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Thursday, January 30, 2014
Dish mangazine - Salted Caramel, Coffee and Toasted Meringue Cake
Étamine
Posted: 29 Jan 2014 by David Lebovitz
Sometimes when I’m asked about what
I miss from “home” (ie: the US). I might answer dried pluots,
crunchy organic peanut butter, aluminum foil that you can’t read the newspaper
through, and an unending supply of Sharpies. (Although thanks to a slew of
well-meaning friends and other folks passing through, I now have an unending
supply of them here in France.) But I no longer sherpa over cheesecloth, because
I’ve found something better: Étamine. 
Way back when, I brought over a few
packages of cheesecloth for such culinary projects as soaking fruitcakes in liquor
(with mixed success),
at times…and draining cream or yogurt for homemade cheeses, marmalade-making,
and labneh.
Then I discovered the gauzy, wispy fabric known as étamine and I haven’t gone
back to cheesecloth. Nor have I asked anyone to sherpa some over for me. (And I
can finagle them into bringing other things, such as dried pluots.)
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
Fish in a flash, chilled soups, no-cook meals – fast and fuss-free
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Fish in a flash, chilled soups, no-cook meals – fast and
fuss-free. Get a preview of our new issue with our recipe
slideshow.
Plus, our favourite Chinese recipes; our travel guide to Zurich; a classic recipe for fried rice; and the opportunity to win a Rado watch by filling out our online survey or an ultimate home coffee kit thanks to Melbourne Food & Wine Festival! Happy eating, Anthea Loucas and the team at Gourmet Traveller |
A Homegrown Table: Food to eat with family and friends by Emma Dean< Winner Masterchef Australia 2013
Emma Dean, winner of the 2013 Masterchef Australia, is fast on her way to becoming a household name in Australia. Growing up on a hobby farm, she developed a love for everything fresh and seasonal from an early age. Her earthy style is reflected in her paddock-to-plate approach to this, her first recipe collection, using food grown or foraged to create a wonderful range of meals.
With over 80 recipes for every time of the day, Emma combines the familiar with the unusual, showcasing different cuts of meat, heirloom vegetables and wild greens.Emma’s first book incorporates her love of food from the land to the plate including her love of foraging and with her easy style of cooking this is the ideal book for people who not only have an interest in cooking but have an interest in the food that comes on their plate.
New Holland -Hardback - NZ$ 49.99
NIGELLA'S BOOKS SERVED UP IN A DELICIOUS NEW LOOK
The Nigella Collection: covetable new editions of Nigella Lawson’s bestselling cookbooks is to be published in a stylish new series format.
The series, published by Chatto & Windus - an imprint of the Penguin Random House Group, will launch in April 2014 with two titles: NIGELLA EXPRESS, which has sold over a million copies in the UK, and baking classic, HOW TO BE A DOMESTIC GODDESS.
Each of Nigella’s nine books will be repackaged in hardback with striking, witty covers, complete with sumptuous new endpapers featuring Nigella at work in the kitchen. The new designs and endpapers will also be available as eBooks.
Following the April launch, HOW TO EAT and NIGELLA SUMMER (previously titled Forever Summer) will be published in June, with the remaining five titles made available throughout the rest of 2014 and early 2015.
Nigella says 'When Chatto asked me to be involved in the redesign of my books I was excited by the idea and thrilled with the results. Even though I am an eBook convert I still adore a “real book” and the whole hands-on production of it – cover, paper, typeface. So to see GODDESS and EXPRESS in a glorious new livery is thrilling. I hope that fellow cooks will love them as warmly as I do.’
And report from The Bookseller"
New look for Nigella:
Fifteen years after the release of her first book, Chatto & Windus is to reissue Nigella Lawson's nine books as the "Nigella Collection", repackaged in what the publisher calls “covetable new editions”.
The Penguin Random House imprint will launch the series in April with two titles – Nigella Express and How To Be A Domestic Goddess. Each of the books will be available in hardback with covers designed by Caz Hildebrand, creative partner, and Camille Blais, senior designer, at Here Design.
There will also be new endpapers featuring Lawson at work in the kitchen, and the new designs and endpapers will also be available as e-books.
Clara Farmer, publishing director at Chatto & Windus, said: “Fifteen years after the publication of How to Eat we are delighted to celebrate this milestone with a vibrant new look for Nigella’s classic cookery books, incorporating sleek design with a playful twist and beautiful new endpaper photography. Nigella is one of our most loved and respected cookery writers and these deliciously designed and packaged editions will appeal to fans, old and new.”
