He left no note. His restaurant had recently been downgraded in a lesser guidebook; perhaps the rumor that Michelin was about to do the same was too much for Loiseau to bear. (The rumor turned out to be false.) - tinyurl.com/br3et
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 1, 2005 17:15:29 GMT -5
Nigel Slater: the interviewWhile other boys in his class were reading Shoot! Nigel subscribed to Cordon Bleu magazineA loveless childhood drove Nigel Slater, The Observer's food writer, to seek affection elsewhere - in the kitchen. In a rare interview to coincide with the publication of his revealing autobiography, he tells Tim Adams how he found escape and happiness in his passion for food, cooking and the washing-up Sunday September 14, 2003 The Observer For much of last year, Nigel Slater ate himself back into his childhood. He whisked up butterscotch Angel Delight and let Space Dust crackle on his tongue; he raided his local corner shops for Smash mashed potato and salad cream and ham in a tin (with jelly); he steamed Heinz sponge puddings, rudely licked out Walnut Whips, spooned up the syrup of canned mandarins and sucked on sherbet fountains. The idea was to recapture the authentic flavour of his growing up, unlock lost time with the help of a lemon meringue pie. His great regret was that he could not find an Arctic Roll; the bonus was that all of the rest of it tasted great. 'I mean I haven't eaten it again,' he says, a little hastily, over a perfect antipasti lunch in his stripped bare Georgian house in north London. 'I don't now have cravings for Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies or tinned baked beans and sausages, but I thoroughly enjoyed all of it. Though whether it was the flavour I enjoyed or the fact that it brought back these floods of memory I'm not sure.' Slater's personal culinary quest resulted in Toast, an inspired memoir, boil-in-the-bag Proust, in which he measures out the sadnesses of his growing up in Milky Ways and fairy drops. At its heart is an attempt to recreate his relationship with his mother, who died of asthma when he was nine, through the taste of some of the food she (often unsuccessfully) served up. - tinyurl.com/cs89r
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 1, 2005 18:10:54 GMT -5
Bride Calls Off Wedding, Throws Party For HomelessPOSTED: 11:46 am EDT June 29, 2005 UPDATED: 11:54 am EDT June 29, 2005 EVERETT, Wash. -- A young woman decided to call off her wedding 12 days before the event and her parents knew they'd be stuck with the bill, so they decided to have a party anyway and invited the homeless. Residents of the Interfaith Family Shelter, housed in a former convent across from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church where the wedding had been scheduled, attended the bash thrown by Katie Hosking, 22, a medical assistant at the Everett Clinic, and her parents, Bill and Susan Hosking of Lake Stevens. "They had a DJ and really good music. It was a warm, friendly atmosphere. The food was delicious. It was a nice break with people not worrying about anything for one night," shelter manager Carol Oliva said. "Toward the end of the evening, they packed up all the leftover food and we got to bring it back to the shelter." One homeless woman got her son out of a wheelchair, "took that child out on the dance floor and picked him up and danced with him. It was a beautiful sight. Our kids realized that even when something bad happens, somebody else has something worse," Susan Hosking said. "It was an eye-opener." The almost-bride would not say what led to the breakup, only that it happened June 6, 12 days before the scheduled date of her wedding. - www.wnbc.com/family/4665534/detail.html
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 15, 2005 18:10:31 GMT -5
If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn't everyone in Asia have a headache?Sunday July 10, 2005 The ObserverIn the port city of Yokohama, south of Tokyo, there is a museum devoted entirely to noodle soup. It may be Japan's favourite foodie day out: one and a half million ramen fans visit the museum every year, and even on the wintry morning that I went the queue wound 50 yards down the street - young couples, mainly: cold, hungry and excited. Inside the Yokohama Ramen Museum and Amusement Park they meet exhibitions on the evolution of soup bowls and instant noodle packets - more fascinating than you'd think, but these are not the main event. That's deep in the basement, where there's an entire street, done up to look like a raucous 1950s Yokohama harbour-front. Every shop houses a different noodle restaurant, each a clone of one of the best noodle shops of Japan. It's a culinary Madame Tussauds. The Japanese are sentimental about their noodle soup - it's the working-class food that nourished the nation in the bleak days after World War Two. Ramen chefs are TV celebs, in a country that devotes more broadcast time to cookery than even we do. I asked the young pilgrims just what they valued above all in ramen. They sniffed the tangy air, Bisto-kid style: 'The basis of the experience is the broth,' was the consensus. In the great Japanese cod-Western Tampopo - the only movie to take noodle soup, sex and death with equal seriousness - a ramen guru announces that the key to Japan's national dish is that 'the soup must animate the noodles'. What does chiefly animate Japanese soups and broths is an amino acid called glutamate. In the best ramen shops it's made naturally from boiling dried kombu seaweed; it can also come from dried shrimp or bonito flakes, or from fermented soy. More cheaply and easily, you get it from a tin, where it is stabilised with ordinary salt and is thus monosodium glutamate. This last fact is of little interest to the Japanese - like most Asians, they have no fear of MSG. And there lies one of the world's great food scare conundrums. If MSG is bad for you - as Jeffrey Steingarten, the great American Vogue food writer once put it - why doesn't everyone in China have a headache? - tinyurl.com/8vkc5
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 15, 2005 19:28:15 GMT -5
