2011-03-01T01:00:00+01:00 | Page 5 of 5

Wild Woman on Feral Acres: A Well-rounded Flatbread

Published by Esmaa-Self + Friday, March 4, 2011 Permalink 0

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by Esmaa Self

Perhaps it’s just the way I’m wired, but for me, recipe adaptation and experimentation is a way of life. Take a recent afternoon in the kitchen whipping up kulcha, an Indian flatbread.

Kulcha and chole

According to Wiki, kulcha is particularly popular in North India and is usually eaten with chole. According to me, this is a versatile quick bread, a recipe no from-scratch cook should be without. Indeed, in a few hours of kulcha making I prepared Tandoori Chicken and Black Bean Pizza; Pear, Gorgonzola and Walnut Pizza; Apple Brie Kulcha and Salmon and Onion Stuffed Kulcha.

This Chef in You entry contains the recipe that presented my jumping off place. If you’ve never prepared kulcha, you may benefit from reviewing the numerous photographs included with their recipe.

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Un Trafalgar culinaire : La cuisine française, un chef d’œuvre en péril

Published by Jonell Galloway + Friday, March 4, 2011 Permalink 0

//
par Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

Click here for English

Michael Steinberger, La cuisine française, un chef d’œuvre en péril, traduit de l’américain par Simon Duran [Au Revoir To All That, Bloomsbury, New York, 2009], Fayard, 2011.

Qui aime bien châtie bien. Prenez la France. La Fraaaaaance !, comme disait le Général. Voilà le sujet urticant par excellence. Parmi ses thuriféraires et inconditionnels, obsédés par l’idée de ce qu’est la France en essence et assez peu en actes, les étrangers qui fréquentent ce pays, qui l’adorent tout en conservant leur distance, une sorte de regard critique, ces étrangers sont souvent les plus enragés. Pour eux les Français ne sont tout simplement pas à la hauteur de leur histoire qu’ils desservent et trahissent à l’envie. La cuisine française, un chef d’œuvre en péril, le livre de Michael Steinberger, œnologue de réputation faite, chroniqueur au The New Yorker ou au The New York Times Magazine, est des plus symptomatiques de cette façon de considérer que le haut héritage qui échoit à cette France en décomposition économique et spirituelle, c’est un peu la confiture aux cochons. Vous pouvez, si vous voulez, remplacer la confiture par ce « gâteau de foies blonds » qui a fait la gloire d’Alain Chapel (« une purée de foies de poulet et de moelle de bœuf servie avec une sauce au homard et à la crème », décrit par le critique gastronomique Craig Claiborne du New York Times comme « l’une des plus grandes gloires culinaires de la génération actuelle »), c’est la même chose. La charge est peut-être salutaire puisqu’il s’agit d’essayer de mettre la gastronomie française au défi de s’égaler une fois encore. Mais elle est cruelle aussi car elle ne pardonne aucun écart, veut crever les arrogances et les baudruches qui desservent, selon l’auteur, un héritage inestimable. Steinberger est une bête qui aime, et donc une bête féroce. Comme l’empereur Commodore défiant le général Maximus dans Gladiator, il convoque les traîtres dans l’arène après leur avoir planté une dague dans le dos.

Rosa’s Musings: 13 ways to eat on a budget and improve your health at the same time

Published by Jonell Galloway + Thursday, March 3, 2011 Permalink 0

by Rosa Mayland

Good food and good eating aren’t a class thing – anyone can eat good food on any budget as long as they know how to cook.— Jamie Oliver

Eating on a budget and improving your health at the same time

A tight budget but a broad mind: Eating humbly and responsibly without decreasing your pleasure and health

Unfortunately too many people have the preconceived idea that eating healthily and with indulgence is synonymous with expensive, and believe that spending less money on food implies that your dinners will be dreadfully bland and grimly boring. Well, today I am about to break with the big myth and set the records straight by showing you how being limited financially doesn’t mean you have to eat like an austere monk on a strict diet or a New Age prophet living on love and fresh air, nor restrain your kitchen activity and stop inventing dishes. Quite the contrary!

On the Chocolate Trail: The Iconic Chocolate Chip Cookie

Published by Jonell Galloway + Thursday, March 3, 2011 Permalink 0

by Christina Daub

A Brief History of the Chocolate Chip Cookie

Did you know Massachusetts has a state cookie? It’s the chocolate chip cookie, an invention attributed to Ruth Graves Wakefield of the widely known Toll House Inn. Legend has it that having run out of her standard Baker’s chocolate, she broke up a bar of Nestlé semisweet and added it to her favorite recipe, Butter Drop Do cookies.