Lawson said: “When Chatto asked me to be involved in the redesign of my books I was excited by the idea and thrilled with the results. Even though I am an e-book convert I still adore a “real book” and the whole hands-on production of it – cover, paper, typeface. So to see Goddess and Express in a glorious new livery is thrilling. I hope that fellow cooks will love them as warmly as I do.”
In June How to Eat and Nigella Summer, previously called Forever Summer, will be published with the remaining five titles made available throughout the rest of 2014 and early 2015.
Nigella Express has sold 876,581 copies through Nielsen BookScan, How To Be A Domestic Goddess 381,134, How to Eat 325,268, and Forever Summer 206,011.
Boudin Noir
Posted: 27 Jan 2014 - David Lebovitz
I’m not one of those “extreme
eaters” and I doubt you’ll ever see me on one of those television shows showing
off how brave I am, boasting about eating Lord-knows-what. In fact, I am the
opposite end: I’m a defender of those who don’t want to eat certain things. Who
cares what other people’s food preferences are?*
A few years back I got to cook with Andrew Zimmern, the host of “Bizarre Foods”
who had come to France. To be honest, I didn’t know who he was because I’ve
been away from the States for a while. I was amazed when we went to my local
market to shop on a sleepy Sunday morning, when suddenly, out of the woodwork,
swarms of Americans descended on him. (Notice I said “him” and not “us” – hrrmmph!)
But being the gentleman that I am, I
stepped aside to let the crowd through. And after spending a day with him, I’d
have to agree: Next time I see him, I’m going to swarm him (again),
too. He is one of the loveliest and most fun people I’ve ever met.
As much as I kind of fell for him, I
still don’t share his proclivity for eating all sorts of oddities, although I
am sometimes curious about them. People have asked me, “Why are Americans so
squeamish about what they eat?” which is rather odd because Americans eat a lot
of hot dogs – and Lord knows what’s in those…and some eat whatever is in that
packet of orange powder that comes with boxed macaroni & cheese. (Which I
recently bought on a whim because I saw it in a store, which was definitely not
as good as I remembered.) And I have French friends who would never eat rabbit,
kidneys, brains, or any of les
autres abats (offal).
Continue Reading Boudin Noir...
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Greens, Biscuit and Telegraph Avenue
Posted on bookcooker: 26 Jan 2014
I am a big Michael Chabon fan. The Adventures of Cavalier
and Clay is one of my top 10 favorite books. I was excited about when
Telegraph Avenue came out - Chabon always creates characters that are quirky
and unique but who I emotionally connect to (even though they are almost always
male). Alas, Telegraph Avenue didn't do it for me in the way Chabon's
previous work has. It took me over a month to get through it, which is a
departure for someone who usually reads books in a week or two. In
the end I made it through and am glad that I did, but I am not sure I would
recommend the book to others. Telegraph Avenue is a street in Oakland
that is traditionally African American but runs from Oakland into Berkley so
serves as a symbol in the book of the particular Northern Californian mix -
hippie, African American, affluent liberal whites. The novel is about
race, gentrification, growing up, love, marriage, family, fatherhood, sexual
identity and friendship. To me the book felt overstuffed - with ideas,
with themes, with obscure movie and music references, and with long descriptive
sentences. It was hard for me to connect with the characters because of
all of this other stuff. While I didn't love the book, it did present
good food inspiration. As soon as I read the words "yeasted
biscuits" I was intrigued. I have made regular buttermilk biscuits
often and lamented that they did not rise as high as the ones I would get in hipster
Southern restaurants. I hoped yeast would get that sky high look I had
yearned for. In the book, one of the main characters, Nat, makes these
biscuits, along with greens and fried chicken, in an attempt to win over some
people in his neighborhood to support the used record store he owns with his
best friend Archie in an epic battle with a hip hop superstore looking to move
into the neighborhood. I decided to focus on the greens and biscuits -
together a great warming winter supper.
Add into this is the reappearance of Archie's deadbeat father, a former kung fu movie star who has gotten himself in trouble with the owner of Dogpile and a local alderman. All of this would be a lot to communicate in a novel, but Chabon adds on to this a large serving of obscure cultural references - music (the rare records Brokeland sells), blaxpoitation movies, kung-fu movies, Quentin Tarantino movies, and general political and societal commentary. Each character has a rich inner life, but the inner dialogue that Chabon creates is so convoluted it is not believable in all cases.
Moreover, this bloated prose made me give up sometimes on a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a character. Waiting beneath all the words is a really compelling story about friendship and race and society but most overwhelmingly about fatherhood (Archie's broken relationship with his father, his abandonment of his own son, his nervousness about how he would treat his unborn child) - this is the what I think Chabon really wanted to write about, but tried instead to say something profound and cool about a whole lot of things instead of just one or two. There is a book inside of Telegraph Avenue that I would have really liked and I hope that Chabon pares it down next time around.
