Food Section
RoboRamen. I (heart) Boba Café. Koreatown, Los Angeles.
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Foodproof Launches
Events: Slow Food Nation
Photo credit Scott Chernis
Slow Food is a movement that started in Italy and promotes a return to the way people used to eat. While it's a sentiment most of us can get behind, life is very different in Italy. Perhaps that is part of the reason why Slow Food USA has had a difficult time building massive grassroots support.
Certainly there have been public statements by the founder of Slow Food that have turned off potential local supporters. Many Slow Food programs have also left believers in the cause feeling, as the New York Times put it recently, as if Slow Food was "just one big wine tasting with really hard to find cheeses that you weren’t invited to."
But the Slow Food Nation events in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend are intended to be accessible to everyone. While some of the events are still pricey to attend, the good news is, there are plenty of events that are free. Here's a round up of just a handful of some of the major free events and programs. Head to the Slow Food Nation site for the complete Slow Food Nation schedule.
Slow Arts
Poetry by peach farmer David "Mas" Masumoto, a photography exhibit on the theme of Life in a Tuscan Town and a Bulgarian Honeybee and Harvest dance are just some of the many arts programs that are part of Slow Food Nation. All but the photo exhibit take place at the Victory Garden.
Youth Food Movement programs
Retreats, films and workshops and a culminating "Eat-In" are planned for those in the 16-34 age range.
Marketplace
The Marketplace will take place in the Civic Center Plaza. There will be produce for sale, street food, "soap box" story telling and water stations for everyone.
Food for Thought films
You'll need to RSVP and tickets are limited, but there will be showings of films such as The Future of Food and Our Daily Bread. Films take place at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason.
Whichever events you end up taking part in, here's hoping you have a very slow Labor Day weekend.
Agenda: Cooking With Nitrogen, Haute BBQ, and a Chocolatey Happy Hour
FEATURED EVENT
Cooking with Liquid Nitrogen
Astor Center
(399 Lafayette Avenue) presents, "Chilling Out with Liquid Nitrogen,"
hosted by Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot of the culinary blog Ideas in Food.
Liquid nitrogen has gained much popularity for its
innovative use in making instant ice creams, creating innovative twists on
cocktails, and cryo-blanching. Discover these techniques and more while tasting some samples of chem-lab cuisine. The class will take place on
Tuesday, August 26th, from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Tickets: $125/person.
EVENTS THIS WEEK (August 20 through 26)
A Chocolatey Happy Hour
Now through September 15th, enjoy a unique happy hour event (i.e., skip the booze this time around) at Chocolate Bar East Village (127 East 7th Street). Every day from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. enjoy $5 mini brownies, classic egg creams, mini iced chocolates, and a truffle of your choice. (212.366.1541)
Queso y Vino
Pamplona (37 East 28th Street) and Despana Foods is hosting an evening of Spanish cheese and wine. The guided five course menu will featured dishes with cheeses from La Mancha, Basque Country, and Asturias paired with regional wines. Queso y Vino will take place on Wednesday, August 20th, at 8:00 p.m. Reservations: 212.213.2328. $65/dinner, $95/dinner with wine pairings.
Coffee and Cake Tasting
Amai Tea & Bake House (171 3rd Avenue) will be hosting a coffee and cake tasting. Featured is Hacienda Esmeralda Special Microlot, a rare, celebrated Geisha coffee varietal from Ethiopia that has been freshly roasted by Counter Culture Coffee. To complement the coffee, Amai will be serving samples of our new their sesame coffee cake, a moist cake made with black sesame and topped with a toasted white sesame crumble. The free event will take place on Thursday, August 21st from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. RSVP: 212.863.9630.
Highbrow BBQ
New York magazine is presenting its first ever Backyard BBQ. Enjoy tasty eats from former "Top Chef" contestant Chris "CJ" Jacobson, live music, fireside comedy, and FREE beer (with the purchase of a ticket). You can also register to be part of a cook-off challenge and have your best BBQ dish be judged by CJ and celebrity guest judges. The event will take place on Saturday, August 23rd at Solar One (2420 FDR Drive, Service Road East) from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Tickets: $25/person.
Harvest Kick-off Party
Make Wine With Us (930 Newark Avenue, Newark, New Jersey) will be hosting a kick-off wine party. The main event will include the first tasting of wines bottled by their wine makers over the summer, accompanied by a buffet dinner and door prizes. Attendees will also have the opportunity to place an order for the 2008 wine season beginning in September. The event will take place on Saturday, August 23rd from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. RSVP: 201.876.9463. Tickets: $15/at the door.
Image: flickr user Viola Zuppa.
The Minimalist: A Sweet Science Without Tomato Cans
Simple Greek Salad
On one flawless Southern California morning, I dolled up and walked my self over to photographers heaven, Samy’s Camera.Armed with the make and model of the camera I had meticulously researched scrawled on a slip of notebook paper, I was finally ready to commit.
