Connecting the Dots
Feb 12, 2010 books, general food
Recently I have been reading quite a lot, and to say I am fascinated by some people’s command of language would be a gross understatement. Regretfully, I feel that while I can BS endlessly, I write quite poorly as a whole and am jealous of these people.
One book I’ve read recently–or reread as it were–is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. The forward once again captivated me in a way that the subject rarely is, and as I neared it’s end and saw who wrote it, I am embarrassed to admit that I had not previously considered that the White half of Strunk and White, is E.B. White; the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little
You see, of late I have also been reading Letters of E. B. White
A farm is a peculiar problem for a man who likes animals because the fate of most livestock is that they are murdered by their benefactors. The creatures may live serenely but they end violently, and the odor of doom hangs about them always.
I have kept several pigs, starting them in the spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through the summer and fall. The relationship bothered me. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing.
Tags: E.B. White, pigs, strunk and white, The Elements of Style
Event: Mollie Katzen at Washington University 10/6
Oct 4, 2009 books, chefs, events
On Tuesday, October 6th, please join Washington University, along with The Burning Kumquat and their special guest, author Mollie Katzen, for a special day of events at the Washington University Danforth Campus.
With over 6 million books in print, Katzen is and award-winning illustrator and best-selling author of such classic cookbooks as The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Her newest project is Get Cooking, a multimedia series of books and videos for beginning cooks.
For more information view the event flyer or visit The Burning Kumquat’s site.
Tags: Mollie Katzen, moosewood cookbook, The Burning Kumquat, Washington University
Ah Ha! A Newbie’s Wine List or: How I Managed to Post Twice in One Day
In March of this year, Josh Galliano and I dined at the Niche bar together. Throughout our meal customers of Niche, who were also customers of Monarch’s, regularly came up to say hello. To my great fortune, a particularly generous customer added to his hello a bottle of 2004 Williams Selyem Westside Road Neighbors Pinot Noir and with that, my Ah Ha wine moment had happened, and a new chapter of my life began. Thanks Jeff L.
Certainly I’d had good wine before, and I definitely preferred it as my libation of choice with a meal. Outside of restaurants, however, I’d been primarily a beer drinker because I could not only wrap my head around beer, I could afford it. I had no idea what Williams Selyem was that night and, if the wallop of flavor were any indicator, I was pretty damn sure it was a winery producing a product well outside my price range. Arriving home and doing a bit of googling, however, I found a bottle at Brown Derby, in Springfield, MO, for $55. While I realize that’s not cheap by any means, it was significantly less than I’d anticipated, and I immediately purchased it and two other bottles of Williams Selyem Zinfandel to tuck away into my cellar (AKA the cool/dark corner of my basement).
The slippery slope of oenophilia had landed and, where once I was a guy that simply knew he liked wine more than beer but felt he couldn’t afford it, I quickly became a guy that reads a dozen wine blogs a day and voraciously clamors for information. Which brings us, windingly, to my poorly written point: One of those posts was written by Stephen Schenkenberg on stlmag.com about his favorite wine books and websites. It’s a good list but, as a newcomer to this world of wine, I thought I’d offer up a newbie’s perspective (which you can read here in it’s shiny-new polite form, or as an stlmag comment in it’s original, several glasses in, grammatically incorrect–but possibly more entertaining–form)
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Tags: blog, books, cellartracker.com, drvino.com, erobertparker.com, Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson, Jay Miller, Josh Galliano, Kevin Zraly, Mark Oldman, Niche, Robert Parker, Tom Stevenson, Tyler Colman, vinography.com, websites, Williams Selyem, winespectator.com
The Making of a Chef
Oct 8, 2008 books, general food, reviews
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Finally I have finished reading Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute. Favorite quotes are highlighted, the dust jacket has been replaced, and it is with sadness–because it is over–that I have returned it to the gastronomy section of my bookshelf. How I hadn’t read the book until now escapes me; especially so in that I’ve owned it for a very long time. My guess is that it had something to do with its having come out shortly after Becoming a Chef. At the time I was a cook, and I can recall reading in several places, as well as hearing word-of-mouth, that it was in some way a lesser version of that book but that’s simply not the case. It has held up far greater than Becoming a Chef which covers only the culinary growth of several celebrity chefs. Their stories are not normal, however, and the view Ruhlman gives us instead is
Tags: Michael Ruhlman
Notes
Oct 5, 2008 St. Louis, books, farmers' markets, groceries, offal watch, restaurants
1. I spotted hardback copies of one of my favorite foodie books, The Apprentice
It’s hard to imagine a time when people were attempting to make chain food that actually stood up to some level of high standards.
