29 Mar 2011 18 Comments
in Observations, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories) Tags: pet peeves, Skinny Girls, Top Ten lists
When it comes to food, everyone’s got their own pet peeves. Maybe for you, it’s the way your spouse chews their food, or restaurants that serve Chinese food and sushi.
Here’s ten of my greatest food-related annoyances, in no particular order: More
11 Mar 2011 8 Comments
in Cookbooks, Cooking Tips, Observations, Recipes Tags: A Day at El Bulli, Adam Perry Lang, Coco, cold cucumber soup, Ferran Adria, Joy of Cooking, mom, Ratio, Saveur, Scandia, Serious Barbecue, Treasury of Great Recipes, Vincent Price, Wine Spectator
The coffee table at our house
I have a Master’s degree in creative writing. But I’ve always said, the way I learned the most was by reading the great writers. Same with cooking.
I didn’t go to school for cooking. Most chefs didn’t. (Nor did William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf have Master’s degrees in writing.) I cooked in restaurants when I was a younger man. But I learned the most by reading, observing, studying what the great chefs were doing and doing that too, and by trial and error. More
22 Feb 2011 5 Comments
in Observations, On the Road Tags: avant garde, el Bulli, Ferran Adria, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, modernism, molecular cooking, Picasso, Spain
Ferran Adria & staff on the beach at Cala Montjoi
I once exchanged emails with el Bulli. If you’re one of the increasingly few people on Earth who have not heard of el Bulli, it’s a restaurant on an isolated bay called Cala Montjoi on Spain’s Costa Brava, a couple hours north of Barcelona. And even if you’ve not heard of it, you’ve been eating its influence whether you recognized it or not for years. More
14 Feb 2011 3 Comments
in Observations, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories) Tags: kitchen, man cave, valentine
Some of my friends have “man caves.” Converted garages, bonus rooms, dens, workout rooms and tool-sheds where wives and children tread lightly; places where an exasperated male can retreat to play a video game, take a hit of weed, read a magazine or god knows what else… (I’ve never actually been in one, so this is all just speculation.) More
skinny girls & mayonnaise 