THE FIRST BOOK THAT ACTUALLY got me thinking about food as something other than tasty fuel with which to stuff my face was Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 work, The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Part travelogue, part…
Tag: cooking
Creations a la Chez Nealo.
OKAY MOSES,” SAID GOD. “HERE’S another commandment: Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”
“You mean, don’t eat meat and milk together?”
“No. Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”
“You mean we should have separate dishes for meat and dairy?”
“No. Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”
“You mean we should wait a few hours after eating meat before we eat dairy?”
“Moses,” said God,”do whatever the hell you want.”
Cook’s Toolbox
ONE OF THE FIRST QUESTIONS a new home-cook asks is, “Besides food, what do I need in order to cook?” Fortunately, someone has supplied the answer. Despite the odd spelling, thekitchn.com is probably my favorite foodie website. Its editors send…
5 Thoughts: Grocery Shopping
1. IT USED TO BE CALLED “doing the marketing.” And it is one of my life’s favorite small pleasures. 2. This simple joy can probably be traced back to my dad and I doing it together every Saturday or Sunday…
First Graf: An Everlasting Meal
THIS IS THE BOOK THAT inspired me to cook for myself. It demystified for me the cooking process, shored up my nascent resolve, and gave me the mental tools I needed to commit the revolutionary act of not settling for…
First Graf: The Gourmet’s Lexicon
SITTING ON MY BOOKSHELF IS a slim purple volume from 1982 called The Gourmet’s Lexicon, an encyclopedic and indispensable listing of cuisines, dishes, and cooking techniques and styles. What Webster was to words, author Norman Kolpas is to food. Often…
Cooking as Transformational Gestalt
COOKING FOR MYSELF ALL STARTED with Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace, during and after reading which I said to myself, “I can.” It also started after seeing Michael Pollan’s Netflix documentary, “Cooked,” during and after…
Brillat-Savarin’s Hot Chocolate
AS AUTUMN TURNS COLDER THE nights and days, a young (or old) cook’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of hot chocolate. And what better hot chocolate can there be than that described on page 88 of the Leete’s Island Books…
Behind the Avocado Curve
AS AVOCADO TOAST CEASES TO be a Thing (I understand the new Thing is “tomato toast”), I am unembarrassed to say I only tried this delectability for the first time last week, for dinner. Verdict: Impressed enough to make the…
Digital Vittles
ONCE UPON A TIME, I subsisted on frozen meals from Lean Cuisine and Amy’s Kitchen. Then I “got religion” via two sources: Tamar Adler‘s An Everlasting Meal — Cooking with Economy and Grace (which also contains one of the finest…
Cheap Thrills: Bantha Milk
GOOGLE RETURNS ABOUT 29,700 HITS for “bantha milk,” AKA “blue milk” — it’s of what Luke Skywalker poured himself a glassful in the original Star Wars, banthas being those giant horned elephants-in-costumes of the same film. Fans love banthas, and…
Pithyism #16
THE WORLD LOOKS A LITTLE more friendly with something fragrant bubbling on the stove.