Kathleen King in family bakery, Tate’s Bake Shop, in Southampton, New York.

The reaction by travelers was instantaneous. Soon her recipe was published in the local newspaper, positively affecting sales of Nestlé semisweet bars. Then the fictitious Betty Crocker featured Wakefield’s Toll House chocolate chip cookie on the radio program, “Famous Foods from Famous Eating Places,” prompting Nestlé to invent the semisweet morsel in 1939. In exchange for using the recipe on the back of their semisweet bar and morsel bag, she was given a lifetime supply of chocolate chips.

The chocolate chip cookie’s nationwide fame can be attributed to home bakers in Massachusetts who sent scores of the addictive Toll House cookies to GIs abroad during World War II. The soldiers shared and pretty soon orders were coming in from across the country.

Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, March 3, 2011

Published by Jonell Galloway + Thursday, March 3, 2011 Permalink 0

by Simón de Swaan

Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.–Doug Larson

Doug Larson, born February 10, 1926, wrote for the Wisconsin-based newspapers the Green Bay Press-Gazetteand the Door County Advocate in the U.S.. Larson’s quotes are catchy, and show up often on T-shirts and the Internet.

Warren Bobrow: Red Velvet Lounge Chair

Published by Jonell Galloway + Wednesday, March 2, 2011 Permalink 0

// Warren Bobrow: Red Velvet Lounge Chair

by Warren Bobrow

The Red Velvet Lounge Chair is a little firecracker of a cocktail, and has all the excitement of a Tiki Bar concoction. It goes down easy, as easy as falling into a lounge chair after drinking a few too many of these.

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Belgium: Cha Hû-Thé Teahouse, Brussels

Published by Jonell Galloway + Wednesday, March 2, 2011 Permalink 0

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by Jonell Galloway

I am not just a tea connoisseur. I am an outright snob and have spent many days of my life in search of good tea, in both chic and shabby places.

I have never been to the Cha Hû-Thé teahouse in the suburbs of Brussels, but for one of the few times in my tea-snob life, I don’t have to sniff the tins of tea in order to recommend it. I’ve only tasted (and sniffed) one tea from there, the Thé du Loup, or literally “wolf’s tea,” and it was made neither with designer bottled water nor in a fancy teapot, but its nose and taste were wax heaven. It was in fact made with the overly mineral city water of Chartres, but it was a Cadillac of a tea, a Rolls Royce of fine-tuning, so it stood up to the test of not being treated with the TLC it deserves.

The main address doesn’t sound chic, although the amateur slide show flaunts oak shelving and cabinets adorned with serious-looking tins of tea and an array of brightly colored teapots for true aficionados. It even hints at shabbiness. The website is full of typos — which might normally put me off — but the names, blends and categories clearly demonstrate mastery of the trade. If you live anywhere near there, I recommend you hop on a train or bus or into your car first thing in the morning and delight in this almost certain kingdom of tea blends.

Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, March 2, 2011

Published by Jonell Galloway + Wednesday, March 2, 2011 Permalink 0

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by Simón de Swaan

Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.–Adelle Davis (1904 – 1974)

Born in 1904, Adelle Davis was one of the United States’ greatest nutritionists. Author of four bestselling books including Let’s Cook It Right she was a pioneer in seeing the connection between what we eat affecting how we feel. She was instrumental teaching people that a body lacking in proper nutrients can be remedied with an adjustment in diet.

Food Poetry: Walnut, by Kim Roberts

Published by Jonell Galloway + Tuesday, March 1, 2011 Permalink 0

WALNUT

A withered heart
cupped in a tough cardboard membrane
inside a mahogany crate
packed like a precious sculpture
loaned to another museum
where we curators, critics all,
pry them open with crude levers.
The heart looks so unpromising and sere,
but in the chamber of our mouths,
with only a touch of bitterness,
it opens black exotic blooms.

Simon Says: Daily Food Quote, March 1, 2011

Published by Jonell Galloway + Tuesday, March 1, 2011 Permalink 0

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by Simón de Swaan

What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.–Bertrand Russell

Described both as the “the greatest philosopher of the 20th century and the greatest logician since Aristotle,” Bertrand Russell went won the 1950 Literature Nobel Prize. He lived to be 97 years old, but not before having been jailed twice, married 4 times and having 3 children.