A Fork in the Road

Table of Contents
Consider the Twinkie
Carrot cashew curry  in Stolen apples Yankee pot roast
chasing the tail of chiuchow - strips of taro frosted with silvery sugar
An Italian Education
Annabel Langbein
Afloat On the Amazon
Omar Sharif slept here
Cassoulet  Vs Cassoulet
Cuisine by Design
Green chile chicken with spring vegetables 

How food moved from hearth to the restaurant

Author: Adam Gopnik

If you look at the contents, there's many emails to Elizabeth Robins Pennell. Initially I thought she might be an expert whose views are welcomed by the author in to his book like a field reporter back to the TV station or the call to the expert on 'who wants to be a millionaire'. This aspect of the book comes into life progressively. Even with the passivity of a relation between an admirer and his dead literary idol, the dissonance of an irredeemable past and the author's reaction to it pulses the one way communication with human pathos.

The author writes about the history of the restaurant not from when it was a restaurant but how preexisting cafe culture had to be merged into it to thrive. He also breaks myths about WW and restaurant timeline.

All appetites have their illusions, which are part of their pleasure. The author feels that the cookbooks stoke a fire in the readers that they know is not a wave that is success-ably ridable.

Is the mystery of good cooking - talent or a secret ingredient and is the chef willing to share it? Being in the critic business, he makes us see the ambiguity of taste and the writing we use to describe food and wine.
 His entry pass takes him to may places where he learns of the latest in modern cuisine. A NZ study about food miles and energy involved is counter-intuitive. What El Bulli is closing?

When you are cooking, do you find yourself capable of anything else? I find myself going back to the recipe to see if I missed anything.

Like species of plants and animals that go extinct, spices like Silphium too face a similar fate.

I hadnt read of Adam Gopnik except for a line of his quoted in How to cook like a man. This book links us to another food author Lisa Abend.

From the tagine land

Today I had chicken Fantasia for lunch. It had tomao sauce around brown rice and chicken all over. Mourad says that when Moroccan food is served in big platters, that is how it is. Sauce all around, vegetables at the center and meat underneath. You work into the center finishing the sauce. The author gets us acquainted with how you eat a plate and serve a guest. The spices used in Moroccan spices are used in many other cuisines, so its not the spices, the author says but how they are used that make a dish Moroccan.

Couscous can be made with hands and at home. Warqa

 Bored with the classics, he came up with zaalouk a different way of cooking eggplants than the Baba ghanoush that we are familiar with. The author is not afraid of stirring up things by trying out different ways, but in the end he goes by what his restaurant patrons like.

The author provides us with alternative ways of retaining the essence by urging us to buy Air Chilled Chicken. Meat lovers will find ways of communicating with butcher, if you follow his suggestions of how to order meat. I hadn't heard of lamb chops until I came to the US and the author explains why it might be so. Next time if you are near a hamaam, check if they have tangias cooking away somewhere.

Icecream with fig leaves?

Basteeya at Aziza.

Presentation: Rolling round thick cheese slices in colorful spices on the side. 

Origins of classic foods

Author: Ann_treistman (also author of 73 Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep. Wow everyone has their 2 cents about how to help a baby sleep.) The link has a slideshow for other foods like sundae, mayo (this is what I like best on MacD's)
This is the kind of question one is likely to ask of deviled eggs. What with the egg white solidifying to form nice little saucers of their whipped up yellows. McDonalds fries start from frozen fries for quality control.
For a long time I had Froffles until at a hotel I used a machine to make waffles. Have you used  pancake machines? The elevator button pressing kids have fun punching in a big number to see the assembly line in action. As much fun it is watching a machine do something for a first time, its fun to watch a person make pretzels. While industrialization has made chicken popular, pretzel making machines and bagel making machines 
put stores selling hand crafted goods out of business.
Popcorn and cotton candy machines at fair. With cotton candy, it is funny to know that they were once made by hand, a laborious process.
With chicken fried steak, a cook mistook the order and made it.
Thomas Jefferson has had an influence on American food thinking of mixing hot with cold (baked Alaska), made waffles popular by bringing a machine from France. So did WWII participants bringing with them all the foods hey liked.
Cereals and their intended audience.
If Key lime pie is so easy to make, why havent I made it yet. Besides anything that involves condensed milk can never go wrong.
When I read of Puda as Indian, I asked my husband if he knew about as I never heard of it. He said its an abbreviation Punjab urban development authority like Huda (Hyderabad ...) (All those boards next to big digs) but now it has merged into HMDA. M is for Metropolitan. Back to edible Puda, from the ingredients, it just seems another name for chile.

Comparing meatloaf in essence to Kofta gives me a new angle to look at the meatloaf recipes with and see if they can work for Koftas.
Imagine the times when sugar was scarce.

