I am currently totally and completely enamored of Faye Hess. I discovered her over the weekend, while catching up on the backlog of feeds in my reader. She is a New York City-based (well, Queens to be exact) chef who has made a series of four cooking videos that are entertaining, instructive and appealingly quirky. Oh, and did I mention that her food looks delicious?
During the nicely edited and captioned videos, she carries on a conversation with the camera that is so natural, passionate and easy that you can readily imagine that you are actually standing in her long, slightly slant-y kitchen with her. While preparing a garlic and butter sauce for freshly made gnocchi, she holds up a handful of sage to the camera man (who I'm guessing is her husband) so he can enjoy the scent. In that moment, I inhaled deeply myself, expecting a noseful of of rich, green woodiness. All I got was the faint wisps of bacon from the morning before.
Thanks to her inspiration, I'm planning a gnocchi attempt soon. I've also subscribed to her blog and ordered her book on Lulu (and I'm counting down the days until it arrives). She's made a passionate fan out of me, and I'm certain she'll do the same to you.
When I was in high school, I had a love-hate relationship with science classes. Geology was fine, biology was okay, and chemistry...well, chemistry was hell. Mrs. Olech, the troll who taught the class, regularly flunked half her students and had a teaching manner that made Alan Greenspan seem bouncy and exciting.
Ironically, while I flunked chem, I aced my cooking classes. Even at the time, I thought that this was a little weird; after all, what is cooking if not a chemical process? The subtle adjustment of flavors, the cultivation of certain bacteria, the measured combination of leavening chemicals are all, basically, a mix of applied chemistry and biology. However, cooking class captured my imagination and attention in a way that chemistry didn't.
Reading a recent profile of Alton Brown, I realize that the problem lay with Mrs. Olech and her ilk. The simple fact is that science can be a lot of fun, if it is applied in a way that is relevant and exciting. I was surprised to learn that, like me, Brown found his science classes "boring beyond words." Even now, as he has built his own store of scientific knowledge, he admits to having discarded academic journals and scholarly papers because of their inability to engage his interest.
The show The Next Food Network Star has a formula. It starts out with a set number of contestants and over the course of weeks, all the contestants are eliminated, save one. That last person standing wins a deal to make a 13-episode series for the Food Network. However, this season, the execs at the Food Network seem to be messing with the formula a bit. Not only did they advance three contestants to the final round, now they've announced that finalist Adam Gertler (famous in Philly circles for his short-lived restaurant The Smoked Joint) is also going to be getting his own show.
Called Will Work for Food, he'll be learning what goes into a variety of food industry jobs and passing this knowledge along to the viewers. Examples of the kinds of employment opportunities he'll be investigating include potato chip inspector, shark feeder and dog-food taste-tester. The show premieres on September 30 at 9:30 pm.
Our pals at Epicurious's Epi-Log pointed us to this lusciously awkward Today Show cooking segment wherein Sam the Cooking Guy shuts Kathie Lee's cakehole not so much with cake, as with a heaping helping of STFU. It's no doubt soured his relationship with the show, but makes for some mighty sweet TV.
Is this the most deliciously cringe-inducing in the history of food television, or can you dredge up any others? Post your thoughts and video links below.
Sunday afternoon, I had more than ten tasks and projects to get completed before the week started up again. However, instead of running around the apartment, marking things off my list, I got completed sucked into a documentary that Scott was watching. Called To Market, To Market, To Buy a Fat Pig, (from the old children's nursery rhyme) it is an hour-long visit to farmers markets all over the country. They take you from New Mexico and California to Ohio and Hawaii.
The only market they visited that I've personally been to is Lancaster, PA's Central Market and, having seen this program, I now have an unquenchable urge to plan my vacations around new farmers markets. I think before the summer is out I'll be driving down to Lexington Market in Baltimore to explore.
If you are a fan of farmers markets, this is one not to be missed. It's on the PBS schedule in various locations for the next couple of weeks.
When I was growing up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was one of my very favorite books. Set in the very fictional town of Chewandswallow, the residents don't have to shop at grocery stores the way the rest of us do. Instead, all their food was delivered by the weather. Morning would start with a drizzle of hot coffee, followed by eggs, toast and bacon. Life was good in Chewandswallow, until the weather becomes unpredictable and the food that comes from the elements becomes life-threatening. Eventually the townsfolk are forced to leave (on rafts made from giant peanut butter sandwiches) and restart their lives in a city where the only thing that falls from the sky is rain and snow.