July 11, 2005 ISTANBUL ADVENTURES # 1: IN SEARCH OF TURBOTOne of the delights of being in Istanbul in Spring is the chance of eating what, IMO, is the most flavorful turbot (called kalkan in Turkish) on earth. Turbot is a fish that I order often in France, Spain (rodaballo) and Italy (rombo), and I find the turbot from the Atlantic in general superior to the Mediterranean variety, but not quite on par with a Black Sea Turbot caught in the Marmara sea. Indeed the dense and meaty turbot from the cold waters of Brittany is quite similar in taste to the Black Sea turbot that is highly prized in Istanbul in Spring. Unfortunately the increasing popularity and astronomical prices of this noble fish have led to its widespread farming, and fish markets in Istanbul are now filled with turbot farmed in the Balkans, especially Bulgaria. Although it is still a tasty fish, farmed turbot, which is brownish in color, is quite bland compared to the wild version. Unfortunately I caught the turbot season at its tail end this year as I arrived to Istanbul in end May. The season for wild turbot starts by the end of February, and those in the know think that this fish is fattest and best during the month of March when it is caught in the cold waters of the Bosphorous. The season lasts until early June or so, until the arrival of the hot summer days, and if you ask for turbot in Turkey past early June, you will either be served a frozen or a farmed fish. I don’t recommend it. The Black Sea Turbot is unique in appearance in the sense that it has buttons on one side. As a child I remember my grand mother, who adored turbot, sucking these buttons and also the bones as the meat attached to the bones is very tasty, and the gelatinous fat contained therein is the most prized part of the great fish. When I was young I considered this practice of sucking the bones to be undesirable. I must have missed a lot. Nowadays, I don’t miss any meat from a good turbot, including its cheek, and I don’t care if other clients stare at me when I attack my turbot in Michelin starred restaurants, such as L’Ambroisie and Apicius where I recently ordered a turbot for two. I simply ask for a bowl of warm water with a lemon slice to wash off my hands afterwards, and the staff approvingly obliges irrespective of the status of the restaurant. Life is too short to worry about aesthetics when the latter is at odds with the dictates of nature which bestowed this ugly fish with such deliciousness that can only be fully exploited by gnawing at the bones. Besides, I know that my grandmother, Handan Milor, would have approved of it! - www.gastroville.com/archives/the_rest_of_europe/000031.html
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 15, 2005 21:09:34 GMT -5
Negotiate Now, Eat LaterAt Cantonese joints like Hong Kong BBQ, food is only half of the experience.By Jonathan Kauffman Published: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 The secret to enjoying Castro Valley's Hong Kong BBQ Restaurant is the secret to finding the best food at any Cantonese restaurant: Make friends with the waiter. "Some of my most personal relationships have been with Cantonese waiters," jokes Jim Leff, founder of Chowhound.com, the online community of America's most devoted Shanghai-style dumpling fanatics and taco-truck cataloguers. "There used to be a restaurant called Shing Kee [in New York] where I could go in and the waiter knew what I wanted and that they were the best dishes on the menu. He was like my psychologist." Leff, who started Chowhound in 1997, edited the recently published The Chowhound's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area -- a quirky, wide-ranging guide to Northern California's best hand-pulled noodles and flakiest croissants, a guide that you want to argue with as much as you want to clutch it tight. As I was writing this review I called Leff to ask his strategies for ferreting out the best dishes on a massive menu like HKBBQ's. Not the most authentic dishes. The best ones. "I never order what I feel like eating," he says, "I order what I suspect the house does best." Leff offers three tips. First, do the perp walk: Before you sit down, meander around the room. "Anything you spot on three or more tables, order," he says. "If you're not sure what something is, ask a waiter. This would be frowned upon in some cultures, but Chinese waiters and customers are total foodies, and will be delighted to help with this. Just act eager and happy." He adds that you shouldn't only scout Asian Americans but serious-looking eaters of any ethnicity. Second, start by ordering an insider's dish, something that demonstrates you're familiar with the cuisine and not going to be a picky gringo. (Leff uses "gringo" to indicate anyone who doesn't share the ethnicity of the restaurant's staff.) But the third -- and possibly most important -- tip is to treat your waiter right. "A restaurant is not a one-night stand," he says. "You're building a long-term relationship. Win over your waiter. Tip him well. And never, ever show the slightest sign of disdain, even if you are served something you deem icky. By the third visit, you'll have achieved 'hip gringo' status. Proud Cantonese restaurateurs respect nothing more than a hip gringo." - eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2005-06-15/dining/food.html
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 16, 2005 16:09:01 GMT -5
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 19, 2005 17:56:49 GMT -5
The Scott Adams Foods company proves it is possible to eat tasty, easy-to-prepare, nutrition-packed food that fits today's hectic lifestyles. Based in Newton, New Jersey, this virtual company produces the DILBERITO™, a delicious hand-held meal that's fun to eat and filled with yummy tasting veggies, rice and stuff you like. Founded in 1998 by Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert®, and Jack Parker, food research and development veteran, Scott Adams Foods plans to make waves in the food industry. "Quite simply, we want to change the way people eat," says Scott Adams, CEO. "Scott Adams Foods started as a personal quest to find foods that were nutritious, fast and easy to make, and most important, taste great. When I found that it was impossible to find anything like that, I knew that we could do something to make the world a better place, and make some money in the process. It's called enlightened capitalism." Scott Adams is enjoying creating a corporation modeled after tenets set forth in his best-selling book, The Dilbert Principle: Create a vision, hire good people, then get out of the way. True to his word, Adams created the vision for the company and hired one of the best minds in the food industry, Jack Parker, to run the operation. The company's first creation was the DILBERITO -- a delicious handheld meal fortified with 100% Daily Value of 23 essential vitamins and minerals. Scott Adams Foods plans to follow the DILBERITO with other fresh tasting, convenient, nutritious food products. "We hope to change the food world one DILBERITO at a time, and ideally encourage the rest of the food industry to make more nutritious products," concludes Adams, "and we plan to have fun doing it." - www.dilberito.com/why.htm
