Tag: dining

Boy, do I love Sonoma. And so would M. Brillat-Savarin.

One Person’s Pastry is Another Person’s Ladder

CUPCAKES RULE. THE SOFT, FITS-IN-THE-HAND-SIZED treat, sometimes filled with flavored cream (and always with cream on top), is my favorite dessert. Shabbat dinner wouldn’t be Shabbat dinner without one (or maybe two). But cupcakes as societal re-entry mechanism? Better still.

The baked goods from Richmond, California-based Rubicon Bakery are the exemplar of the form — not too sweet, not too small, delicious either refrigerated or at room temperature. They are an affordable $4.67 for a container of four at my local Whole Foods. And there’s an added incentive to buy them: Rubicon Bakery’s employees are reinventing themselves after brushes with prison, addiction, and other un-bakerly challenges. Continue reading “One Person’s Pastry is Another Person’s Ladder”

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 I will leaf through it at random, trying to expand my cookery-consciousness; other times I will use it to look up something I see mentioned in a recipe or on a cooking documentary. (I’ve even used it as a basis for a few Prosatio Silban tales.) Whatever the need or occasion, it’s a fine ingredient in any cook’s or foodie’s library. Continue reading “First Graf: The Gourmet’s Lexicon”

The Seven Don’ts (bagel reprise)

THE AUTHOR OF THIS PIECE is a “born and bred New Yorker,” but even here in the sticks some things are sacrosanct when it comes to that most iconic of Jewish foods. I agree with much of what she says, am unfamiliar with part of it (again, we miss some things in the Valley) and was frankly astonished by one (see: “rainbow bagel“). Your culinary mileage may vary, but if you were raised eating bagels (or even came to them later in life), it’s worth your while to check out this article for — to paraphrase Frank Herbert — the forms that must be obeyed. Smacznego, b’tayavon and bon appetit!

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 leftovers into lunch the next day. The crunch and earthiness of the toast (I used Safeway’s “Signature Brand 15-Grain Bread” as a base) perfectly balances the cool richness of the avocado. I didn’t even salt or pepper it at first (as the standard recipe advises), but when I did the flavors popped like a rose in bloom. The next day was even better with gomasio (a sesame/sea salt/seaweed blend) sprinkled over it.

I rarely follow food fads (in fact I am quite defiant about it), but this time the Hive Mind (or at least one guy in Australia) has devised something truly happifying. Mash avocado, salt and pepper to taste, spread thickly on good toasted bread, eat with knife and fork. As the man said, “Go thou and do likewise” — if you haven’t already.

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 essays on cooking I’ve ever read), and the video version of Michael Pollan’s Cooked. Both preach the gospel of self-sufficient cookery and the evils of processed food, and filled me with the fiery zeal to cook for myself.

Of course, any budding home cook needs a bit of help. Fortunately, that help is only a click away. Here are some websites which send me daily emails filled with recipes, cooking tips and the various wisdoms of household management: Continue reading “Digital Vittles”

Taste of Fame

HOW MUCH OF THEIR OWN flavors do, or can, Ben & Jerry’s’ honorees eat? Is there a celebrity discount? Free ice-cream for a lifetime, as long as you eat your own flavor? At what point do you just feed it to the potted plants when no one’s looking? This is where today’s investigative journalists should be spending their time: deep in the dairy freezer, scooping for clues (or as my mentor Daryl Curtis used to say, “We keep digging down to get to the bottom to stay on top.”) I’d say an eat-off is in order, except that Phish Food is named after a band and they’d have an unfair tag-team relay advantage over someone like Willie Nelson or Stephen Colbert. Or Jerry Garcia who, being dead, isn’t quite the foodie he once was.

One Conversation

WE WERE DISCUSSING SYNAGOGUE FUNDRAISERS, and I suggested an egg toss.

E. G., who knows who he is but may not want you to, looked at me with the sad seriousness of the ex-military and first responder. “Eggs aren’t for tossing,” he said. “They’re for eating. It debases us to play with something that half the world is starving for.”

That was ten years ago. To this day, the sight of someone playing with or otherwise wasting their food still makes me itchy inside.

One conversation was all it took to change my mind about something I had never seriously thought through. What will it take to change yours?

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