2011-02-01T01:00:00+01:00 | Page 4 of 6

Switzerland: How About a Biodynamic Dinner for Valentine’s Day?

Published by Jonell Galloway + Wednesday, February 9, 2011 Permalink 0

by Jonell Galloway

The Philosophy of Fine Dining, Rudolf Steiner style, in Crissier

The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner was the inventor of the spiritual movement anthroposophy, a kind of intuitive ethics which has thrived in Switzerland, chiefly through the Waldorf schools and through foundations and communities inspired by his teachings. This seventeenth-century castle, Le Castel, was bought by the Lausanne branch of the Rudolf Steiner Foundation in 1989.

The current community living on the grounds of Le Castel practices biodynamic farming, quite in line with Steiner’s view of humans’ relationship to the world. These products are used in the restaurant.

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David Downie: Awesome & Easy Seafood Pesto Recipe, Great Lunch at Da Mirin

Published by Jonell Galloway + Wednesday, February 9, 2011 Permalink 0

by David Downie

(Photo shown: Alison Harris’ cover shot for Enchanted Liguria, which shows the church of San Rocco di Camogli)

The perched village of San Rocco di Camogli could fit in a picnic hamper, yet it boasts a famous bakery (Maccarini), a great butcher shop (Arturo Paolucci), a Michelin-praised restaurant (Nonna Nina) and a friendly little trattoria with fresh fish and a nice terrace and eager owners: Da Mirin. Co-owner Sandro does the cooking, while his wife and fellow proprietor, Elena, waits and runs the show.

Today Sandro whipped up some succulent fresh fish mousse with local olive oil, salt and pepper – not the creamy, heavy kind of mousse you get in fancy restaurants or in France. We nibbled on that with focaccia while waiting for the Pesto di Mare. This too is Sandro’s invention. First you clean and mince or process a bunch of fresh, fragrant basil, tossing in a fistful of plump pine nuts. Then you set the salsa aside. (Yes, salsa. In Italy, sugo = “sauce” and it is cooked, whereas salsa is raw, always). You take a handful of fresh, ripe tomatoes, simmer them at low heat in excellent olive oil, with a pinch each of salt and pepper. You prepare a couple of handfuls of fresh shrimp. You boil pasta like trenette or linguine or tagliolini or even fresh gnocchi. While the pasta is cooking, you toss the shrimp in with the tomatoes. A few seconds before the pasta is al dente, you take the sauce off the heat, put it in a serving bowl and stir in the salsa (the pesto of basil and pine nuts – no cheese, no garlic). Then you toss in the hot pasta and serve pronto. Awesome. Super, really, killer awesome.

Food Art: Delicious Meandering, A Slide Show of Photos by Alison Harris

Published by Jonell Galloway + Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Permalink 0

We’re developing a food and wine social network for you, right here on our site!

Published by Jonell Galloway + Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Permalink 0

by Jonell Galloway

To register, Just click Sign Up at the top left of the screen to become a member. We’ll keep you posted as to how you can post your own food photos, share your recipes, start your own mini-blog, join groups, and participate in discussion boards.

The gray menus you see at the top of the home page and the headings at the bottom right of the sidebar, marked Groups and Members, are already up and running, albeit not perfectly.

To join a group, click on the menu in the far top right marked Visit. You can already join the Food Photography group, run by Meeta Khurana Wolff, and the Culinary Chemistry group, run by Jenn Oliver. We’ll be adding new features every day.

A fun time is to be had by all!

On the Chocolate Trail: When it Comes to One’s Chocolate, Sartre was Right: Hell is Other People

Published by Jonell Galloway + Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Permalink 0

by Christina Daub

There’s a hole in my heart. My heart of chocolate. I hadn’t even opened the red velvety box full of William Carlos Williams truffles before the truffle thief struck. Smack in the center: three missing. Telltale cocoa prints dusting the lid.

This is of course not the first time my chocolate has been raided nor will it be the last I’m sure, though I have gotten clever about hiding it over the years. As soon as one spot was discovered, I’d find another, always having to stay a leap ahead of the chocovore grunting around the house.

There have been decoys, unsweetened bars where the bittersweet were normally hidden, false-backed drawers, secret shelves…but I reveal too much here.

This time I wasn’t swift enough. I left the early Valentine’s heart in its purple plastic bag in the glasses cupboard for one night and boom, the chocolate detector started clicking like mad. To make matters worse, the violated heart was rewrapped and put back in the bag, back in the cupboard as if it had never been found. No apology, no Sprungli’s pralines poem taped to the door:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I have been close to a chocolate divorce before. The last time a friend brought me a box of Sprungli’s pralines I was unfortunately out of town and not only did Truffle Thief consume the entire box and remove the evidence, he never even said a word about our friend, his visit or the thoughtful present of coveted Swiss chocolates.

