Carl Sagan’s apple pie
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.
That’s Carl Sagan in Cosmos. Here’s the recipe for Carl’s apple pie.
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kottke.org posts about food
We’re at dinner right now
Due to a medical condition, Roger Ebert doesn’t eat or drink anymore. He doesn’t miss tasting food or drink, only the more social aspects of dining.
What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They’re the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done — probably most of our recreational talking. That’s what I miss.
As Ben Trott says, the last paragraph is the killer.
The Spotted Pig’s smoked haddock chowder recipe!!
If I had to choose my all-time favorite restaurant dishes, the smoked haddock chowder from The Spotted Pig would definitely be on there, possibly in the top five. Years after I asked Ed Levine of Serious Eats if he could get the recipe, he finally posts the recipe for me.
When infusing the haddock, think of making a cup of tea. You want to pull all the smoky flavors out into the cream. This will result in a deeply rich soup. Once you make this you will never go back to another chowder.
Thank you Ed and April! (I’m really holding back on the exclamation points here; I’m almost irrationally excited to cook this for dinner tomorrow night…if I can find smoked haddock somewhere in NYC…)
The foods, the Whole Foods, and nothing but the foods
This week’s issue of the New Yorker has a long profile of John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods.
John Mackey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market, refers to the company as his child-not just his creation but the thing on earth whose difficulties or downfall it pains him most to contemplate. He also sees himself as a “daddy” to his fifty-four thousand employees, who are known as “team members,” but they may occasionally consider him to be more like a crazy uncle. To the extent that a child inherits or adopts a parent’s traits, Whole Foods is an embodiment of many of Mackey’s. A Whole Foods store, in some respects, is like Mackey’s mind turned inside out. Certainly, the evolution of the corporation has often traced his own as a man; it has been an incarnation of his dreams and quirks, his contradictions and trespasses, and whatever he happened to be reading and eating, or not eating.
Tiny gingerbread architecture
These little gingerbread houses that can perch on the rim of your hot chocolate mug are pretty cool:
Make some! (via matt)
The sun never sets on Shake Shack
The Shake Shack is turning into Danny Meyer’s accidental fast food empire.
“A hamburger stand is a very democratizing amenity,” he said. “We hope that each new Shake Shack can become both a citizen of, and mirror of, their communities.”
What’s the deal with fish oil?
So says the first line of Paul Greenberg’s story on fish oil. Which is weird for me because I had been wondering this very thing in my bathroom the other day while staring at my wife’s bottle of omega-3 pills.
Nearly every fish a fish eater likes to eat eats menhaden. Bluefin tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they have come from menhaden.
Menhaden are also top-notch algae eaters and, no surprise, overfished. (via djacobs)
Update: Bad Science questions whether fish oil is actually beneficial. (thx, phil)
Lovely chocolate
One of many from Mary and Matt. It’s a stacked bar chart *and* candy. (via youngna)
Fire and Knives
I really like the cover on the first issue of Fire & Knives, a subscription-only food magazine based in the UK.
(via eat me daily)
The ham sandwich theorem
The ham sandwich theorem is sometimes called ham and cheese sandwich theorem, the pancake theorem, and the Stone-Tukey theorem but not the sandwich theorem.
The ham sandwich theorem is also sometimes referred to as the “ham and cheese sandwich theorem”, again referring to the special case when n = 3 and the three objects are
1. a chunk of ham,
2. a slice of cheese, and
3. two slices of bread (treated as a single disconnected object).The theorem then states that it is possible to slice the ham and cheese sandwich in half such that each half contains the same amount of bread, cheese, and ham. It is possible to treat the two slices of bread as a single object, because the theorem only requires that the portion on each side of the plane vary continuously as the plane moves through 3-space.
No idea how this is related to the I Cut You Choose conundrum.
Scandalous: fake cheese used at fancy restaurant
But it’s not what you think. At Le Bernardin, one of the highest calibre restaurants in NYC, Eric Ripert and his chefs use “cheap, fake Swiss cheese full of artificial flavors” as a baseline to normalize everyone’s palates so that sauces can be judged fairly in the kitchen.
In terms of flavor, that cheese tastes identical all year long…so it give us a reference, and we can judge fairly.
Cheese. Is there anything it can’t do?
Shaking cocktails
Kazuo Uyeda demonstrates his hard shake:
From an article in the NY Times about cocktail shaking:
Mr. Uyeda, who owns a bar named Tender in the Ginza district, is the inventor of a much-debated shaking technique he calls the hard shake, a choreographed set of motions involving a ferocious snapping of the wrists while holding the shaker slanted and twisting it. According to his Web site, this imparts, among other things, greater chill and velvety bubbles that keep the harshness of the alcohol from contacting the tongue, while showering fine particles of ice across the drink’s surface.
Back to the land
Maira Kalman wonders about the patterns of food consumption in the United States, whether it is democratic or not, and how we might want to change.
Every one of her essays is outstanding; I can’t stop linking to them.
Food in movies
Another great video essay from Matt Zoller Seitz: Feast, a tribute to images of food on film.
Cooking, perhaps more than any activity, lets an actor exude absolute physical and intellectual mastery without seeming domineering or smug. Why is that? It’s probably because, while cooking is a creative talent that has a certain egotistical component (what good cook isn’t proud of his or her skills?), there’s something inherently humbling about preparing food for other people. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a workaday gangster footsoldier giving lessons on how to cook for 20 guys, like Richard Castellano’s Clemenza in The Godfather, or a hyper-articulate, super-fussy kitchen philosopher like Tony Shalhoub in Big Night, (“To eat good food is to be close to God…”), when you’re cooking, it’s ultimately not about you; it’s about the people at the table. Their approval and pleasure is the end game.
Understanding vs. listening to customers
A fascinating but short case study of Ferran Adrià’s restaurant El Bulli from the perspective of an MBA.
There is much about the restaurant that is inefficient, as MBAs are quick to note: Adrià should lower his staff numbers, use cheaper ingredients, improve his supply chain, and increase the restaurant’s hours of operation. But “fixing” elBulli turns it into just another restaurant, says Norton: “The things that make it inefficient are part of what makes it so valuable to people.”
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