David Downie: Paris, Paris Delighting in Discovery

Published by Monday, February 28, 2011 Permalink 0

 

by David Downie

Paris, Paris Delighting in Discovery

Unlikely Discoveries Department: the tearoom, restaurant and courtyard terrace of Bonpoint, the chic clothes emporium for kiddies with well-healed parents.

The official name is “Salon de Thé Bonpoint.” The address: 6 Rue de Tournon (Tel: 01 56 24 05 79). That’s in the 6th arrondissement in Paris, a 2-minute stroll or roll-by-baby carriage from the Luxembourg Gardens and the French Senate in the Luxembourg Palace.

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David Downie: Brittle Delight

Published by Monday, February 28, 2011 Permalink 0

by David Downie

Confession time: for the last 25+ years I’ve lived in Paris and traveled the byways of France and Italy, tasting and writing about delicious food and lickerish wines. I’ve rarely felt gastronomic nostalgia for my native land, though the food and wine of California admittedly aren’t bad (this is serious understatement as you all know). But I have an incurable passion for peanuts in all sizes, shapes, and clonal varieties. I also love other spicy nuts, and, the real shocker, brittle. Yes, brittle. Peanut brittle not only hits all the right pleasure buds. It also whisks me back to the happy days of my youth in San Francisco and Berkeley, when “wild” was the operative descriptor.

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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, February 28, 2011

Published by Monday, February 28, 2011 Permalink 0

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by Simón de Swaan

“I’m feeling mighty lonesome
Haven’t slept a wink
I walk the floor and watch the door
And in between I drink
Black coffee
Love’s a hand me down brew
I’ll never know a Sunday
In this weekday room”

Paul Francis Webster

Paul Francis Webster was an American composer who three times won an Oscar for best song. He attended both New York University and Cornell University without ever receiving a degree before he joined the US Navy, and becoming a dance instructor prior to finding his true voice as a lyricist. This song was published in 1948 and recorded by Ella Fitzgerald in 1960.

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Switzerland has its own AOCs!

Published by Sunday, February 27, 2011 Permalink 0

by Jonell Galloway

When it comes to wine and food, a name is not just a name

Switzerland has had AOCs for a while now, but on 14 January 2010, the Swiss federal agriculture office, OFAG, published an official bulletin containing a list of approximately 800 appellations of origin and geographical indications, roughly the equivalent of the French Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC). These were voted in in the context of a reciprocal agreement with the EU, and are to be protected and respected throughout the EU.

GruyereAOC-Switzerland-the rambling epicure-jonell galloway-genevalunch-cheese

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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, February 25, 2011

Published by Friday, February 25, 2011 Permalink 0

http://www.davidddownie.com/by Simón de Swaan

My kitchen is a mystical place, a kind of temple for me. It is a place where the surfaces seem to have significance, where the sounds and odors carry meaning that transfers from the past and bridges to the future.–Pearl Bailey

Born in 1918, Pearl Bailey was a composer, singer, songwriter, a dancer, then a singer in New York in the early 1940s, touring with the Cootie Williams orchestra, and later a featured singer in night clubs, radio and television. Best known for her theatre role in “Hello Dolly” she died in August of 1990.

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The 7 Lives of Bread: The Whispers of Wheat

Published by Thursday, February 24, 2011 Permalink 0

Dictionnaire Universel du Painby Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

translated and adapted by Diane Castiglioni

The land is covered with a lusty golden fleece. This wheat, which the wind gently combs, announces the harvest of bread. Because the land has long carried this treasure in her womb, it is also the time for confession.

In “The Woman with Hair of Gold”, one of the tales collected by Clarissa Pinkola Estés from her Magyaran aunts and analyzed in Women Who Run with the Wolves (Grasset, 1996), one sees something that has been long kept a secret. Allow me to reinterpret in my own way here.

A woman, in wanting to get rid of a country bumpkin who wants to force her to marry him, gives him some of her golden hair. Such an elegant way of putting him off. The simple man rushed to the market to sell it. And they laughed at him. The humiliation sends him back immediately to the one who played him thusly and he kills her. In storytelling, one is not burdened with the detours. To get rid of the woman with the hair of gold and his crime, he buried her in loose soil near the stream.

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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, February 24, 2011

Published by Thursday, February 24, 2011 Permalink 0

by Simón de Swaan

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.–Laurie Colwin

Laurie Colwin (June 14, 1944 – October 24, 1992) was an American novelist and food writer, who died in her sleep at 48. Since her death, her following has continued, and all her books are still in print.

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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, February 23, 2011

Published by Wednesday, February 23, 2011 Permalink 0

by Simón de Swaan

If you’re happy, you eat. If you’re sad, you eat. You lose a job, you eat. You get a job, you eat. It’s, you know, it’s addiction.–Barbara Cook

Photo courtesy of Theater Mania.

Barbara Cook is a Broadway singer and actress who won a Tony Award for her role in The Music Man in 1957. Today she performs in concert and in cabarets.

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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, February 22, 2011

Published by Tuesday, February 22, 2011 Permalink 0

by Simón de Swaan

Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.–John Cage

Apart from being a very gifted composer, poet, artist and print maker, John Cage was an amateur mycologist and mushroom collector.

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Bollywood Cooking: Chicken tikka masala: New Indian or fusion?

Published by Tuesday, February 22, 2011 Permalink 0

by here

Chicken tikka masala, New Indian or fusion?

Chicken tikka masala is quite likely one of the most popular Indian dishes the world. The irony of chicken tikka masala, better known as “CTM,” is that what is often enjoyed in restaurants as a traditional Indian dish has very little to do with authentic Indian cuisine. It is closer to “Britain’s true national dish.”

It was former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who proclaimed chicken tikka masala as the new national dish of Great Britain, in an attempt to set an example of British multiculturalism. The chicken tikka masala Mr. Cook was referring to was in actual fact the gravy-based dish invented in Britain.

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