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 19, 2005 18:26:44 GMT -5
For cod's sake(Filed: 16/07/2005) Soused mackerel Cured pollack with ratatouille Gurnard and deconstructed guacamoleImagine living next door to the Weekend columnist Rose Prince. That's what I've been doing lately, at least on these pages. She's friendly enough, but I wouldn't fancy my chances if she were to catch me trying to smuggle an ethically doubtful product into the Telegraph kitchen. You don't mess with the doyenne of savvy shopping. I do my best to avoid harming anything or anyone when I flex my spending muscles. But recently, like many of my friends, I have become slightly bewildered about buying fish. Advice is often conflicting or forensic to the point of obfuscating. And it is my belief that some big shops and fishmongers are deliberately unhelpful, thanks in no small part to their obsession with offering a huge choice to the consumer. It would take a braver supermarket than any I know to remove tuna or tiger prawns from the shelves. If you are stumped by all this, there is some pragmatic advice around. The first tip - and this is only a rough guide - is to worry less about what fish you are looking at than how it was caught. In-shore line, creel or diver-caught fish and seafood is generally OK. Trawling and dredging isn't. It is hardly surprising to discover that ancient methods of hunting have the least impact on the environment. Here is another bit of antique wisdom: look at the price tag. Some of the fish that your friends at the Marine Conservation Society would like you to be tasting is literally cheap as chips - gurnard and mackerel are obvious examples. Both fish have suffered from besmirched reputations in the past, but I've never understood why. Mackerel is one of our finest wild foods and rich in the omega three oils that we should be eating more of. As are sardines, another cheap fish. - tinyurl.com/9ecaf
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 19, 2005 18:35:58 GMT -5
Free Beer for GeeksBy David Cohn02:00 AM Jul. 18, 2005 PT Beer always tastes better when it's free, or so the saying goes. So leave it to a group of college students to find a way to make sure their beer is always free. Well, at least the recipe they use to brew it is. A group of students at IT University of Copenhagen have produced what they claim is the first open-source beer. The recipe and brand of their beer is published under a Creative Commons license, which means anyone can use the recipe for pleasure or profit. The only catch: If you make money selling their unique beer, you have to give them credit and publish any changes you make to the recipe under a similar license. Their inspiration wasn't just to get drunk, but to see what happens when an open-source structure is applied to a universally known product like beer. "Why not take the legal framework, the open-source licenses, and apply them on analog products?" said Rasmus Nielsen, a member of Superflex, an art organization that helped create the beer in conjunction with a student group called Vores Øl (Our Beer). - tinyurl.com/8aem6
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 21, 2005 17:21:08 GMT -5
Empathize with them Cut your finger on SPAM top Pigs must feel that too Stomach full of SPAM Swimming is prohibited Rocks sink in water I envision a world where all mankind shares SPAM and none go without. - slices from the SPAM-ku archive
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Jul 21, 2005 18:23:36 GMT -5
The Slowest FoodWhy American chefs have taken up sous-vide cookingBy Sara Dickerman Posted Wednesday, July 20, 2005, at 11:35 AM PT Chefs are always looking for extreme ways to cook. Some espouse extreme labor intensiveness: "Dude, you have to remove the pods, skins, and sprouts on every one of those fava beans." Others seek out extreme ingredients: "Our chickens are milk-fed, then finished on figs." There's even extreme rusticity: "Don't use a brush to baste that spit roast; use these rosemary branches instead." And now, it seems, there is extreme slowpokery. Elite restaurants are proudly selling beef cheeks and short ribs cooked for 30 or 40 hours, or fish slow-roasted at 160 degrees. The most popular and fascinating of these superslow techniques is sous-vide cooking. Sous vide is the practice of cooking food at low temperatures in vacuum-packed plastic bags. (The term is essentially French for "vacuum-packed.") Once you get beyond the cosmic ick of cooking in plastic, the sous-vide effect—something I have experienced in a few European restaurants and some ragtag home experiments—is uncannily tender. Food looks firm and neat but collapses quite willingly in your mouth. And since no juices or vapors escape from those little plastic parcels, food cooked sous vide is full of flavor—a little garlic goes a long way. Cooking in sealed packets is nothing new. For centuries, people encased food in something more or less waterproof, like a pig's bladder, and heated it in a water bath. Food cooked this way was steamy, moist, and perfumed with any herbs or spices sealed inside the bundle. Then, in 1974, a French chef named Georges Pralus learned that he could prevent the shrinkage of foie gras during cooking if he sealed it in plastic and poached it slowly. Pralus went on to teach the great chefs of the era, including Paul Bocuse, Alain Ducasse, and Michel Bras, about his method, and the technique became fairly common in Europe. - slate.com/id/2123101/?nav=fo
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Post by franko on Jul 22, 2005 16:33:08 GMT -5
Ah . . . the slow food movementAn Overview of the Slow Food MovementFounded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986, Slow Food is an international association that promotes food and wine culture, but also defends food and agricultural biodiversity worldwide. It opposes the standardisation of taste, defends the need for consumer information, protects cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguards foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition and defend domestic and wild animal and vegetable species. Slow Food boasts 83,000 members worldwide and offices (in order of creation) in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the USA, France, Japan, and Great Britain. The network of Slow Food members is organized into local groups—Condotte in Italy and Convivia elsewhere in the world—which, coordinated by leaders, periodically organize courses, tastings, dinners and food and wine tourism, as well as promoting campaigns launched by the international association at a local level. More than 800 Convivia are active in 50 countries (including 400 Condotte in Italy). slow food overviewTaste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food – Slow Food USAeven in Canada (Vancouver)