First published in 1982, Cloudy has been beloved to generations of young readers and now, according to our sister site Cinematical, it's coming to the big screen. The animated film is going to be altered quite significantly from the original book, but hamburgers and donuts will still rain from the sky and the city will still be blanketed by a pea soup fog at times, so that's good enough for me. I really look forward to seeing it when it comes out in 2010.
Alanna is traveling for the next couple of weeks, and while you may see a post or two up from her appear on the site while she's away, she isn't near a TV and so can't watch The Next Food Network Star. I'm going to be subbing in for her in the recap department. So let's get started, shall we?
I warn you, after this point, there will be spoilers!
Bananas and chimps just seem to go together, in the same way that we associate eggs and bacon or a bagel with cream cheese (I'm not suggesting that you eat a chimp with your banana, it's just that I could only think of food pairings). The folks behind the new animated movie, Space Chimps, also think that bananas and chimps go well together, and to that end, they've teams up with Dole to promote the movie via banana. Dole will have "chimp" stickers placed on 100 million bananas, 4 million pineapples and 4 million salad bags sold in grocery stores as a way to increase awareness of healthy food tie-in with the movie.
In addition to all that promotion, they've also dreamed up a recipe for a banana, strawberry and pineapple shake that will appeal to young kids and help them eat healthfully. The recipe is after the jump and the movie starts on July 18th. Enjoy!
Healthy officials say celebrity chefs often fail to maintain basic hygiene standards, according to an article by BBC news.
Interestingly, however, the article only cites one health official, but it states that the issue was brought up at a medical conference in Edinburgh. Crimes by the celebrity chefs include not washing lettuce and using the same utensils for raw meat and cooked foods. Guilty shows include BBC's Ready Steady Cook and Celebrity MasterChef, which I've actually never seen.
I'm not sure whether the problem, if it exists, happens here in the U.S. as well, as I have never thought about the issue while watching food TV. I guess I always presume that ingredients are pre-washed, or that the washing is edited out of programs like Top Chef and Iron Chef America. Your thoughts?
Okay Top Chef junkies, here's the cookbook you've got to own. Top Chef The Cookbook not only offers up the best of the first three seasons of the addictive reality show, it also gives you something of a behind the scenes peek into how the show works and why it is so appealing. The introduction is written by Tom Colicchio (one of the show's primary judges), and it is interesting and conversational, making me feel like I was sitting down with him, asking questions about how he got involved with it and receiving candid answers in return.
It takes this book 35 pages to get to the recipes, because they have devoted the beginning of the book to setting up the show, sharing unknown secrets about how it works and offering up lots of wisdom about why the show is as appealing as it it. I found this section to be totally engrossing and lost half a hour reading it (I'm a known skimmer, something has to be really interesting for me to read it closely and deeply).
But finally, the recipes do arrive and they are dishes that the chef-testants dream up when they are on their game and the food gods are smiling. In other words, these recipes are the best of the best to come out of the show. Many of the recipes are simple, familiar dishes that the chefs have elevated (such as waffles, steak and eggs and eggs in a hole) so that they are intriguing while still being recognizably tasty. Others are slightly more outrageous and unique (although nothing like some of what Richard dreamed up on this most recent season).
Essentially, this is a cookbook built around a TV show and it will feed those of you who love to watch Top Chef. But it is also an interesting and serviceable cookbook that would serve you well, even if you'd never watched a single episode. That's a tough line to walk and they've done it admirably.
I'm going to have to be completely honest and admit that I didn't catch the entire episode of The Next Food Network Star last night because I arrived home late from my grandfather's 90th birthday party (at a sushi restaurant, which I think speaks to his amazing condition). That means that you guys have to fill me in on any amazing details from the beginning of the show, if you have any to share.
And while you think about that, I'll move on to the recap, because what I did see was pretty surprising.
You may not be familiar with the name Florence P. Hanford in the same way that you with Julia Child, but Hanford broke much of the ground that made it possible for all the television cooks who came after her. She first started appearing on the air, doing 20 minute cooking demonstrations, in February 1947, on Philadelphia's WPTZ (at that time, the only television station in the city). In 1949 she was given her own half hour show, called Television Kitchen. It appeared on Wednesday afternoons and was sponsored by Philadelphia Electric Company.