Arriving on the 4th floor, my info was conveyed to the adorable sales clerk. The camera was procured. Price was confirmed and a credit card about to change hands.
It all seemed so easy. (Sigh)
But then, alas, a few questions were posed. A revelation was made. (That I take pictures of food.) A different camera was offered up. (Waterproof! Smaller! Not available in fashion-colors!) The transaction completed and I traipsed off with what turns out to be the most annoyingly lame and un-useable camera known to human kind.
Seriously kids, do you see those pictures? That is a sampling of a month’s worth of trying every silly setting on the thing. Here there and everywhere the camera has come out and failed me spectacularly.
Dishes have not been recorded, moments not captured, and sadness has settled in my heart due to a stringent no-return/no-exchange policy (and a vague hope it was just really me and not the camera.)
But then I realized something…a little something. I can still share recipes without photographic evidence and you will still love me.
Well, I hope so anyway!
So while I do my darndest to figure out this shamefully overpriced digital contraption, I shall leave you with a recipe for Greek salad.
And I leave the imagery of this perfect summer salad to you.
1 ½ tablespoons red wine vinegar
Juice from 1 lemon
2 teaspoons fresh oregano, minced
½ teaspoon salt
A few grinds of black pepper
1 clove garlic, minced
¼ cup olive oil
½ medium red onion, sliced thin
2 English cucumbers, peeled, halved lengthwise, seeded, thick slices
6 large tomatoes, each tomato cored and cut into wedges
¼ cup loosely packed torn fresh parsley leaves
20 large kalamata olives, each olive pitted and quartered lengthwise
¼ cup feta cheese, crumbled
2 hearts of romaine lettuce, chopped
Whisk together the first seven ingredients in a large bowl.
Add the sliced red onion and cucumber and toss; let stand 15 minutes.
Add the tomatoes and parsley to bowl with onions and cucumbers and toss to coat.
Divide lettuce on wide, shallow serving bowl or platter; top with vegetables, sprinkle olives and feta over salad. Serve immediately.
Makes enough for six to eight people.
© 2008 Fresh Approach Cooking
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© 2008 Rachael at "Fresh Approach Cooking" www.freshcatering.blogspot.com This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, or at the aforementioned url, the site you are looking at is guilty of infringing upon terms of copyright. And generally cheesing me off.
Are you coming to the Chicks with Knives Sustainable Supper Club dinner?
More than 90 % of American wine production occurs on the West Coast. A large part of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with wine comes from simply trucking it from the vineyard to tables on the East Coast. A wine bottle holds 750 ml and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 ml. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 % of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars. - NY Times
/gone swimming.
about a month ago, on the anniversary of a death in my life, i took a trip to see a river i'd never met. not that i knew of, at any rate. it was the Yuba River and it startled and awed me.
today, with my same friend, we are adventuring to see and swim in another river. no anniversary today, just a day between things, catching summer before it ends.
if you are visiting eggbeater for the first time from TuttiFoodie, welcome! please make yourself at home-- there's lots to see and taste, and any number of the links will take you to see others for whom i have great respect and admiration.
thanks for visiting!
Great Moments in Grilling: Mexican Roadside Chicken
I've never been to Mexico, so I haven't had the chance to pull over and taste a roadside "Sinaloa"-style chicken, but thanks to Rick Bayless, I've mastered grilling a beautifully blackened, spicy, smokey, and succulent bird in my backyard, well north of the border. This easy, delicious dish has become a summer standby.
The recipe for Pollo a las Brasas con Cebolitas (Grilled Roadside Whole Chicken with Knob Onions) can be found in Bayless' Mexican Everyday cookbook (see the complete recipe online here). If you missed it, this was Bayless' contribution to the spate of easy/fast/quick cookbooks published by major chefs in response to the Rachael Ray phenomenon. If this one got lost in the shuffle, that's too bad, since it simplifies (in a good way) what would otherwise be extremely complicated and challenging Mexican dishes.
The prep is fast-going. The only complicated step (though really it isn't) involves flattening the chicken. I like to take kitchen shears and slice through the back of the chicken on both sides of the backbone. Remove the bone, flip the chicken over, and as Bayless instructs, "wallop the bird on the breast" with either your fist or a mallet to dislodge the center bones and flatten the breast. Thud.
The marinade, which colors the chicken a deep red, can be made almost exclusively with ingredients from the pantry: dried ancho chile powder, cloves, cinnamon, cider vinegar, and oregano (the only fresh ingredients you will need are garlic and a little orange juice). What's more, the marinade does not require extensive time to sink in. Smear the chicken all over and by the time the grill is heated, it's ready to go.
