Tips From Art Culinaire
I’m always of two minds about Art Culinaire, the quarterly hardback food porn publication aimed at chefs. On one hand, the editing is slipshod and the recipes are unreliable. On the other, the photos are gorgeous and the ideas are inspiring.
A couple of ideas from the current issue grabbed me as I plotted out the menu for our most recent dinner party, probably the last one in our apartment. I tried them out, and I’ll definitely use them again.
Pine Nut Brittle
Swapping peanuts with pine nuts in crunchy caramel creates an odd candy. When you bite into it, there’s an explosion of pine nut flavor, but the nuts themselves disappear. You can see them, but you don’t feel them as your teeth slide through the sugar: I compared them to Rice Krispies. I didn’t bother looking at the Art Culinaire recipe; I just followed the peanut brittle recipe in David’s The Perfect Scoop, which is in turn our mutual friend Mary Jo’s recipe.
Extracting Marrow
Want to get marrow out of a beef bone to use as an ingredient? One recipe in this issue suggested putting the bones in a double boiler, but I don’t own a double boiler that can fit four big bones. Instead, I made a bain-mairie — which I view as a double boiler in different proportions — by placing the bones into an 8x8 glass baking dish, which I then put into a roasting pan. I added enough water to the roasting pan to come halfway up the side of the baking dish and covered the baking dish with foil. I cooked the whole thing in a 350° oven for 10 minutes. Then I scooped out the softened marrow with ease. (I put it into a dumpling and fried it; more on that later.)
- Go To Jojo
Over the years, I have urged my Bay Area readers to go to Jojo in Oakland. Sometimes I’ve done so overtly, but I have always kept a link to it on the right side of this blog. Melissa and I have many happy memories tied to the restaurant and its...
- Not About Food: The Other Kind Of Java
On Tuesday, our company’s president came all the way from Chicago to pay us a surprise visit. Many of you are probably thinking the same thing we all did: Uh oh. And sure enough, headquarters is shutting down our office and laying all of us off...
- Pardon Me, Turkeys
Want a safe topic for the family’s Thanksgiving dinner chatter? Snopes tracked down the history of the presidential pardon for turkeys. Who was the first president to issue a pardon for birds headed to the slaughterhouse? It may not be who you think. And...
- Mr. Manners On Dinner Parties
Many of you know that I’m a devoted listener of the Grammar Girl podcast. In today’s episode, she mentioned that Mr. Manners, one of the other podcasts in the same network, recently talked about dinner parties. There are transcripts for part...
- Mark Morford On The Baconator Ads
In Mark Morford’s latest opinion column for the San Francisco Chronicle, he rants about the new Wendy’s ads — and our culture of gluttony — in his typical stream-of-consciousness style. I guess everyone’s writing about food...