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Aug 2, 2005 4:39:25 GMT -5
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 3, 2005 12:56:59 GMT -5
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 3, 2005 13:12:12 GMT -5
Olive oil 'acts like painkiller'Good quality olive oil contains a natural chemical that acts in a similar way to a painkiller, a US study says. Researchers found 50g of extra-virgin olive oil was equivalent to about a tenth of a dose of ibuprofen. A Monell Chemical Senses Centre team in Philadelphia said an ingredient in the oil acted as an anti-inflammatory, the Nature journal reported. The team said while the effect was not strong enough to cure headaches, it may explain the Mediterranean diet benefit. - news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4204076.stm
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 3, 2005 13:21:00 GMT -5
August 30, 2005 Chicken Curry With CashewsWhen I was pregnant I craved a lot of Indian food, particularly curries. At first I was eating a lot of take-away but as my list of food restrictions got longer and longer and the weekly bill for eating take-away got larger and larger I started making a lot of the meals at home, favoring recipes by my pals Madhur Jaffrey and Julie Sahni and the rest from a beautiful cookbook called The Food of India. Kalustyans was my favorite stop and shop for spices and staples; that is until I became full preggers and stopped fitting in their narrow aisles (BAH! just kidding). Anyway, I made so many Indian inspired meals and we ate so many leftovers, endless leftovers (because I still haven't figured out how to cook for just two and not forty seven) that my husband finally asked if we could maybe not have so much Indian food for a while. Apparently he meant a long while because our daughter is now 19 months and he still isn't quite ready to start having curries again. But he has been out of town, which means that the babe and I have been partying like it was 1999 and feasting like queens on curries, and chutney, and naans OH MY! - www.murrayhill5.net/blog/inmykitchenblog/archives/000613.html
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 4, 2005 14:17:12 GMT -5
Corned Beef & Cabbage - The Feeding of A Mythby Bridget HaggertyWhat's the national dish of Ireland? Corned Beef and Cabbage, you say? Since March has undoubtedly become "Irish Awareness Month", we thought it would be fun to explore the truth behind yet another Irish myth. Our research took us to an informative page on European Cuisine. According to the article written by an Irishman, Corned Beef first turns up in the Vision of MacConglinne, a 12th-century poem which describes Irish food as it was eaten at the time. The poet tell us that Corned Beef is a delicacy given to a king, in an attempt to conjure "the demon of gluttony" out of his belly. This delicacy status makes little sense until one understands that beef was not a major part of the Irish diet until the last century or so. True, cattle were kept from very early times, but it was for their milk - not their meat. Said one bemused sixteenth-century traveller and historian,"They make seventy-several kinds of food out of milk, both sweet and sour, and they love them the best when they’re sourest." So, what meat did the Irish eat? History tells us that pork was always the favorite. In ancient times, cattle were prized as a common medium for barter. The size of one’s herd was an indication of status, wealth and power -- hence all the stories of tribal chieftains and petty kings endlessly rustling one another’s cattle. - www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/2Kitch/aCBeefCabge.html
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 11, 2005 17:03:40 GMT -5
FoodieView: The Recipe Search Engine searching over 110,000 recipes and counting... Why search for recipes one site at a time when you can search them all here? We scour the web to find the best recipes on the web's most popular recipe sites. - www.foodieview.com/index.jsp
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 11, 2005 17:06:16 GMT -5
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 17, 2005 10:30:20 GMT -5
September 12, 2005 Listening to habanerosPosted by Teresa at 01:13 PM * 130 comments Habaneros are in season, those wicked little hot peppers that clock in at 100K - 580K Scovilles.* They taste of fruit and smoke—really a yummy pepper—but their heat puts them well up into the “biohazard” range. I’ve been working up improved methods for dealing with them. Here’s the principle: Capsaicin, the molecule that makes hot peppers hot, is hydrophobic, meaning it doesn’t like water. Safely handling habaneros isn’t just a matter of wearing rubber gloves and never touching your face (though you do have to wear rubber gloves and avoid touching your face). Less obviously, you want to avoid having lots of habanero come into contact with water that isn’t heavily loaded with detergent. If you’ve ever handled metallic sodium, you know the drill, except you use olive oil instead of kerosene. I was once cooking with habaneros and maintained proper procedures right up until the end, when I absentmindedly took the big wok I’d been using and ran it under the kitchen tap. It seemed like only a few seconds had passed before I heard Patrick start coughing, two rooms away. I went to him, eyes streaming, and told him that we were going eat out that night while the air cleared. What I do with habaneros is use them to make a big batch of hot pepper oil once or twice a year, and then use the oil in my cooking, a drop at a time. Capsaicins are much better behaved in oil. It simultaneously picks up the hot pepper flavor and buffers it—sort of smooths it out and spreads it around. The result is still hot, but the burn has a nice long slow buildup and fade, without that raw feral bite that makes you want to scrub your tongue. - nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006812.html
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 18, 2005 18:41:31 GMT -5
The New York Times June 27, 2004
CHOICE TABLES; Young Chefs Celebrate Two Montreals
By DANA BOWEN
MONTREAL is the kind of city where attentions turn -- quickly and often -- to the pleasures of the table. You can hardly walk a block without succumbing to fresh-baked croissants, raw milk cheeses or grilled sausages sizzling in charcuterie windows.