Eight months later our friend came through town again and stopped by. How’d you like those chocolates, he inquired. Chocolates? What chocolates??? Truffle Thief started to shift uncomfortably and mumbled something lame about me being gone.

Let me tell you, gone never looked so attractive. The luxury of living alone again hit me like a truck full of Mars bars. To have one’s chocolate and be able to eat it too, is that really so much to ask? Especially since I am one to share or was once upon a time.

Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, February 7, 2011

Published by Jonell Galloway + Monday, February 7, 2011 Permalink 0

by Simon de Swaan and Jonell Galloway

All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.–John Gunther

John Gunther is best known for his 500-page tome Inside Europe about pre-war and wartime Europe, and went on to write “inside” books about several continents. They were translated into 90 languages and sold by the millions around the world. As he traveled around the world, he wined and dined in the highest places.

His description of Hitler in Inside Europe is unforgettable:

He reads almost nothing. He dislikes intellectuals. He has never been outside Germany since his youth in Austria and speaks no foreign language, except a few words of French. He is nearly oblivious of ordinary personal contacts. A colleague of mine traveled with him, in the same airplane, day after day, for two months during the 1932 electoral campaigns. Hitler never talked to a soul, not even to his secretaries, in the long hours in the air; never stirred; never smiled.

Photo courtesy of NNDB.

The Rambling Epicure Voices

Published by Jonell Galloway + Monday, February 7, 2011 Permalink 0

Jenn Oliver writes our column Culinary Chemistry. She has a Ph.D. in science, where she explains the scientific aspects of what really goes on when you cook (the next Harold McGee?). She’s been running a gluten-free blog, Jenn Cuisine, since 2008 and her kitchen is more like a laboratory than a kitchen. She’s focuses her chemical calculations and experiments on figuring out how to make traditionally glutinous food gluten-free.

Esmaa Self writes the Wild Woman on Feral Acres column. She lives on a small farm in Colorado where she employs organic and sustainable methods to grow fruits, vegetables and herbs, raise chickens, bees and fish and where she routinely turns out imaginative, healthy, guilt-free meals from scratch. One of her numerous blogs recounts her farming adventures: Backyard Eggs. She also writes novels and contributes to numerous organic farming and green publications, and runs a sustainable living site, Homeostasis.

Simon de Swaan is Food and Beverage Director at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and has an incredible collection of antique cookbooks and books about food and eating, from which he often posts interesting and unusual quotes. In his column Simon Says, he gives us daily food quotes from his tomes.

Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is an essayist, editor and journalist. He directed the special editions of the Nouvel Observateur for almost ten years and and has published twenty books. As preparation for publication of his Universal Dictionary of Bread (Dictionnaire universel du pain, Bouquins Laffont, 2010), he obtained a baker’s certificate (CAP) at the Ecole de Boulangerie et Pâtisserie de Paris in 2007, and traveled worldwide to countries where bread held a particular cultural significance.

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David Downie: Pandolce, Italian Riviera Icon

Published by Jonell Galloway + Monday, February 7, 2011 Permalink 0

by David Downie

Pandolce is one of the Italian Riviera’s culinary icons. It’s found from the Cinque Terre near Tuscany, to Genoa, all the way to Ventimiglia on the border with France. Ligurians call pandolce “pandöçe” in their challenging, tongue-dislocating dialect. For lack of a better description in English, you might reasonably call it a Christmas fruit cake.

Pandolce comes in two basic formats. The old-fashioned one, made in bakeries or at home (by about 10 people in the entire region) is tall, porous, airy and leavened twice, and has a round or dome-shaped form. It’s the Riviera’s answer to Milanese panettone.

The other Ligurian variety, which everyone mistakenly calls all’antica (it’s much more recent in invention) stands only a few inches high, is dense and heavy and fabulously good: take a look at the pic on this page (by Alison Harris, of course).

Jonell Galloway: Cooking Schools: A Practical Hands-on Way of Learning a Language

Published by Jonell Galloway + Monday, February 7, 2011 Permalink 0

by Jonell Galloway

When you learn French in school, you learn how to say “the past recaptured,” “finding time again,” and other such useful Proustian phrases, but you don’t learn how real people talk today, as in, “I would like a dozen of those luscious dark chocolate religieuses, please.” School vocabulary is often formal and outdated, and omits teaching you useful, everyday phrases.

When I arrived in France, people would kindly smile at my textbook phrases. I quickly caught on that when they smiled, it was best to just ask them how they would say it, in plain French, because I sounded like Proust, which makes an ordinary French person want to go to sleep.

This applied in particular to the most ordinary, commonplace words. I had read Flaubert, Maupassant and Proust, but sometimes didn’t know the words for the simplest objects.

My best example is café au lait. For some reason unbeknownst to me, when you order café au lait in a café in France, you call it café crème. There is no logic in this, because it doesn’t contain an ounce of cream. It is made with steamed milk, just like the café au lait you make at home. It’s the same thing, but you call it by another name, depending on the context.