2. Guanciale. Salume Beddu was slinging some made with Fararr Out Farm Berkshire jaws at Tower Grove recently and it is delicious.
Toast some good bread, render some up like lardons, and top it with arugula and a fried egg cooked in the rendered fat for the ultimate (and fast) after-work snack.
3. Grits. I’d been unimpressed by Revival’s in the past, but this week, cheesy grits baked in a dish and topped with a slice of ham and a sunny-side up egg were absolutely perfect. It doesn’t get much better than egg yolk running over anything.
4. Getting much better…the Fat of stlbites.com has made an appearance at Niche. Lamb belly is now the final savory course of the tasting menu and it’s ridiculously good–everything a solitary slice of tender lamb gut was meant to be.
Lamb – mushroom, cauliflower, tapenade (& Brussels Sprouts when I had it)
5. A guilty pleasure: Chicken Modega and a side of white cavatelli at the Town & Country Rich & Charlie’s. Bonus: it was $28 for two of us to eat. Bonus 2: That Rich & Charlie’s is BYOB. Bonus 3: It was enough for lunch the next day too.
Tags: Farrar Out Farm, fried egg, grits, guanciale, Jacques Pepin, lamb, Niche, Revival, Rich & Charlie's, Salume Beddu
Who knew…
Jan 25, 2008 books, restaurants
it would take burgers to get us another national restaurant mentioning?
…Hubert Keller (San Francisco’s Fleur de Lys) has opened a second Burger Bar in St. Louis, Mo.; he already sells 1,400 burgers each weekend night in Las Vegas.
It’s nice to see St. Louis in the national press a little more recently, but I think we can all agree it would be nice if it wasn’t for this.
Though, apparently, “burgerphilia has become so acceptable among foodies that two books on the subject are coming out this year: Hamburger America, by documentarian George Motz, and The Hamburger: A History, by New York magazine online food editor Josh Ozersky.”
But you shouldn’t care because if you’re really that interested in reading about hamburgers, you should be reading John T. Edge’s Hamburgers and Fries. From fried chicken to donuts, every book that guy writes is fantastic.
Tags: Burger Bar
Amateur Goes Pro
My first impression after reading Adam D. Roberts’ new book The Amateur Gourmet: How to Shop, Chop, and Table Hop Like a Pro (Almost) was not kind. Without getting into the details let us just say that I was unimpressed with its length and my ability to read it while multitasking just four times. At $25 its 216 pages of giant font did not spell value.
Had I liked it, I might point you to the fabulous chapter in which he attempted to get his friend to appreciate the glory of coffee and olives. His clever tactics to trick her into thinking they were, at the very least not-half-bad, would serve many of us well as we poke and prod our friends and relatives to try new things.
Or perhaps I would comment on Roberts’ engaging sense of humor. More than any author I can recall his personality leaps from each page. Without actually having met him his openness regarding every facet of his life makes me feel as though I would probably know him better than members of my own family.
But, I did not like the book as I could not help but wonder why we needed it in the first place.
Adam D. Roberts’ you see is a blogger. He is (go figure) The Amateur Gourmet. He has a large following of adoring fans in the online food community, and that was my issue with the book. I am one of those fans, and for those of us that read his blog each week, there is nothing dramatically different about this book than one of his longer posts. His personality which makes his web page such a success is obviously there, but do too the formality of a book, he loses a bit of the eccentricity that is the secret to his success.
This one time however, I will admit I was wrong. I have realized in the month since finishing the book that while I personally did not need it, there are millions of Americans who do.
This book is not for people like me that discovered food long ago and are already fans of his blog. It is for the people who do not know who Adam D. Roberts is. It is for the people that grew up in families where nobody cooked and the question was always “where do you want to go” instead of “what do you feel like making?” But more importantly, it is for the channel surfer eating a micro waved dinner who stops just long enough on the Food Network to think to themselves “that looks good. I wonder if I could make that?”
Roberts thinks you can, believing if he can do it, anyone can.
By that standard this book is a huge success as Roberts’ takes you through his adventures like making his first tomato sauce, shopping at the farmers market, and learning how to dine with Ruth Reichl.
While it does contain some recipes it is not a cookbook, and while the title might lead one to believe some cooking skills will be taught, mostly it is a memoir encouraging people not to be afraid of the food world because it is exciting, and it is for everyone.
641
Sep 20, 2007 books, general food, sustainable agriculture
I like to read about food and I’ve amassed a pretty hefty cookbook collection over the years. They take up several bookshelves, and Ellie actually tells stories about how much space it takes up in our home. One of them is 8 feet tall by 4 feet wide, and unlike Heidi Swanson, there seems to be no end in site.