But during two trips earlier this year, I sensed a new development in Quebec's culinary hub, inspired by a rebounding economy and some pioneering cooks. Montreal has moved from charming food town to international dining city.
With one foot in the Old World, and the other in the city's multicultural markets, young chefs have opened exciting new restaurants. Some take a global approach; others are fiercely committed to Québécois ingredients. Some extol French technique; others toss it out the kitchen window.
Thankfully, some things haven't changed. Wood-fired bagel ovens turn out hand-shaped rings that are sweeter, and squishier, than their American cousins. ''Medium-fat'' smoked meats reign at beloved delis like Schwartz's, and restorative bowls of pot au feu at neighborhood bistros like L'Express.
Montreal is sometimes referred to as ''Paris without the jet lag,'' but this isn't true. For one, Montreal is graciously bilingual. It's also compact: In under an hour, you can wander from newly hip Old Montreal on the St. Lawrence River up to the shopping districts of Boulevard St.-Laurent and Rue St.-Denis, snacking all the way.
Toqué!
Montreal's most acclaimed restaurant moved this January from its decade-old St. Denis location to the splashy new Caisse de Dépôt et Placement building downtown. The upsides are numerous: diners can park in the underground garage or take the Métro, which connects to the lobby via a modern tunnel; they can power-lunch with irresistibly priced prix-fixe meals; and they can still go to Toqué!'s former space and visit Cocagne, the casual bistro that Toqué!'s owners and one of its former chefs, Alexandre Loiseau, opened in March.
But will Toqué! lose its unassuming neighborhood charm? Will the celebrity chef Normand Laprise continue to wow crowds with his trail-blazing intensity? Yes, and yes, if you ask me.
The large room, a visually arresting subdivision of crimson and violet dining nooks, is elegant. Illuminated globes dangle around a glass-enclosed wine room, and vast distances between tables convey calm, even during the dinner rush.
The night I dined there with my friend Rebecca, our server was off-putting. He regurgitated details by rote, and seemed crestfallen when we decided against the $70 tasting menu. Despite water glasses that had not been filled, he offered a $4 amuse-gueule, which we felt obliged to accept.
The oyster shooter, suspended in briny grapefruit juice with a whisper of cilantro foam, screamed my taste buds to attention. It was so tantalizing, I forgot how much I disliked our waiter.
Mr. Laprise's cooking is a brilliant form of culinary contrivance -- he masterfully renders top-notch ingredients, then fastidiously arranges them on the plate. Seared foie gras, one of his specialties, was a marvelous example: its sweetness drawn out by cubed yellow beets and onion chutney; its creaminess underscored with barely-cooked quail egg. Rebecca's appetizer was less cohesive: what were shiitakes, marinated onions and bell pepper compote doing alongside tender, curried sweetbreads? We hadn't a clue.
Gorgeous guinea fowl was another cerebral dish, with semisweet cocoa sprinkled on the far side of the plate, rich milk foam in the center, and a sharp turnip galette tempered by both. Rosy, tender saddle of lamb with cauliflower purée, oven-roasted raspberries and beets, and braised lamb crépinette was infinitely simpler and more satisfying.
A warm, molten chocolate cake oozed with red wine reduction, and paired beautifully with our final sips of a jammy Côteaux du Languedoc 2001, Les Étâts d'Âme de Mas Julien ($47). The international wine list offers plenty in this range, although just six selections by the glass.
Au Pied de Cochon
Toqué!'s antithesis -- a rollicking two-year-old brasserie in the busy Plateau district -- is a trendy temple of Québécois comfort food. The wobbly wooden tables in the narrow, rustic room are packed until midnight, but the bar offers a better view of the open kitchen, where a riot of tattooed cooks hoists medieval portions of game into a blazing hearth.
The chef and owner, Martin Picard, advocates juice-dripping-down-the-chin gustatory indulgence. You don't think about food here -- you eat it. And it tastes great!
The first time I ordered poutine (Quebec's famous cheese fries), a Gen-Xer busing tables insisted we splurge on the foie gras version ($14). I'm eternally grateful. The crispy skin-on fries, tangled with milky cheese and rich gravy, were topped with two fat, rich lobes that melted into the mix.
Other standout starters include intensely flavored onion soup; salty deep-fried oreilles de Crisse pork rinds; and lightly dressed salad greens that snap with flavor.
From late May to late September, the chef rolls out a lighter fish menu, including mackerel from the Gaspe Sea, four kinds of crabs, and, for those daring enough to partake, live sweet shrimp.
But I've only had the pleasure of tasting Mr. Picard's fall and winter dishes (some are on the menu all year), which are not for the faint of heart. My favorite -- a ridiculously large, juicy bone-in pork chop smothered in wild mushrooms, caramelized onions and sauerkraut -- is a scrumptious mess.
Deer onglet (hanger steak) with mushroom sauce with beer is only slightly more refined. The namesake pied de cochon -- fork-tender and full-flavored pig's foot under crackly skin -- arrives with heaps of mashed potatoes with cheese curds and garlic.
If rustic desserts like maple syrup-soaked pouding chômeur cake in a bubbling hot casserole sound too heavy, try cromesquis de foie gras ($2.30), a bite-size, deep-fried cube of foie gras. With a swallow of dessert wine, the burst of hot liquid liver is instant bliss.
