Although I like Tony Bourdain’s show, and he did a great job when he came here to Livingston (a show that featured the ex-boyfriend known on this blog as the Mighty Hunter, as well as some real glamor shots of Jacques the bird dog), I was thrilled by his techniques show, especially his assertion that instead of killing Home Ec in the name of feminism, the nation should rather, have required Home Ec of everyone. One of my pet ideas. Home Ec should be a requirement in high school. Learn to cook the kinds of basic items Bourdain showcased, a…
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It’s that time of the month when I write my Bookslut review (will post link when it’s up) and the topic of why we cook, and what constitutes “real” cooking, and what we go to cookbooks and food websites and food blogs looking for has once again bubbled up to the top of my head. I love my cookbook review gig, in no small part due to the stream of cookbooks that is flowing toward my house these days. I love cookbooks. As a teenager I used to read them like novels, and my very first professional job out of…
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Although I’ve made pancetta a couple of times (once even landing myself in the local paper for my efforts), I’ve never made plain old bacon before. Because of my Bookslut gig, there seem to be an increasing number of cookbooks about canning, pickling, and preserving washing up on my doorstep. For bacon, I turned to Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It: And Other Cooking Projects (sorry Ruhlman, wanted to branch out). I had one slab of pork belly left in the freezer, and we’re running out of bacon around here, so I thought I’d make a go of it. This…
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I had to go to Bozeman yesterday to do some errands, and I had lunch at my favorite little restaurant, La Tinga. There aren’t many things I miss from California, but taquerias and Asian food are among them. I had about ten minutes before my haircut, so I ducked in for a taco or two, including one that had chicken and potatoes and a mildly-hot red chile sauce. It blew my mind. I hadn’t really expected it to, but something about the plain mealy potatoes and the chiles, with a little chicken in the mix, it was delicious. On the…
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Jeez oh Pete, so spring is here, and it seems to have brought along the first “canning is dumb” article. This year it’s at Slate, where last summer, it was at Salon. I’ve addressed this subject once already, last summer, when Salon published a ridiculous piece “debunking” the “myth” that canning will save you money, but I guess if they’re going to write the same article over and over, I’ll have to keep throwing in my two cents. Canning is useful if you have an excess of something. It’s a method of preservation. If you want to make a hobby…
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I’ve been obsessed with nori rolls lately. I got the idea from Cathy Erway’s delightful book, The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, which I reviewed for Bookslut about a month ago. After this long winter, I’ve been craving crunch, and veggies, or maybe there’s something in the seaweed that my body craves, but it’s been nori rolls for lunch for a couple of weeks now. The thing is, nori rolls are actually quite easy. I like the rice warm, so I either make up a fresh batch in the rice cooker,…
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJgb2bCfzE Michael Ruhlman started a meme a couple of weeks ago where he asked people to blog about why they cook. Above is his TEDxCLE talk about why cooking is essential to making us human, to making us families, and to making us reasonably healthy human beings. It’s well worth the fifteen minutes (and he’s sort of adorably nervous, as one would be). He says in the video, and on the follow up post on his blog, that we need to make cooking an imperative. With which I agree. But I guess one of the things I’ve been trying to…
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My new cookbook slut column is up at Bookslut: Greece is the Word. It’s been a delightful month of lemon and garlic and lamb around here. Several new recipes/techniques going into regular rotation from How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking by Michael Psilakis, Vefa’s Kitchen by Vefa Alexandiou, and Michael Symon’s Live to Cook: Recipes and Techniques to Rock Your Kitchen.
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There was a good article in the Billings Gazette this week about our local Livingston Hospital. They’ve been making the change to local product and cooking “from scratch” (as long-time readers know, this phrase is one of my pet peeves). It’s been a big success, with 3000 more meals served this year than last, and folks who aren’t sick, or visiting someone, actually going to the hospital cafeteria for lunch. We have such great product around here, and it sounds like Jesse Williams is doing a lot of the same things that Rick Bayless does in his restaurants, thinking ahead,…
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So, I’ve been casting around for an alternative to tuna, now that the Genova tuna in oil that I liked has disappeared from my local grocery stores. There’s nothing but tuna in water which I think tastes like drek, and well, the whole tuna thing is problematic, as per this FAQ over at the estimable Monterrey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch site. Plus, my sweetheart doesn’t really like fish, which means I didn’t buy salmon from my friends in town who run a commercial fishing operation in the summer (I can’t eat that much by myself), and although I’m inching toward…