Entries from The Amateur Gourmet tagged with 'tips'
Barcelona / El Bulli Wrap-Up
This is my last post about Barcelona and El Bulli---thank you all for your patience as I recounted my trip in such great detail. For anyone who wants a quick all-purpose post that covers the bases, here they are: we stayed at (and loved) the Banys Orientals which was recommended by a reader, had the friendliest staff, and lovely music on its website. (They also helped us rent a car for our journey up to El Bulli.) In Roses, we stayed at the Hotel Coral Playa, which was recommended by Louisa Chu, and was a charming (and relatively inexpensive) option for those of you lucky enough to get a reservation at El Bulli. As for our dinner at El Bulli, many of you asked how much it cost. The answer is $1000 (about 700 Euros). That may seem outrageous, but I'd been saving since February so when it came time to order wine, etc, I didn't have to be a cheapskate. (Without the wine, and without a tip--which, I imagine, is optional (though I left a nice one)--the meal could've been more like $700.)...
A Funny Thing I Do (A Tip & A Recipe for Vanilla Bean Pudding)
What you see here is documentation of a very strange practice, a funny thing I do each time I pull a recipe from the internet. What I do is: instead of printing the recipe out with my printer (which is totally hooked up and ready to use), I grab a piece of paper and write the recipe down off the screen. It occurs to me now that the reason I do this is so that I'm aware of all the steps of the recipe before I go into the kitchen to see the recipe through. Writing it down allows me to synthesize everything--the ingredients I need, the prep I need to do, the oven temp (if the oven has to go on)--and I think that this funny thing I do accounts for the frequent success I have with recipes. By the time I begin the actual cooking, I'm well aware of all the steps and what has to happen to make it all come together. That's way better than printing the recipe and winging the recipe step by step only to hit a wall when you realize you have no smoked paprika. The recipe you see above is a New York Times recipe for vanilla bean pudding which you can read by clicking here. The pudding came out great, though the picture didn't: Trust me, though, it's one of the simplest most rewarding things you can do with a vanilla bean. It takes just minutes and after an hour or so in the fridge, dessert is done. So do what I do: click the recipe, write it down off the screen and get to it. You may want to buy a vanilla bean first, though that'll occur to you once you're writing it down. You'll never print a recipe from your printer again. ...and for your entertainment, while you're eating, a pudding video I suddenly remembered from the TV show The State:...
How Successful Writers E-Mail
One of the most surprising things I've learned over the past few years of running this blog and entering the world of food and writing is this: when e-mailing a famous writer--food writer or not--the best strategy is to keep your e-mails short short short. Eight paragraphs about your life, love and devotion to this writer's writing will not win you much favor. Instead, pare it down to just a few sentences. You'd be shocked at what writers, when e-mailing one another, sacrifice to keep their e-mails short. The bloody corpses of punctuation, syntax, grammar and logic are strewn across countless e-mails in my inbox. And yet when I re-read e-mail exchanges I've had with successful writers, the e-mails are always pointed, smart, and incredibly succinct. Same is true, actually, for agents and editors as well as producers, publicists, and directors. Keep it brief, keep it smart, and you'll be rewarded. Just a tip from your old friend, The A.G....