More
Friday, January 24, 2014
Should You Remove the Green Germ from Garlic?
Posted: 24 Jan 2014 01:07 - David Lebovitz
Garlic
has a season, and depending on where you live, that season is usually spring
through mid-summer. In France, we get ail nouveau,
which are heads of garlic that are very plump and slightly soft, whose moist
skin is tinged with a bit of pink. As it ages, the garlic becomes more rosy in color,
and there is even a special “rose” garlic in France called ail rose de Lautrec,
whose status is certified by the French government. As the months progress,
garlic season ends and the remaining heads go into storage.
In France, garlic that has been kept
is often referred to as ail sec,
or dried garlic. And in many cases, during storage, those cloves of garlic will
develop a green germ inside that is said to be bitter and should be removed. I
know, because I’ve said that myself. But I’ve never really put it to the test.
So when a friend, who worked closely with Marcella Hazan (an
expert on Italian cuisine) told me that Marcella never removed the green germ
(her reasoning being that since it was new garlic in the making, it was tender
and not bitter), I figured it would be interesting to see – and taste – if
removing it really did make a difference.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
The Toronto Cocktail
Posted: 21 Jan 2014 - David Lebovitz
I was part of a whole generation of
San Franciscans that were terrorized by Bruno, a cantankerous, older Persian
man who had a bar in the Haight called Persian Aub Zam Zam. I’ve probably
mentioned him before, but I recently went down that rabbit hole of the Internet
where I found a few
stories
about him via a search for something else.
Then…well, we all knows where that
leads…
He believed that if you’re going to
have a drink at a bar, you should have it at the actual bar. I don’t know why
he had a few tables and chairs around the outskirts of the dark room, because
anyone that came in and tried to take a seat at one would be yelled at by Bruno
– “The tables are closed. Get the hell out of here!“
Am not sure if they were just for
decoration or what, but he would also flip out on people if they ordered a
foofy cocktail, such as a Cosmopolitan, a Screwdriver…or heck, anything that
wasn’t a classic cocktail on his pre-approved list. If you wanted to stay on
his good side, you’d order a Martini – one made with gin. An order for a Vodka
Martini would get you tossed out. And in contrast to what some “experts” might
advise, he didn’t shake or stir his (gin) Martinis, he “pounded” the $2.50
cocktail with a muddler, which resulted in an icy-cold drink, served (or
course) in a classic Martini glass. And your change was always a shiny
half-dollar coin snapped down on the bar after you paid.
Continue Reading The Toronto
Cocktail...
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Jamie’s recession
The Bookseller 21 January, 2014
It may be a trifle unfair to say that someone who recorded £6.2m in sales had a bad 2013, but this is Jamie Oliver’s worst output through BookScan since his breakout in 2000—barring the hardback-less 2003 (£2.8m).
With hindsight it seems that a recession-themed cookery title was a couple of years too late; Save with Jamie (Michael Joseph) did not have the resonance of a usual Oliver, selling 297,000 copies for £3.2m, his lowest-selling autumn hardback since Jamie’s America (239,623 units for £2.9m in 2009). As the second-bestselling author since records began, Oliver is measured by a different yardstick so this is relative; Save with Jamie was, by some £800,000, the bestselling cookery title by value in 2013.
Oliver should steel himself for a flood of “is Jamie over?” articles. But he has a habit of bouncing back: the follow-up to Jamie’s America was Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals, which at £24.5m has sold twice as much (by value) as any other non-fiction title since records began.
The Naked Chef still led the cookery/diet pack, a group that is becoming increasingly crowded at the top. Nine chefs and one diet guru (Spencer) are in the chart—the previous high was five chefs in 2008—including Top 50 débutants Paul Hollywood and Tom Kerridge. An additional four cookery/diet authors shifted over £1m through the TCM in 2013: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsay, Delia Smith and The 2-Day Diet author Dr Michelle Harvie.
It may be a trifle unfair to say that someone who recorded £6.2m in sales had a bad 2013, but this is Jamie Oliver’s worst output through BookScan since his breakout in 2000—barring the hardback-less 2003 (£2.8m).
With hindsight it seems that a recession-themed cookery title was a couple of years too late; Save with Jamie (Michael Joseph) did not have the resonance of a usual Oliver, selling 297,000 copies for £3.2m, his lowest-selling autumn hardback since Jamie’s America (239,623 units for £2.9m in 2009). As the second-bestselling author since records began, Oliver is measured by a different yardstick so this is relative; Save with Jamie was, by some £800,000, the bestselling cookery title by value in 2013.Oliver should steel himself for a flood of “is Jamie over?” articles. But he has a habit of bouncing back: the follow-up to Jamie’s America was Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals, which at £24.5m has sold twice as much (by value) as any other non-fiction title since records began.
