On Friday, I sent out the following e-mail to my pork-eating friends:
Dear Friends,
Today I was reading the New Yorker profile of the only food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, Jonathan Gold. In it he says of a spicy Thai food dish: “It was glowing, practically incandescent. You bite into it and every alarm in your body goes off at once. It’s an overload on your pain receptors, and then the flavors just come through. It’s not that the hotness overwhelms the dish, which is what people who don’t understand Thai cooking always say, but that the dish is revealed for the first time–its flavor–as you taste details of fruit and turmeric and spices that you didn’t taste when it was merely extremely hot. It’s like a hallucination.”
My friend Tom snapped this picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday at Le Pain Quotidien in Santa Monica. Says Craig, in his Arnold Schwartzenegger voice: “Hasta la vista roast beef with caper mayonnaise, diced tomatoes and scallions!”
At the end of yesterday’s video podcast with Michael Symon, you may have heard me sheepishly express doubt about adding blue cheese to tomato soup. For some reason, I thought the result would be grainy and gloppy and just kind of gross. Instead, this tomato soup was absolutely the best tomato soup I’ve ever had–and the best part about it is you’d never know that blue cheese was what was making it taste so good. It adds depth and creaminess but it doesn’t taste funky and you don’t notice the texture.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to chat with Iron Chef Michael Symon outside the Standard Hotel in New York’s meatpacking district. Chef Symon’s in town to promote his new cookbook, “Live To Cook” which he co-wrote with this blog’s good friend Michael Ruhlman. Here’s our lively chat edited down to just 4 minutes:
As for the tomato soup I mention at the end, I made it later that night and it was so fantastic I’m going to share the recipe in a separate post (look for it tomorrow). And if you want to watch the video of me cooking with Chef Symon in his kitchen at Lola, click here.
Floating Away — DeNiro did it for "Raging Bull," and now I've done it for this month's banner. That's right, check out the new plus-sized me floating up there in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Once again, kudos to Lindy Groening for another stellar illustration, and to Justin for puffing the air into all those balloons.
My friend Rob wrote me the following e-mail yesterday and because it’s such a good question, I thought I’d answer it right here on the blog.
Hey Adam, I was reading reviews of [Jonathan Safran] Foer’s new book “Eating Animals” on being a vegetarian and renewing my pledge to only eat “humane” meat — free range, cruelty free, local, organic, etc. But I cannot for the life of me figure out which places are “approved.” Is there any way to figure this out? Would this make for a good blog? It seems to be a topic a lot of people are talking about… – Rob
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who can delay gratification and those who can’t. The following video, our latest from Food2.com, explores this subject with two recipes for doughnuts; one for those who like slow authentic doughnuts (recipe courtesy of Emily Isaac from Trois Pommes Patisserie in Park Slope) and the other for those who like ‘em fast and dirty (recipe courtesy of our friend Krisse, my director Josh’s wife (you can see her making them in an old post here)). These recipes are like mirrors; whichever one you choose will reveal the real person within. So which are you: slow and authentic or fast and dirty? Choose a doughnut and choose YOUR DESTINY.