A hoppy brown ale, Griffon Rousse ($4.70 a pint), paired well with the pork, and the sophisticated wine list offered an exciting range, from an earthy Côtes du Rhones (from about $25), to rarefied super-Tuscans like Sassicaia ($275).
Anise
I had been dreaming about this place since a dinner last November, when I fell in love with its fallow deer chop, glazed with bitter guanaja chocolate and cassis-caramelized onions. On my second visit, I was starry-eyed all over again.
The tiny, two-tiered restaurant, and its self-taught chef, Racha Bassoul, have garnered considerable attention since opening some two years ago in the Mile End district. With gold walls and lipstick red chenille banquettes, Anise's simple décor directs all attention to the plate.
It's always nice to encounter servers who adore their chef, as they do here. After describing the dried fruits and seven spices hiding inside flaky lamb pastilla, one of them called Ms. Bassoul, who was born in Lebanon, ''an alchemist of flavor.''
I left both meals humming with a warm, spice-induced high that lingered for hours.
The bread basket was the first of many surprises. Chewy black-sesame-coated flatbread tasted of fine sea salt, but wasn't salty. Cardamom rolls were the fluffy essence of the pod.
My friend Rebecca and I began with intensely-flavored oyster mushroom soup thickened with salsify and sweetened with coconut cream. This begat ''eggplant fantasy'' (yes, the menu is prone to precious language), a texturally thrilling stack of roasted eggplant, eggplant-seed ''caviar,'' creamy tahini and ratatouille with intermittent bursts of red pepper heat.
The slow, low poaching of salmon in olive oil, infused with tarragon, citrus and green peppercorns, carried flavor to the fillet's core. It came with a refreshing sweet-tart pomelo salad and lemon oil.
The subtle gaminess of fork-tender venison osso buco, braised in a caraway seed jus with beautiful baby roots, was offset with minty oil.
The $65, six-course dinner included a ''cheese idea'' -- a generous slice of goat cheese from Quebec with edible bloomy rind, drizzled with orange-sesame honey -- then, chocolate fondant, flavored with anise, in a tiny flowerpot.
The wine list offers just a handful of good bottles. A spicy Paso Robles 1998 zinfandel from Pesenti ($49) proved the perfect companion to this sensual repast.
Brunoise
The two young chefs who opened this modern restaurant in May 2003 -- Zach Suhl and Michel Ross, who worked at Gordon Ramsey's Michelin-starred L'Oranger -- call their food cuisine du marché, or market cooking. I call it the best deal in town, and judging by the crowds, many others agree.
The three-course menu runs $27 to $38, depending on your entrée. Nothing is spared in style in the 48-seat interior: cappuccino-colored walls and the concrete bar are softly lighted with whimsical wall sconces. Wicker-backed chairs are just cozy enough.
Service was helpful and amicable: As I agonized between bourride and terrine to start, my server suggested both for a small surcharge. I'm still not sure which I liked better. The prosciutto-wrapped pork terrine, studded with sweatbreads, herbs and fleshy mushrooms, came with honey mushroom-celery leaf salad and a piquant dollop of gribiche sauce made with plenty of mustard and hard-boiled eggs. Spiky saffron aioli enlivened the fisherman's stew.
I pray that the roasted guinea hen is on the menu when I return. This is what poultry should taste like -- moist and nutty, perfect with the silky bois boudran sauce, a rich, reduced demi-glace. Its unfussy counterparts were hockey-puck-size sweetbread ravioli, braised cippolini onion, and crunchy haricot verts.
Vanilla pannacotta can be ho-hum, but here it's stunning: the triple-reduced cream arrives in a bright bowl of basil coulis, sprinkled with passion fruit seeds for tang and texture.
My only complaint about Brunoise is that wines aren't served by the glass, but in 250-milliliter pitchers or bottles. The 250's -- about 8.5 ounces-- are fun for couples, but not enough for four. That said, I was dining alone here and managed to finish my pitcher of La Segreta 2002 ($10), an inky Sicilian priorat from Planeta.
Aix
The newish boutique hotel restaurants in Old Montreal are anything but tourist fodder. Within a few blocks' radius are Verses (in the Hotel Nelligan), S (in the St.-Sulpice) and this sleek, six-month-old addition to the Hôtel Place d'Armes. The chef, Janick Bouchard, a French classicist when moonlighting at his other restaurant, Les Remparts, takes a countrified approach with this down-to-earth cuisine. Yet for a restaurant specializing in artisanal foods from small Quebec farms, its subterranean space is strikingly urban, with beige banquettes, bamboo screens and a long black bar.
My server was refreshingly down-to-earth: so quick to describe every ingredient's provenance, I wondered if Quebec's tourism board had put him up to it (I was there anonymously). He steered me toward a Canadian wine on the long international list: the 2000 Sumac Ridge merlot-cabernet sauvignon ($32), which was surprisingly elegant and fruity.
Packed with business types, lunch is a steal, with generously sized entrees priced at about half their price at dinner -- $9 to $12.50, compared to $13 to $29.50. Homemade charcuterie, particularly cognac-spiked chicken liver mousse with sweet fig preserves, was delicious, as was house-smoked salmon with coriander-cucumber crème fraiche, even if the potato blini were too dense.
Entrees were less successful. Dry rabbit leg needed a gentler braise, and though the accompanying baby roots were lovely, whipped potatoes were overworked and gummy. Bison steak was juicy, but the greasy frites sub par.
An inexpensive ($9) and fantastic sampling of Quebec's farmstead cheeses yanked us back on track. A sweet digestif made from local cider, cidre de glace, was on the house and combined well with the hard cheddar, runny goat, funky sheep-cow and raw milk Camembert.
