Tag Archives: Essays
January 11, 2012 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
No one looks at a coil of barbed wire and thinks, “I would like to eat that.” Yet there are eaters among us who see a plate of frisée and think that very thought. Psychologists have a word for these people: masochists. How else to explain the inexplicable desire to consume razor-like stalks of pale green lettuce, each bite ravaging the inside of one’s mouth? It’s time for someone in the food world to stand up and expose frisée for what it really is: a sadistic trick of nature, seducing chefs and gardeners around the world with a hidden pheromone that creates the illusion that frisée is actually good to eat. I assure you, it’s not.
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December 8, 2011 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
The commercial goes something like this: a female college student unwraps a package sent to her from her mother, who’s on the phone, standing near a window where sunlight illuminates her smiling face. The girl’s face soon lights up too when she discovers the gift that her mother so thoughtfully sent her way: a jar of Jif peanut butter. “I love you mommy,” says the girl or maybe it’s the mom who says, “I love you.” Either way, I watched this commercial at the gym, while running on a treadmill, and I remembered it. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
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November 9, 2011 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
It’s that time of year again. First comes the “What To Do With Leftover Candy?” and the blood-tinted Halloween punch; then we’re in turkey month—just look at those glossies at your supermarket checkout—and, faster than you can say “hot buttered rum,” there’ll be the Bûche de Noëls, the potato latkes, and glasses of champagne to ring in the New Year.
Most mainstream food outlets—from blogs to magazines to cooking shows on T.V.—will follow the formula with precision. They’ve been plotting this since summer, when holiday strategy meetings took place: “What can we do this year that we didn’t do 50 times already?”
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November 3, 2011 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
[Image via RoboPencil]
Everyone makes mistakes in the kitchen. Kim Kardashian got engaged in the kitchen and Justin Bieber fathered a baby in the kitchen. Look: it happens.
Some people freak out when a mistake happens: “Oh my God! This is a disaster! I’ll never cook again!” Other people employ a series of tactics to recover from their mistake. That’s what this post is about; here are 10 Ways To Fix A Mistake in the Kitchen.
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October 20, 2011 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
In all the debate that goes on in this country about what people eat and how we need to reform the American diet, it’s always taken as a given that people who attempt to nourish themselves and their children on fast food need to be educated, need to be reformed. There’s a sense that we who are enlightened about food, who subscribe to the philosophies of Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman and Alice Waters (I certainly do), are somehow in possession of a great secret and if only we could communicate this secret to the uninformed, we’ll spare them from diabetes and heart disease and cancer and all of the other blights inevitable for those who don’t buy organic produce, who gobble down Big Macs while we gobble down our brown rice bowls.
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October 13, 2011 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
[Photo credit, Dallas Observer]
By this point it’s old news that Sam Sifton, restaurant critic for The New York Times, has stepped down from his job after only two years. It’s a pretty short run for a restaurant critic, and his reasons for stepping down have been explained matter-of-factly: he’s going to become the Times’s national editor. That means instead of covering Parmesan flan and celery leaf sorbet he’ll be focusing his energies on issues such as the debt crisis, the job crisis and any other crisis that creeps up before the next Presidential election.
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March 24, 2011 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
I started cooking seven or eight years ago, maybe even a little further back, and it was around the time that people stopped buying whole heads of lettuce and started buying lettuce, pre-washed, in those little plastic tubs. The tubs, which are now omnipresent, have labels like “Spring Salad Mix” and “Herb Salad Mix” and they cost, usually, around $5. And like many of you out there, if I wanted to make a quick lettuce salad, I’d grab one of those tubs, pay my $5, bring it home, dress it up and call it a day.
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November 4, 2010 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
Mr. Game Show was a Hanukkah gift that my parents bought me one year in the 1980s. It looked like a regular board game (small tokens that you moved around a large, printed board) except there, in the middle, was a plastic figurine that talked. “Hello!” it announced in a Guy Smiley voice, “I’m Mr. Game Show! Who’s ready to play a game?”
Mr. Game Show’s Mr. Gameshow had slick-backed hair and big white teeth. He embodied everything that was false and mockable about that most loathsome TV type: the game show host. As time marched on, and we moved through the 80s to the 90s to today, the TV landscape has shifted enough that, even though there are still game show hosts (Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek haven’t gone anywhere) there’s a new contender for that most loathsome TV type: the food show host.
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