Le Bernardin VIP

I am trying to figure out how to become a Le Bernardin VIP so that I too can get baby eels.  Unfortunately, I suspect it involves eating at one of New York's most expensive restaurants a couple of times a week for a long time, so I'll just content myself with looking from afar.  They do look like pastas, though! 

Malaysian curry

We're off to a wedding in another state today, which will be a lot of fun.  Yesterday, though, I tried to imitate my favorite dish at our local, everyday Thai restaurant, the inimitable Bangkok Tasty.   I used a simple combination of red curry paste, sauteed briefly in oil, and then combined with fish sauce, lime, green beans, coriander, coconut milk, bean sprouts, sugar, and firm tofu.  It was, indeed, tasty, but next time I would greatly reduce the sugar and up the curry paste, and add cauliflower.  Nonetheless, once you get through chopping the ingredients, a wonderfully quick dinner for a night you really need to spend packing, but did not.

El Bulli taking the piss?

I followed Tyler Cowen's link to a well blogged visit to El Bulli, probably the most famous restaurant in the world today.   I'm sure the food is actually good - too many people say so to be wrong.  But looking at the pictures, I just can't get away from the feeling that they're taking the piss, just a little bit.   On the other hand, the restaurant does look beautiful. 

Pizza hut pasta

I don't really know how to explain Pizza Hut's new pastas, which I learned about via Instapundit via the Speculist. I don't understand the business plan (why would I buy frozen pasta from Pizza Hut rather than, say, Stoffer's?), I don't understand the market, and I don't understand why I would want to eat a beef pasta listing so many foul ingredients as this one.

Un-force fed foie gras

Michael Ruhlman writes about a new foie gras from Spain that isn't force fed, as is traditional foie gras, but relies on the goose's natural inclination to gorge itself. I'm skeptical, not only because Gordon Ramsay appears to have rejected it as inferior (and though Ramsay's television persona is something of a joke, he is a very serious, very great chef), but because I had a version of what I believe to be a humanely raised foie gras at the wonderful L'eau a la bouche outside Montreal last year. While it was delicious, and to me tasted better objectively than real foie gras, it wasn't foie gras. It was very fatty, unctuous, liver, and there's a big difference between the two.

Word of the Day

"Pellucid", meaning transparently clear, from Justice Stevens' otherwise puzzling opinion in today's Baze v. Reese, upholding Kentucky's method of execution.

UPDATE: As in, it is pellucidly clear that most TV chefs have research staffs find them other people's recipes for use in their shows.

"My" special risotto, says she

The interesting part about the Cindy McCain mini-recipe kerfuffle (in which it was discovered that recipes listed as the McCain's personal home cooking were actually drawn verbatim from Food Network) is that every single current Food Network TV chef does much the same thing, and I've long found it highly obnoxious. "Oomph", groans Giada, as she decorously slithers her "favorite" lasagne into her mouth, or such and such dish like "her mother used to make". The number of Rachel Ray's dishes that she claims she "usually" makes in X or Y fashion are legion. And I won't even get into the pastiche clown, Guy Fieri.

In reality, no one has a ready repertoire of favorite dishes which they've served multiple times in the past vast enough to cover 3 dishes a day for even 30 episodes a year. My own grandmother, for example, a highly talented cook who fed a family all three meals every single day for 40 years, can count perhaps 10 dishes that would qualify as "favorites", or specialties, or about which she can claim with any plausibility "I usually serve it this or that way". She knows of, and can probably execute, any number of other dishes, but those are always in the context of having learned them from some woman in the past, or once having been served it at dinner. In the same way, listen carefully to Batali or Pepin on TV. Very rarely does either use the Food TV code. Rather, they learned the dish in Amalfi, or know puff pastry to be made in this way, or once ate it and remember the flavor vividly. There is none of the forced, fake, intimacy of Rachel Ray's apparently bachannalian home feasts, at which we are to suppose she serves 14 dishes a night to an army of hungry omnivores. Of course, professional chefs have a much larger mental library to work from than the rest of us. But that is obviously not what they're invoking on TV.

None of this is to say that there's no value in Food Network, or that I hate the hosts. There is, and I don't. But it is rich of someone to complain on Rachel Ray's behalf that Cindy McCain['s intern] stole her recipes as her own.

A quick weekday dinner salad

For most of 2007, I spent every day and much of every night in the office. The economy was piping hot, and legal practice for a corporate lawyer in New York was an unending stream of deals and transactions. In those circumstances, even the quickest home meals were impossible. The best I could do was order hummous, or taboule, or the like, from some of the middle eastern restaurants here in New York, and lose myself for a moment or two in nostalgia for home.

But the economy has slowed down, and my life is much better. I don't mean to downplay the wretched effects of economic stress on many people, but I have enjoyed very much coming home before midnight, the opportunity to see my girlfriend for more than snatched meals outside my office, the chance to breath some fresh, non-air conditioned air. And, of course, to cook during the week.

Weekday dinners need not be complicated, or time consuming. The last thing many people want to do after coming come from work is to wait for a stew to thicken. With spring finally here, furthermore, the vegetables are improving every day. With that in mind, dinner last night was this grilled goat cheese (from Vermont's Coach farms), atop a salad of tangy, spicy, dandelion leaves and thinly sliced apple, just to soften the sometimes astringent dandelions the tiniest bit. No, it's not fancy, but it'll do.

PS - I often get into arguments with other people who have long running issues with weight over whether one can plausibly eat, say, a 4 oz. chunk of goat's cheese healthily. All I have to say is that a 4 oz. goat's cheese like the above has about 250 calories, has great "mouth feel" (to use one of the worst food industry phrases) and "umami" up the wazoo. I'll take that over a frozen diet dinner any day of the week.

A worthy pro-bono project

I had never before heard of the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, but now that I have, I'm enthused. Among other things, they're engaged in defending small farmers from the ravages of New York and California's state agricultural regulators, who are (as are all American agricultural regulators) evangelical about rubbing out raw milk. Especially interesting is the saga of Meadowsweet Farms, which apparently distributes raw milk and other dairy products through an LLC into which someone wishing to enjoy good food contributes capital. The profits produced by the cows fed by the capital contributions happen to be sweet dairy goodness. Unfortunately, Meadowsweet is under withering attack from the government, which is attempting to prove that it is illegally "selling" raw milk. A fascinating situation, and a worthy pro-bono project for any (ahem) lawyer.

Commodity Prices force school lunch cuts

The Washington Post reports the disturbing news that rising commodity prices are causing bad changes in school lunch programs. The really disturbing part of all this are the choices the schools are making to react. One school district has replaced "healthier options" (presumably milk) with Yoo-hoo. Another school has removed tomato slices (inappropriate given the season anyway) and replaced them with celery. And yet another came up with limiting fruit to twice a week.

I realize that the budgets are stretched. But it seems obvious to me at least that part of this has just got to be incompetence. Not because they're out of money, but because the apparent solutions have such deleterious effects that they're clearly worse than the disease.