Entries from The Amateur Gourmet tagged with 'Michael Symon'
MIchael Symon's Spicy Tomato & Blue Cheese Soup
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....
A Video Podcast with Michael Symon
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....
nibbles 5.23.08
* Iron Chef Michael Symon celebrates the reversal of Chicago's ban on foie gras. "It always boggles my mind how quickly people bash foie gras but in the meantime have no problem with mass produced chicken, pork etc....let me assure that these ducks live a much better life than the "yellow chikens" that seem to be at every grocery store." * Pim visits Pink's in L.A.. "Waiting half an hour for a hot dog was certainly a new experience for me." (Long ago and far away when I lived in L.A. for a summer I visited Pink's with a friend and enjoyed it. Though the celebrated "snap" of the dog, which Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold made note of in his indispensable L.A. eating book "Counter Intelligence," didn't quite please me the way a soft, New York city street dog does. Maybe because the city dog is the dog I grew up with.) * Davivd Lebovitz eats at Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower. Strangely enough, I've been there too: my parents took my brother and I to London and Paris when we were too young to appreciate it, though I remember getting dressed up and riding the elevator up into the belly of the Eiffel Tower for dinner. When we asked for our table, the maitre'd kindly informed us that there'd be a small wait because "the American actress Sally Field hasn't gotten up yet." When she got up, we asked for her picture and she said no....
Michael Symon
Perhaps it's injudicious to say so (especially if Rachael Ray is reading this--sorry Rachael!), but of all the Food Network stars I've met so far, my favorite, hands down, has to be Michael Symon. I think Food Network stars come in two types: those with light-switch personalities (on one second, off the next) and those who are the same onscreen as they are offscreen. Michael Symon, most certainly, is in the latter camp. He's the real deal: a great chef (the perogies I ate at his restaurant Lola, after shooting the video you'll see below, were truly unforgettable--worth a trip to Cleveland) who is also kind, charismatic, and, most of all, authentic. Check out this video and see if you don't agree: Perhaps my affection for him is also due to this interview (click here) which was the first thing I did for Food Network. Needless to say, I was terrified. I never told you about that day--it happened in mid-December--when, after rounds of interviews, I showed up to shoot an actual pilot, there at 7:30 am, where an entire crew was waiting. They put me in hair and make-up and then they whisked me on to a very real set, with about 20 people in the room, and said, "OK--go!" The format of the pilot was much different from the shows you've seen: they had me working from a script I wrote myself--a little like "The Daily Show" meets "Talk Soup"--and there was one impassioned essay I wrote, a mock diatribe about dieting, that I could not get right for the life of me. Take 20, Take 21... it was humiliating and draining and by the end of that segment, I figured my career as a Food Network web host was officially over. But then came Michael Symon, who was flown in explicitly for this interview. And he was so affable, such a good sport, that I suddenly felt calm again and when we sat down to talk, even though all the cameras were there and the same crew that'd seen me mess up with such flair, I was completely at ease. And the same was true, months later, when I flew to Cleveland to shoot the segment you saw in the first video. Even though I was in a real restaurant kitchen with that wall of heat (I'm not sure many of you realize how hot it is in a restaurant kitchen, especially behind the grill station) and a bunch of sweaty, suspicious sous chefs and sauciers, I may as well have been in my own kitchen cooking. Michael Symon casts a spell around him--it's the spell of a supremely talented chef completely at ease with himself and others. A few weeks later, I was in Miami, walking with a friend, and I heard a voice calling. "Hey Adam!" The voice was familiar but difficult to place. Then I identified the source: it was Michael Symon standing outside his hotel with his wife. If you would've told me last year that an Iron Chef / chef cult hero would be calling out my name at a Wine & Food Festival, I would've called you mad. "MAD!" I would've said and that would've been it. But now I've met Michael Symon and I feel like I've made a new friend. If nothing else comes from this gig, that's enough for me. And an even better reason to return to Cleveland, a city we barely saw--we flew in, shot at Lola, slept in a hotel, and flew out the next morning. I say: Spring Break Clevleand 2008. Who's with me? Party at Symon's place. I promise, I won't do the cooking. P.S. Michael Symon has his own blog, Symon Says, which you should go read by clicking the words "Symon Says." P.P.S. Michael Ruhlman, another Cleveland cult hero, was there the night I was cooking, mocking me and my food. (Actually, I think he said I did a decent job.) Unfortunately, the footage didn't find its way into the end video (it's hard to edit this stuff down to 3 minutes!) So apologies to Ruhlman and a promise that when I do return to Cleveland, I'll bring him a gift bag of raw venison liver to show my remorse. (Click here for explanation.) P.P.S. I'm going to post the recipe for that ziti with fennel and sausage later tonight. Stay tuned!...