Never in a Chef's jacket

Author: Alyssa Shelasky

The author of ‘Apron Anxiety’ is a writer. The way she lands writing assignments is interesting. She is one of those people who seem to be in the right place to find people and things to write about. Almost till half into the book, the author paints a stark picture of her self as an absolute food illiterate, happy making the same kind of sandwiches months together. Her boyfriends turn out to be ‘more imaginative eater’ than her. With one such love a ‘Pioneer Woman’ story where the author relocates for love not to the boondocks but a city nowhere vibrant like New York. She puts herself into the kingdom of food, which is what exactly her fiancé is tied to more than to her. Her foray into the cooking scene with her blog fame involves a brush with ‘foodie mafia’. She finds herself content as a homecook with an apron. In the day of foodie mania where the food world is wowed with foams she sticks to simple delicious food.

Her culinary journey starts with a desire to feed her loved one. As her kitchen confidence increases, so does her audience. Friends and neighbours and so do the emotional ties with them. She is no longer a kitchen-phobe when she cooks for the chefs who work at her fiance’s restaurant. She is open to positive criticism about her cooking. While sharing the stories of her life, she also shares the recipes that let her celebrate or tough out life - a down day with a pizza made from store bought dough (not a purist) to a Rainy Day Rigatoni. She’s an optimist always appreciating how good the place smells after she has cooked something, like that itself was the end result of the kitchen labor.

Once she realizes the power of food, she starts wielding it. The author finds joy in conceptualizing and creating menus. That’s a long way from a person with just a ‘like’ for food to a someone who executes meals with desired colors in mind.

Her realization that ‘everyone hurts and everyone is hungry’ is a credo that makes her want to cook for others to brighten up some lives.

The writing flows smoothly like a batter without any lumps. The author managed to meld the people, food and recipes without overdoing any of them.

food lit mag

The first issue of Lucky peaches was large on Ramen noodles. In the second issue, the theme is 'The Sweet Spot'. 

Ike jime

'The Ripeness and the rot' moves from a vegetable's freshness situation to a chef's most creative period which is generalised to all artists. Rebecca Rusch  is an example of comeback in sports.  This ties in with 'Perfect moment' of knowing the window of the best taste of an ingredient.

Celeste Byers

sweet spots on banana.

Christina Tosi details few recipes like Arnold palmer cake made at Momofuku milk bar.

'Expired to perfection' is a look at refrigerator's contents and their status. 'Repurposing'. 

I like the comic-satire of accepting the mistakes in their recipes. The comic of the experiences of an experimental cook speak to the uncertainity of the dish hanging over the head of the cook.  It is literal when a sheet of pasta is hanging from the head of the cook, being churned out of the pasta machine. 

There is a great history of Miso but when it read list of ingredients it became irrelevant like the many kinds of ramen in the first issue.

Not all of it is accessible. I dont get what they mean by 'high level cooking'. Never the less, you learn many things about cooking, not just techniques and ingredients but a broad look at cooking not just as a set of recipes or ingredients but also as an art both in execution and representation, its tradition and history.

Tatsuo Ikeda knife

Naeng myun

Coi restaurant

Nage

Another review

Eating lychees under an avocado tree

Author: Gail Simmons

At first I mistook the ‘professional eater’ in the title for the competitor eater like Man Vs Food.

Our first experiences with food start with mom and her kitchen. Gail Simmons’s interest in cooking too took off at her mom’s kitchen making omelettes. Later she took this to an assembly line level churning out 50 of those at a Kibbutz in Israel that sounds like a ‘Biosphere’ experiment.

Her father having grown up in South Africa, the author had access to special foods there resulting in a wider palate. She has traveled widely and tasted food in all those places.

She let her passion lead her to her career in food writing and then a Merchandising manager. She went to culinary school, worked on the line and learned the business of restaurants. She excerpted a food journal to give the readers an idea of how much food she tastes in a day.

I have seen my share of ‘Chopped’. So I was interested in knowing the behind the scenes of cooking competition on TV. The author has written of her experiences judging food on top Chef. She classifies the contestants whom she calls chef-testants. ‘Top Chef Just Desserts’ was an insight into how food contests have to consider the cooking time and recipe policies before issuing a challenge.

The  book's focus on food is maintained well all along the food. Even when she describes her wedding, the emphasis is on the food for the event. Even though this book does not have many recipes or much cooking, with its description of techniques (how in modernist cuisine, having a foam adds the essence without adding texture or volume) and a wide variety of foods it urges the reader to savor each morsel to get the taste/essence of it. Like the author says 'being a young line cook (is) you dont use your mind much. You are taking orders. you're not thinking or creating - ... I needed to go back to using my head'.

In the end she does say that she is ‘not in the business of competitive consumption’.