See more food photo compositions at Meeta K. Wolff.
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iTaste and the world: find restaurants in London and Australia!
Switzerland may be tiny, but we have the world at our fingertips. The iTaste restaurant finder and social network started here, and is quickly spreading all over the world.
Click here to find a restaurant to meet every budget and taste in Australia and in Australia, for example.
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How to Eat Gourmet on a College Student’s Budget
by Jonell Galloway
When I was in college in the U.S. and France in the 70s and 80s, my kitchen was about the size of an American half-bath. I was already well on my way to gourmet snobbery, but since I couldn’t afford to eat in gourmet restaurants every night, I was forced to find novel ways to satisfy my taste buds.
Photo courtesy of Carlos Porto.
When I traveled, I was totally without shame. I went to the best French restaurants with my friends and brazenly ordered an assortment of dishes, which we proceeded to share. We would ask for extra eating utensils and split a dozen snails or a soufflé among three, or share a glass of expensive Bordeaux. Amazingly, the French waiters never once ran us out of the restaurant.
Where there is a will there is a way to eat gourmet every day, as the cliché goes. At home, I stocked up on pasta, and once a week I would go to the farmers market and load up on fresh vegetables and make a variation of Bolognese, which was about the only Italian sauce popular at the time.
But my Bolognese took a different twist every day and every week, depending on the vegetables in season and the meat on sale. Sometimes I used ground pork and beef; sometimes bacon. In the winter, I used more root vegetables; in the spring, peas. As commonplace as that may seem today, my friends were always in awe of my culinary skills, so that just encouraged me.
Today’s gourmet college student is not limited to Bolognese and has a wider choice of vegetables. There are a million things you can do with a package of pasta.
Start by stocking up. Pasta, olive oil, tomato paste and sauce, onions, garlic, Parmesan, Balsamic vinegar and a mixture of dried Italian herbs should always be plentiful in your larder.
If there’s a farmers market near you, make it a weekly pilgrimage. Buy seasonal, local vegetables and herbs if possible. They will taste better and contain more nutrients. If you see tomatoes and eggplants in December, turn the other way, no matter how tempting they may seem.
The first night after shopping, sauté a large batch of vegetables with garlic, onion and Italian herbs in olive oil, mix them with pasta and then sprinkle them with Parmesan. The second night, use the same vegetables, liven them up with a few drops of Balsamic vinegar, and serve them cold as a salad. The next day, add the tomato sauce and then a different vegetable every day, simmering it each time. The last day, use it to make lasagne.
You can actually make a sauce that will last all week, varying it every night by adding different vegetables (or meat or beans) every day. The sauce will become better with time, rather like the “eternal pot” of the French, where they added different meats and vegetables every day to the same cauldron.
And you will have eaten gourmet every day of the week!
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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, March 14, 2011
The candyman can, The candyman can cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.–Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley
This song was written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley specifically for the film and does not appear in Roald Dahl’s original book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or the 2005 film adaptation. It was sung by Aubrey Woods, who played Bill the candy store owner in the original film.
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Food News: The Rambling Epicure and iTaste are teaming up
by Jonell Galloway
The new Michelin guide for France came out last week and has caused much stir in the restaurant world. Many think the old-fashioned European restaurant guides such as GaultMillau and Michelin — once had-to-haves for any restaurant lover — are antiquated and stagnant and can’t keep up with our changing times, that they are ancien régime, dinosaurs of times past.
This may well be. While restaurants come and go, some restaurant goers continue to yearn for the traditional cooking of the past, insisting that today’s young chefs don’t even know all the basic techniques of Cuisine, with a capital “C.” In 2010, UNESCO declared that the French gastronomic meal is part of French cultural heritage, defining specific rules and social occasions for partaking of it, as if it were a species in danger of extinction.
Others, such as food critic David Downie, in his article “Surveying the Paris food scene: a mecca again — but is it French?” on Gadling, and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in his review of Au Revoir to All that: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine by Michael Steinberger, dare to question whether the French restaurant scene is still French, yet conclude that it doesn’t matter. Paris and France will always be the Elysian Fields of the food gods, no matter what their nationality, and innovation has never stopped.
What has changed is the way we eat — lighter — and the way we choose restaurants. In France and Switzerland, as in most places, the traditional restaurant guides are often outdated before they even go to print. Restaurants come and go, as do chefs. Establishments are no longer bastions of a certain type of cuisine by a certain chef. Because of this, on-line guides are more flexible and can change with the times. They can be updated daily or even hourly, unlike printed guides.
It is for this reason that The Rambling Epicure is partnering with iTaste, a Swiss-based restaurant social network, which is quickly spreading its antennae all over Europe. iTaste refers to itself as “the food critics’ social network” and “the web’s gourmet word of mouth network.”
The beauty of iTaste is that you can define your tastes in restaurants, read reviews of user-critics with similar taste, and follow their reviews on a regular basis, just as you do with any social network.
Their argument is that Google is convenient, but a human search engine is even better. In the iTaste communitiy, each iTaster becomes a food critic and shares his or her reviews with their contacts and followers.
iTaste was founded by Paul de la Rochefauld in Geneva, Switzerland, and has slowly been spreading its wings to the rest of Europe, including France, Germany, Italy and Belgium. It is in French, English and German. Since it gives you the possibility of entering a location and a restaurant, its possibilities are endless. You can even be the first one to start by entering your favorite restaurant in your home country. See you there!
Click here to go to iTaste.
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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, March 11, 2010
A clever cook, can make….good meat of a whetstone.–Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466?-1536)
Frequently referred to as Erasmus, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus was a Dutch priest and scholar. Using humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament. He lived through the Reformation period and consistently criticized some contemporary popular Christian beliefs. In relation to clerical abuses in the Church, Erasmus remained committed to reforming the Church from within.
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Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, March 10, 2011
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by Simón de Swaan
Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.–Maurice de Vlaminck
Maurice de Vlaminck (4 April 1876 – 11 October 1958) was a French painter who, along with André Derain and Henri Matisse, is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense color.
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