Entries from The Amateur Gourmet tagged with 'apples'
Pot Roast
When I think pot roast, I think Americana, I think 50s sitcoms and a beleaguered housewife who intones: "Oh, darn it, I burnt the pot roast!" It's not a dish that I ate much growing up, eating--as we did--most of our meals out. My first real pot roast memory, actually, comes from Atlanta. I ordered pot roast at one of my favorite, kitschy restaurants there--Agnes & Muriel's--and got very sick afterwards. I don't blame Agnes & Muriel's, but I did blame pot roast. I avoided it for years....
Alex's Birthday Dinner
You may recall that the worst meal I've ever cooked for people in my life was the meal I cooked for my friends Alex and Raife in March of 2007 (see here). Rereading that post, I don't think it was as awful as I remember it being; but the pressure was high because Alex, one of my closest friends from college, had never experienced my cooking (she'd only seen me defrost California Pizza Kitchen pizzas when we lived together) and I wanted to impress her. Well, I'm pretty sure I didn't. Luckily, Alex has a birthday. And now she lives in New York and so does our friend Raife who was also there at that disastrous dinner. So to celebrate Alex's birthday, which was in October, I invited them both over for a gigantic do-over. How did I fare?...
Tuesday Techniques: French Apple Tart
I would like to begin this week's "Tuesday Techniques" column--a column which appears regularly on Wednesdays--with a discussion of the word "technique." I think people are intimidated by the word. It implies a "right-wrong" dynamic, something hammered home by Tom Colicchio on "Top Chef" when he criticizes improper technique. "You don't know how to cut an onion?" "You don't know that proper paella has a crust?" "You kissed Padma on the left cheek and not the right?" This bullying has its merits. In a cooking school environment, in a restaurant kitchen, forceful drilling of proper technique produces top-quality chefs. At home, however, does it matter if you have a perfectly clear consomme? Not unless a perfectly clear consomme is something to which you aspire. Most people, I'd conjecture, just want to make dinner. And that's why TV hosts like Rachael Ray and Giada De Laurentis are so popular. They make cooking look easy and fun. In fact, those words "easy" and "fun" are often in their show titles. But why can't using proper technique, cooking on the level of a Tom Colicchio, be easy and fun? Why does Jacques Pepin's "Technique" book feel so much like a text book? Why does writing this column sometimes feel like homework? Why does this paragraph have so many questions?...