By the last bite, I had mapped out my next Quebec adventure, visiting the dairies where these are made.
Bill of fare
These restaurants are easy to get to by taxi or the Métro. All accept major credit cards, and none allow smoking.
The prices, except for prix-fixe meals, are estimates for a three-course dinner for two, including a modest bottle of wine and tip, at the rate of $1.40 Canadian to the United States dollar. Nearly 17 percent in taxes are added to restaurant bills. Reservations are highly recommended for all.
Toqué!, 900, place Jean-Paul Riopelle (St.-Victoria Métro station); (514) 499-2084; open for lunch Tuesday to Friday and for dinner Tuesday to Saturday. The prix-fixe lunch is $27, prix-fixe dinner from $70; à la carte from $225.
Au Pied de Cochon, 536, rue Duluth Est (Sherbrooke station); (514) 281-1114; dinner Tuesday to Sunday; $100.
Anise, 104, rue Laurier Ouest (Laurier station); (514) 276-6999; dinner Tuesday to Saturday. Prix fixe from $50; à la carte from $175.
Brunoise, 3807, rue St.-André (Sherbrooke station); (514) 523-3885; dinner Monday to Saturday; $90.
Aix, 711, Côte de la Place d'Armes (Place d'Armes station); (514) 904-1201; breakfast, lunch and dinner daily; $140.
Correction: July 11, 2004, Sunday The Choice Tables column on June 27, about Montreal, misstated the name of the body of water from which the restaurant Au Pied de Cochon gets its mackerel. It is the Bay of Gaspé, not the Gaspe Sea.
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Post by franko on Sept 19, 2005 20:05:53 GMT -5
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 24, 2005 18:54:05 GMT -5
Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective - By Robin FoxThe Myth of NutritionWe have to eat; we like to eat; eating makes us feel good; it is more important than sex. To ensure genetic survival the sex urge need only be satisfied a few times in a lifetime; the hunger urge must be satisfied every day. It is also a profoundly social urge. Food is almost always shared; people eat together; mealtimes are events when the whole family or settlement or village comes together. Food is also an occasion for sharing, for distributing and giving, for the expression of altruism, whether from parents to children, children to in-laws, or anyone to visitors and strangers. Food is the most important thing a mother gives a child; it is the substance of her own body, and in most parts of the world mother’s milk is still the only safe food for infants. Thus food becomes not just a symbol of, but the reality of, love and security. All animals eat, but we are the only animal that cooks. So cooking becomes more than a necessity, it is the symbol of our humanity, what marks us off from the rest of nature. And because eating is almost always a group event (as opposed to sex), food becomes a focus of symbolic activity about sociality and our place in our society. The body needs fuel. But this need could be served by a rough diet of small game, roots, and berries, as it was for several million years. Or, even more extreme, pills could be synthesized to give us all we need (except bulk). But our “tastes” have never been governed solely by nutrition. Modern nutritionists chanted the litany of the “four food types” (vegetables, grains, dairy products, meats) from which we were supposed to take more or less equal amounts daily. But dairy and domestic meat fats are now considered harmful, and a new “food pyramid” – equally misleading – is being touted. In fact, nutrition plays only a small part in our food choices. Adele Davis, whose bossy opinions on food were to a whole generation as authoritative as Dr. Spock’s on childrearing (she recommended a diet of liver and yogurt), held that European history was determined by food habits. The French ate white bread and drank wine and strong coffee, she said, and this was about as nutritionally disastrous as possible; the Germans, on the other hand, ate dark bread and drank beer – both nutritionally sound. Was it any wonder, she asked, that the Germans kept beating the French? But even if both nations were to accept this interesting hypothesis as sound, do we believe they would change their food preferences? Nor are these preferences solely governed by what is available. All cultures go to considerable lengths to obtain preferred foods, and often ignore valuable food sources close at hand. The English do not eat horse and dog; Mohammedans refuse pork; Jews have a whole litany of forbidden foods (see Leviticus); Americans despise offal; Hindus taboo beef – and so on. People will not just eat anything, whatever the circumstances. In fact, omnivorousness is often treated as a joke. The Chinese are indeed thought by their more fastidious neighbors to eat anything. The Vietnamese used to say that the best way to get rid of the Americans would be to invite in the Chinese, who would surely find them good to eat. - www.sirc.org/publik/food_and_eating_1.html
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Sept 28, 2005 21:06:56 GMT -5
Monday, September 12, 2005 Balut. The Egg of Darkness. Pinoy-Pinay. Panorama City, CA.(WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS GRAPHIC PHOTOS OF DUCK FETUS) If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness, do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession. If you fear the sound of water hurrying through crevices toward unknown and mysterious destinations, do not consider it. Seek out the sunshine. It is a simple prescription. Avoid the darkness.- Loren Eiseley from the book The Night Country In the Philippines there are supernatural creatures infamous in the country’s folklore that can put a crippling chill in the spine of grown men by the mere mention of their name. On nights when the moon is high and the weather balmy and the air thick and wet, and when the residents of small villages leave their windows and doors wide open to escape the oppressive heat that smothers the Malay Archipelago, this is when the feared aswang are said to appear. The aswang live among the general human population and are not easily identified. They can take the form of women by day and werewolves by night. These are the merciless and murderous shapeshifters that hunt small children and the frail elderly. They may also take the form of a bloodsucking female vampire who seduce and kill. Or they can resemble something Westerners would describe as zombies or the undead on an eternal search for human flesh with a special fondness for liver. An aswang is also able to cast spells in order to subdue the victim then use her wickedly long, serpentine tongue to penetrate the skin and to feed off of the blood. As with many of the aswang’s Western counterparts, they were once human but became possessed by evil spirits and turned into creatures of the night. There are a few ways to turn aswang but it is rumored that one way is to eat balut. There is a delicacy infamous in Filipino culture that can put a crippling chill in the spine of grown men almost as quickly as talk of aswang. That delicacy is the notorious balut. Balut is a popular Filipino street snack and is essentially a duck egg with a fetus inside, typically between seventeen to twenty days in gestation. In the Philippines balut is so popular that it is equivalent to what the hot dog is in the U.S. There are balut vendors who push around carts full of fetal treats and bark their wares in a sing-song chant of “baluuuut, baluuuut!” Balut is also a popular aphrodisiac for men. But even with the good vibes and positive spin surrounding balut, the stigma attached to eating it overshadows all the warm and fuzzy aspects of this very Deep End Dining dish. - deependdining.blogspot.com/2005/09/balut-egg-of-darkness-pinoy-pinay.html
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Post by Doc Holliday on Oct 12, 2006 15:34:33 GMT -5
Dunno if it fits in here or not but I recently bought the Food Chanel (Canadian version) on my cable connection. It has very quickly become my favorite non-sports channel (along with Historia). My favorite chef is definitely Bobby Flay but I also really like Alton Brown, Rob Rainford and Nigella Lawson (this woman is sooooo... sexy). I got a bit of a problem with Rachel Ray though... I find her a bit too conceited. Anyway I really like the Chanel, if you like to look, pro or not, you'll like it too.