The Naked Chef still led the cookery/diet pack, a group that is becoming increasingly crowded at the top. Nine chefs and one diet guru (Spencer) are in the chart—the previous high was five chefs in 2008—including Top 50 débutants Paul Hollywood and Tom Kerridge. An additional four cookery/diet authors shifted over £1m through the TCM in 2013: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsay, Delia Smith and The 2-Day Diet author Dr Michelle Harvie.
TODAY'S COOKBOOK NEWS from PW
Comfort
Food, According to Ellie Krieger The Food Network host and cookbook author talks healthy twists on hearty classics, how to get meatballs on the table in half an hour, and how she handles hardcore pizza cravings. more
The founder of the Food Network South Beach and New York City Wine & Food festivals shares his cookbook inspirations. more
This
Week’s Bestselling Cookbooks Rocco DiSpirito's "Pound a Day Diet" lands on PW's bestseller list -- but it's far from the only health-conscious book flying off the shelves right now. more
Marc Forgione: Recipes and Stories from the Acclaimed Chef and Restaurant
In his first cookbook, chef/owner Forgione (a winner of Next Iron Chef) shares the story of his entry, survival, and ultimate success in the cutthroat world of the restaurant business. more
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Dan
Whalen's Thai Coconut Chicken Stuffed Cabbage Dan Whalen offers a new take on traditional stuffed cabbage. more
Monday, January 20, 2014
Favourite mango recipes.
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Nothing says summer like a juicy mango atop a luscious dessert
or in a fresh warm weather salad. Check out our slideshow for some of our
favourite mango
recipes.
Plus, why expedition cruising is so popular; our recipe for Texan-style brisket; our guide to Guangzhou; a weekend away with GT in Wolgan Valley; and your chance to win a portable barbecue! Happy eating, Anthea Loucas and the team at Gourmet Traveller |
Sunday, January 19, 2014
New cookbook from Matt Preston, popular Masterchef Australia judge
I have never met Matt Preston although I feel as if I know him through seeing him on TV so often in recent years. I like him even more now after picking up his new cookbook while browsing at the Village Bookshop at Matakana last Saturday. I read his refreshing, honest and revealing introduction, flicked through the book looking at the beautifully illustrated, easy to follow recipes using ingredients easily found in most supermarkets, and decided on the spot that this would be $50 well spent !
Well if the first dish cooked from Matt's second cookbook, (his first by the way was Matt Preston's 100 Best Recipes), was anything to go by then we are in for some treats - Pork chops with roast figs (the new season is just underway) and a Byzantine sweet-sour balsamic and orange glaze.
Here's Matt writing in his introduction :
Time to Pay
Posted: 19 Jan 2014 - David Lebovitz
I won’t comment on the current
foibles of a few amorous souls in Paris, although I’ve had a number of
discussions with friends about it, both here in France and in the United
States. It seems that not only do Americans and French have different views about
the behavior of their public officials, mostly regarding what’s tolerated and
acceptable to publish and discuss, versus what isn’t. After watching a
presidential press conference where there was a spirited pledge to save a whole
bunch of money via methods that have yet to be revealed (kind of like the
upcoming discussion about the pesky task of coming up with a seating chart when
it hasn’t been revealed who the guest of
honor is planning to bring as his paramour), the rest of are
spending our time pondering those who act with their unique version of plain
ol’ common sense.
Not only do the French and Americans
have different relationships politically, socially…and intimately with each
another (being from San Francisco, admittedly, my views are a bit more skewed
than others), there is also a difference in our relationship to money. The difference
is easily observed at the cash register; when it’s time to pay in the United
States, as the cashier is ringing up your stuff, you plan ahead and get your
money ready so you can pay up when the time comes promptly, and be on your way.
In France, when it’s time to pay, you stand and wait until the cashier gives
you the total that’s due. And then, and only then, do you painstakingly extract
your wallet from your pocket, and start the process of le règlement.
I assume that most adults have been
buying things all their lives. But it seems like a shock to those who are told
that the price of a head of lettuce will cost them 95 centimes. And it takes a
moment to let it fully sink in. Then, and only then, each centime is counted
out with more scrutiny than that which is bestowed upon our remarkably fearless
leaders. Including someone who doesn’t fear slipping out the back door and
zipping through their fancy-schmancy neighborhood of Paris strapped to the back
a scooter in the dark of the night.
(But for those who wish to be a
little more prudent, a local car rental outfit offered that perhaps éviter, or ditching, le scooter and switching to a
car with tinted windows might yield a little more privacy.)
Continue Reading Time to Pay...
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