Hoping to save a little space, I recently started going to the library when I noticed they had an old, hard to find, cookbook I wanted to read. In the digital age, I’d somehow forgotten what a great public service the library is, and around 641, Dewey shows the glutens of the world a little love. Honestly, I was pretty shocked to see how great the gastronomy and cookbook sections were. So, while the library has worked out great, the money savings has been a little more mixed.
One book I was shocked to see was Marco Pierre White’s autobiography, The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef. If you don’t know who he is, before Gordon Ramsay, there was White. He is the original rock and roll chef and the first person I’m aware of to consistently go into the dining room and tell people to shove off.
When I was on the ACF Jr. Culinary Team, he was a hero of ours, and I grabbed up all his cookbooks; the best of which was the tough to find White Heat. In it, we discovered strange foods like caul fat, that we, as young cooks, had never seen, had, or even heard of.
There’s a funny story in the book about a Michelin 3 star chef dining at White’s restaurant and afterwards coming into the kitchen to say everything was great except the fish, which was salty. White told the cook who prepared it to tell the chef to “F off”. That cook was Ramsay. His foray into customer abuse had begun.
Overall, as interesting as it was to me, a fan, I’m sad to say, the autobiography is pretty poor. White has a tremendous ego, and comes off sounding like a real jerk that ruins every meaningful relationship he’s ever been apart of both personally and in business. The book, therefore, was a library win. It equaled money saved because if I ever own it, it will have to be both cheap, and used.
Another I just happened across on the racks was one of my current reads: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It’s an interesting book about Barbara Kingsolver’s family doing their part–as they see it–to eat locally for a year. In many chapters, she and her husband unfortunatly get a bit preachy and come off sounding a touch condescending to those with a viewpoint that might differ from their own. Still, it’s entertaining and informative.
The best chapter that I’ve read so far is called “You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day”. Unlike many in the locavore movement, the Kingsolver’s eat meat. To that end, they raised/are raising their own chickens and turkeys, and Kingsolver does a remarkable job talking about the reasons for eating meat, and why it is not inhumane. One point, which I’d never really thought about in detail, is that the animals on farms were domesticated to be docile. They were bread specifically as food, and for the most part, they would not survive in the wild. She touches also on the Slow Food point: the best way to save heritage breeds is to, in fact, eat them.
I’m not quite done with this one, but I’d definitely recommend it. Even with it’s definite one-sided-ness it’s one of the better books on the subject as Kingsolver is a more engaging author then most.
This book, therefore, was a library loss. I was enjoying it so much, I bought my own.
There were several more wins like Heston Blumenthal’s book . I’d always wanted it, but once I had the opportunity to flip through it, I realized it was a complete waste. Every chef out there wants a cookbook these days, but few chefs can really pull one off. It’s tough to come up with a new idea for a cookbook, or a new and interesting way to present an old one, and he failed on many levels.
Into the Vietnamese Kitchen was a draw. Old idea: Vietnamese food. New twist: easy to follow recipes with beautiful pictures that make you want to jump into the pages because your mouth is watering. I bought it.
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Then there’s the incredibly strange book I stumbled upon Tuesday: Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand.I spotted this in the new release rack at the library yesterday and I had to grab it.It’s not every day my fringe-hipster-indie-rock-world crosses paths with my over-opinionated-gluttonous-food-world.
Apparently Alex Kapranos (lead singer/guitarist) was a chef and cook while he was in a series of failed bands leading up to Franz Ferdinand. So, while traveling all over the globe rock star style, he ate from both really well to really strange. He documents it here, and so far, it’s well written and entertaining. |
Who knew I was a low level celebrity?
Sep 11, 2007 books, general food, reviews
One of my friends just sent this to me. I’d forgotten I made this comment oh so long ago. If you don’t own Culinary Artistry, and you’re wondering how people cook fabulous food without recipes, pick it up. You won’t be sorry.
“William L. Burge IV, chef: ? “CULINARY ARTISTRY is one of the finest culinary pieces that I know of, not just because of the conversations with the chefs which are great, but more importantly for the lists of food combinations/suggestions. ? As a young cook, they served as a sort of flavor wheel, when I felt that a dish could use just a little something more. ? A must-have for current chefs, aspring chefs, and anyone interested in expanding their palate of usable flavors.”
[source: www.becomingachef.com ]
From the mountains of Panama and Ethiopia, to the urban-jungles of Portland and Chicago, journalist Michaele Weissman takes us behind the scenes for a look at the world of third-wave specialty coffee. How did we get to Starbucks, and where we go from here?