Her show ran for twenty years and she claimed that she never repeated a recipe and never burnt a thing on air (although she did try to bake a cake in an oven that wasn't on, luckily, a rehersal cake was waiting in the wings and could be substituted during a break). She prided herself on introducing new ingredients to her viewers, and so used bamboo shoots, Chinese cabbage, artichokes, avocados and teriyaki sauce when they were still foreign and exotic. Hanford's show was never picked up nationally, so she was only famous for her on-air cooking in the Philadelphia area, but people still requested her recipes years after the show wen off the air.
She died on July 1st, at the age of 99, after a full and varied life. For more information on Florence Hanford, check out her biography on The Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia.
You guys are right: The problem with The Next Food Network Star is that it challenges the contestants with tasks that I can't imagine them having to face if they actually win. I watched last night with a friend who had never seen before, and he was pretty much laughing out loud. That said, I still kind of really like it. Agree? Disagree? Read on.
I grew up in a household where we embraced leftovers, composted actively and had a dog with an iron-clad stomach, so very little food went to waste. As I got older and started living on my own, I realized what a feat of meal planning and conservation my mother had been pulling off all those years, as I found myself tossing heads of lettuce, moldy cheese and sour milk at the end of each week. I worked to change my habits, learning how much food I needed for each given week, working hard to use up my leftovers and buying an indoor composter to ensure that my vegetal waste didn't go into the landfills.
As food and fuel prices rise, more and more people are becoming concerned with the amount of food that we waste. This morning the Today Show aired a segment on food waste and in it they interviewed journalist and blogger Jonathan Bloom. Bloom runs the website Wasted Food and is currently writing a book about the amount of uneaten food that gets sent to landfills each day.
The segment is interesting and is an excellent primer for those people who are new to the idea of food conservation. They suggest that more frequent trips to the supermarket, in which you buy less, is one of the answers to preventing food waste. While I think that's a good idea, I wish they had stressed tactics like shopping at farmers markets (the food is fresher, so it stays good longer, giving you more time in which to use it) and using your freezer (if you make a large meal, halve it and freeze a portion for another time).
Last week I wrote my first post about The Next Food Network Star, having never seen it before. Thanks to those of you who gave me a heads up about show details and juice from past seasons. My plan is to just enjoy the show for what it is, and to try not to harp on the contestants too much. I'll admit that I'm easily entertained (I do sometimes watch old Sesame Street videos on YouTube), but I find the show pretty funny, and it's not like I have better things to do than watch TV and write about it. So join me in celebrating the absurdity of it all -- it could be fun.
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When I was in high school, I had a love-hate relationship with science classes. Geology was fine, biology was okay, and chemistry...well, chemistry was hell. Mrs. Olech, the troll who taught the class, regularly flunked half her students and had a teaching manner that made Alan Greenspan seem bouncy and exciting. 
The show The Next Food Network Star has a formula. It starts out with a set number of contestants and over the course of weeks, all the contestants are eliminated, save one. That last person standing wins a deal to make a 13-episode series for the Food Network. However, this season, the execs at the Food Network seem to be messing with the formula a bit. Not only did they advance three contestants to the final round, now they've announced that finalist Adam Gertler (famous in Philly circles for his short-lived restaurant The Smoked Joint) is also going to be getting his own show. 
Bananas and chimps just seem to go together, in the same way that we associate eggs and bacon or a bagel with cream cheese (I'm not suggesting that you eat a chimp with your banana, it's just that I could only think of food pairings). The folks behind the new animated movie, 
Healthy officials say celebrity chefs often fail to maintain basic hygiene standards, according to 
Okay Top Chef junkies, here's the cookbook you've got to own. 
I'm going to have to be completely honest and admit that I didn't catch the entire episode of The Next Food Network Star last night because I arrived home late from my grandfather's 90th birthday party (at a sushi restaurant, which I think speaks to his amazing condition). That means that you guys have to fill me in on any amazing details from the beginning of the show, if you have any to share.
You guys are right: The problem with 
Last week I wrote my first post about 
Chocolate-stuffed bananas on the grill
Tyler Florence welcomes new daughter
Beware kids' menus!