What's critical is to follow Bayless' directions regarding indirect cooking. If you are using a gas grill, that means turning off the burner directly under the chicken. After 45 minutes, you'll end up with a juicy chicken that is crisp on the outside rather than dried out, usually the bane of grilled chicken. It's a great dish for a large group, since you can easily double the recipe to two chickens without doing much extra work.
Bayless suggests serving the chicken alongside grilled knob onions (grilled scallions will also do). Even better, heat some corn tortillas while you're at it for wrapping pieces of the meat tableside with a dose of tomatillo salsa.
Review: Animal restaurant in Los Angeles
TWO "food dudes" -- laid-back, long-haired cooks who grew up in Florida and are culinary graduates of the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale -- make their way to California and end up at the late Chadwick in Beverly Hills working with Ben Ford and Govind Armstrong. In 2004, the dudes, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, found Carmelized Productions, a catering company. Soon, they're starring in the Food Network docudrama series, "Two Dudes Catering," which purports to show "two young renegade chefs who play by their own rules" in "the big time world of Hollywood catering."
Coffee's trained tasters know their beans and brews
Dora Jaramillo slides off the top of a wooden box to reveal 36 numbered vials of "perfume." Each number in the kit corresponds to a different aroma commonly found in coffee, some positive (lemon and butter) and some not so positive (medicinal and rubber). These codified aromas are part of Jaramillo's professional infrastructure.
Restaurant breakfasts make a comeback in L.A.
WHEN Campanile stopped serving daily breakfast a decade ago, the regulars (but obviously not enough of them) who'd made a cappuccino and pastry or poached eggs and ham at the restaurant part of their morning routine were devastated. They had become accustomed to using the white tablecloth restaurant as an office away from the office. Over a sumptuous breakfast, they would meet clients, hold meetings, plot goals and projects. Screenwriters scribbled, actors pored over scripts and there may already have been a few bloggers at their keyboards. And then it ended (except for weekend brunch, which is still going strong).
Best breakfast spots in Los Angeles
Gordon Ramsay. Britain's celebrated tow-headed chef offers a proper hotel breakfast in the posh new London Hotel. The Japanese bento box includes grilled salmon and whitefish, green tea noodles and buckwheat soba, a dipping sauce, beautiful rice and Japanese pickles. Some other dishes could use more attention to detail. Juices aren't squeezed to order as you'd expect at these prices, and while toast served in a silver-plated toast rack is lovely, what's up with the eggs Benedict? The English muffin is supermarket quality, toasted on one side only; however, the hollandaise is silky as can be and the eggs are impeccably poached. English breakfast features quite ordinary sausage, crisp delicious bacon, a grotty-looking wedge of portabello mushroom and, in my case, perfect sunny-side-up eggs for $24. Citrus French toast is cloyingly sweet and, oddly, comes with sweetened butter for another sugar rush. Scottish smoked salmon is luscious, though the bland soft scrambled eggs and undercooked potato blini that come with it leave something to be desired. Still, the setting is swell, service is attentive and it's quiet enough to talk, just not the top-notch experience you'd expect from a chef of this caliber. Gordon Ramsay at the London, 1020 N. San Vicente Blvd., West Hollywood; (310) 358-7788; www.thelondonwesthollywood.com . Breakfast served 6:30 to 10:30 a.m . Monday through Friday.
Best Asian breakfast restaurants in Los Angeles
BREAKFAST IS the last great dining frontier. Los Angeles is full of intrepid culinary explorers, venturing to all corners of the city in search of lunch and dinner; but as for the morning, we're often breakfast conservatives. Everybody knows about pancakes and waffles, and many are at home with Latin American breakfast staples. But Asian breakfasts are perhaps less well known. Except for dim sum, which is more of a fancy brunch option, what is Asian breakfast?
Hungarian peppers: a walk on the lighter side
THEY tumble out of farmers market crates entwined in pairs like folk dancers, elongated necks extending from slender, bell-shaped pods. Hungarian peppers, ranging in color from soft butter yellows to radiant greens, are back for their annual summer fling.
2006 Source Napa Gamble Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc
A gorgeous Sauvignon Blanc from Napa's Gamble Vineyard, which is planted to vrais (true) Sauvignon Musque de Loire and Preston Sauvignon Blanc clone. Pale gold, with a scent of ripe pears, honey and flowers, the 2006 Source Napa Sauvignon Blanc is crisp and clean, with a bright citrus zing and a light touch of oak -- perfect for summer drinking. The wine is the project of Bill Davies and Tom Gamble, who grew up in the business (Davies' family made wine and the Gambles farmed grapes) and have been friends since 1965 and the first day of nursery school. Serve it with gazpacho, vegetable antipasti or seafood dishes.
Chilled Cucumber Salad
Paella Perfect: Rediscover True Flavors Of Spain
Paella prepared on a kettle grill and served with a glass of cool sangria made for a magical party for food writer Bonny Wolf. But first she gathered a few tips on the proper equipment and ingredients for this traditional Spanish meal.