A medium-rare steak is a medium-rare steak is a medium-rare steak. But how much salt does it take for it to be seasoned “perfectly.” You know it when you taste it, but what does your friend think? The person at the next table who binged on potato chips earlier that day? The smoker? And that’s just one dimension of seasoning.
Cooking and eating play on the very thin line between objective execution and wildly speculative matters of personal taste. Wine, nearly independent from matters of nutrition, even more so. Which is why I’m so excited about SOMM, the upcoming documentary about the exhaustive training, exclusive tasting, and grueling testing required to become one of the world’s few Master Sommeliers.
Source: The Huffington Post
Southern Foodways Alliance
I’m blown away: the SFA has put together an amazing collection of oral histories, videos, interactive maps, and more detailing the past and present of southern food. What’s more, they spell out guidelines and tips for contributing your own interviews to the project.
Whether you want to know the history of boudin, curious about what’s new in Southern artisanal cheese, or are planning a real-deal barbecue tour, this is the place to start.
From ‘Soft Guerilla’ series
Kyle Bean via BoingBoing
Texts from last night, Martha Stewart Living edition
- Me: This Press N' Seal wrap is out of control.
- Mom: Makes you want to make a big ole batch of something just to get the leftovers. Bet you just can't wait to unwrap that lunchie.
- Me: I know! All I can think about is sausages and burgers and if its safe to do sous vide. Wondering if the Glad product placements in Top Chef have something to do with it. Between that, all the baking I've been doing, and the lemon curd, really feeling the Martha Stewart vibe.
- Mom: That's my boy! No Sunday night football for you. Bed time soon, and sweet dreams of napkin rings and tarts tatins.
It’s like Betty Crocker and Charles Manson had a love child and he’s cooking for me
Source: en.wikiquote.org
UCB Tackles NY Foodie Culture with 'Pig: A Restaurant
Foodie culture satire has become a sub-genre unto itself: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip had some great little jests at British haute cuisine and the web series Foodies does a great job poking fun at American food snobs and their social challenges.
Now, Upright Citizens Brigade takes on the New York dining scene with Pig: A Restaurant, a short, one-woman play about the chefs, reviewers, bloggers, and eaters who create, perpetuate, and critique couture cuisine. From the Gothamist:
Written by the Leila Cohan-Miccio, a former editor for Grub Street, directed by Caitlin Tegart, and single-handedly performed by Lauren Conlin Adams, who’s waited tables everywhere from Balthazar to DB Bistro Moderne, Pig is a razor-sharp take on the city’s current foodie fadishness. The incredibly elastic Adams plays half a dozen characters, including, but not limited to: a pork-obsessed control freak chef, a hyper-bitchy restaurant publicist, a lascivious hat-wearing critic, and a DIY Brooklyn “farmer” who grows grapes on his Crown Heights rooftop, “with the terroir of Jamaican beef patties and weed.”
Tickets are available for $5 for wednesday shows on 12/7 and 12/21
Taco Bell
Love theis idea, and awesome, if somewhat tedious, execution.
Cormac McCarthy’s Yelp reviews
Financial District - San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Two stars.
And so the man defied the villagers and ate the taco. In defiance of the will of those people but also in defiance of some order older than he. Older than tortillas. Than the ancient and twisted cedars. How could we know his mind? We are all of us unknowable. Blind strangers passing on a mountain road.
The man laid there in the village square for three days and nights and took no food and spoke to no visitor. The older villagers said that the man should not have eaten the taco and no sane man would do so and the price of such folly was known to all.
On the fourth day an old lady asked the man was he ill and did he need a doctor. The man told her he was indeed ill but that he wished to see a priest. And she crossed herself and left and in the sweltering afternoon sun a priest came down to the square to see the man.
The priest asked the man why he lay there in the square and if perhaps he could be convinced to leave. The man said he had eaten a thing which he should not have and he could not move because the world was revealed to him in its evil and in its beauty. That if he moved he might fall into the sky and never return. The priest assured him that it was not possible to fall into the sky and that an earthly cure of ginger and peppermint would surely calm his digestion. The man asked could God make a taco so terrible even He could not eat it. The priest considered this and said no this was not possible and to think so was a sin. The man was silent for some time. Then he said that he had eaten such a taco and that it tasted of bootblack and horsefeed. That if this taco was under God’s dominion then surely all other great evils must be as well. And then the man took the halfeaten and greaseblackened taco from his coatpocket and thrust it at the priest like a broken sword. Eat it, he said. Eat it or be damned.
2 Follow Up Reviews:
11/3/2011 We do not hear from the man who ate the taco until November of that year, when he … Read more »
11/10/2011 They left him there in the cell. Delirious. Speaking of crazy things. Wild things. The guards would not… Read more »
Source: yelpingwithcormac
Cooking our way out of the recession
A new program in Chicago focuses on giving the unemployed a new start in culinary arts and hospitality. I’d love to wax poetic about the joys and self-improvement by learning how to cook, but with Chicago’s unemployment rate at 11.2% (compared to a national average of 9%), it’s all about the bottom line:
When asked what attracted him to the program, one participant named Billy, hired a month ago to work full-time at the Hard Rock Hotel downtown, reached in his pocket to pull out a paycheck. As of Monday’s graduation, one-quarter of the graduates had already found full-time work.
With the collapse of manufacturing and the middle-class lifestyle it afforded, the class gap provides an interesting opportunity in the service sector. Before there was the assembly line, there was the saute line.
Modern Squash (via NYTimes.com)
1. Hang-It-All, Charles and Ray Eames, 1953. 2. PH 4/3 Lamp, Poul Henningsen, 1966. 3. T.W.A. Terminal, New York, Eero Saarinen, 1962. 4. Philip Johnson, 1906-2005. 5. La Chaise, Charles and Ray Eames, 1948. 6. Egg Chair, Arne Jacobsen, 1958. 7. Swan Chair, Arne Jacobsen, 1958.