Any opinions ?
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Post by M. Beaux-Eaux on Oct 12, 2006 15:56:36 GMT -5
Dunno if it fits in here or not but I recently bought the Food Chanel (Canadian version) on my cable connection. It has very quickly become my favorite non-sports channel (along with Historia). My favorite chef is definitely Bobby Flay but I also really like Alton Brown, Rob Rainford and Nigella Lawson (this woman is sooooo... sexy). I got a bit of a problem with Rachel Ray though... I find her a bit too conceited. Anyway I really like the Chanel, if you like to look, pro or not, you'll like it too. Any opinions ? I had it when I subscribed to cable. I liked the shows you mentioned, with the exception of Ray's program. She seemed a bit too interested in drawing attention to herself, something Nigella Lawson knows she doesn't need to do (she can make one twitch by merely arching an eyebrow while she prepares a recipe—and she can bake a cherry pie). Two other favourites of mine were Mario Batali's "Molto Mario" and Anthony Bourdain's "A Cook's Tour" (some other channel is/was carrying his "No Reservations" series). It was one of my favourite channels as well. Oh yeah, there was also a show featuring a Japanese-American chef, who was based in California, that I also enjoyed.
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Post by Disgruntled70sHab on Oct 12, 2006 16:26:27 GMT -5
Dunno if it fits in here or not but I recently bought the Food Chanel (Canadian version) on my cable connection. It has very quickly become my favorite non-sports channel (along with Historia). My favorite chef is definitely Bobby Flay but I also really like Alton Brown, Rob Rainford and Nigella Lawson (this woman is sooooo... sexy). I got a bit of a problem with Rachel Ray though... I find her a bit too conceited. Anyway I really like the Chanel, if you like to look, pro or not, you'll like it too. Any opinions ? Don't know this one, Doc. However, I will confess to not missing "Iron Chef" when it was on. I really enjoyed watching these guys do their thing within an hour. And, it's a big deal to defeat one of the three "Iron Chefs." It doesn't happen too frequently. The USA tried to copy it but when they brought out William Shatner as the MC for the inaugural show, they missed the boat IMHO. Like a lot of shows, nothing like the original. Cheers.
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Post by Doc Holliday on Oct 12, 2006 17:50:12 GMT -5
Dunno if it fits in here or not but I recently bought the Food Chanel (Canadian version) on my cable connection. It has very quickly become my favorite non-sports channel (along with Historia). My favorite chef is definitely Bobby Flay but I also really like Alton Brown, Rob Rainford and Nigella Lawson (this woman is sooooo... sexy). I got a bit of a problem with Rachel Ray though... I find her a bit too conceited. Anyway I really like the Chanel, if you like to look, pro or not, you'll like it too. Any opinions ? I had it when I subscribed to cable. I liked the shows you mentioned, with the exception of Ray's program. She seemed a bit too interested in drawing attention to herself, something Nigella Lawson knows she doesn't need to do (she can make one twitch by merely arching an eyebrow while she prepares a recipe—and she can bake a cherry pie). Two other favourites of mine were Mario Batali's "Molto Mario" and Anthony Bourdain's "A Cook's Tour" (some other channel is/was carrying his "No Reservations" series). It was one of my favourite channels as well. Oh yeah, there was also a show featuring a Japanese-American chef, who was based in California, that I also enjoyed. I hear you about Rachel Ray. Frankly I'm not quite sure what she's doing there... I find her culinary skills to be, well, ordinary. Nigella... Almost forgot Bob Blumer, great chef, with a weird twist on things. His show The Surreal Gourmet is very bozo ish (and I mean that in a good way ) I like Batalli as well but unfortunately he has no shows this season on he Canadian chanel so I only get to see him in Iron Chef America once in a while where the show is cool but you can't really pick anything helpful. I find Japanese chef to be sometimes a little hooked up on itsy bitsy fine details... But I like Asian food and I can make a wicked sauté on the 'ole wok, a bit of sake and Sayonara !.
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