Here, Malcolm Gladwell, whose most recent book, Blink, I didn't much care for, gives a talk in the TEDTalks series on the lessons of one food scientist who discovered a long time ago that, in short, one size doesn't fit all.
Watch the video here.
I think it goes a bit beyond this. I think that we're just starting to scratch the surface of what he calls "discovering variability". I think, in fact, that what we're coming back to is what I've come to call "analog warmth". It's what audiophile talk about when they embrace the "warm" sound of an analog amplifier that uses vacuum tubes over a digital one that breaks everything down into ones and zeros, either/or.
Digital makes scalable, but the either/or of the whole thing robs digital of the warm feeling of life on the most basic level. Somewhere between the chaos of randomness and the order of binary code, there's life.
I've been thinking of this concept for a while and would like to start fleshing it out, maybe not even in the food realm, but it seems a good place to start. More later.
03 May 2007
02 May 2007
Gin Snobs
The New York Times just ran a story which denigrates vodka and celebrates gin. Piffle. They're just mad that they've been overpaying for Grey Goose like the rest of us for years. (Most of those ratings you see that put Smirnoff at the bottom and Grey Goose at the top are sighted, not blind tastings. With blind tastings, vodkas get ranked pretty randomly. It's all marketing... witness the spelling of the first word in "Grey Goose".)
I've found this to be true:
You can't trust a woman who drinks gin after sunset.
This may sound sexist, but the fact is you can't trust a man who drinks gin, period...
Unless it's a Ramos Gin Fizz... or the occasional Salty Dog... and I've always enjoyed a cold G&T on a hot afternoon. The Negroni's not a bad drink, though I'd rather have just the Campari with soda. Oh hell, I guess I'd rather cop to untrustworthiness than ruin the symmetry of the aphorism.
I've found this to be true:
You can't trust a woman who drinks gin after sunset.
This may sound sexist, but the fact is you can't trust a man who drinks gin, period...
Unless it's a Ramos Gin Fizz... or the occasional Salty Dog... and I've always enjoyed a cold G&T on a hot afternoon. The Negroni's not a bad drink, though I'd rather have just the Campari with soda. Oh hell, I guess I'd rather cop to untrustworthiness than ruin the symmetry of the aphorism.
30 April 2007
Maltagliati al Forno ai Funghi Porcini Secchi
Not only have the Italians given us pasta fresca, they've also given us a way to maintain our dignity (or at least some authenticity) when we screw it up. I made fresh pappardelle for M and her friend the other night. Since I was making fresh pasta, I went ahead and made extra to freeze against some late and hungry arrival home. Saturday evening was that late and hungry arrival, when we came home from a night in the Berkshires scoping out wedding venues.
I remembered the pappardelle in the freezer, and as is usual, started constructing a dinner menu in my head based on what I suspected was in the fridge and pantry. What I hadn't counted on, though was my idiocy in storing the pasta. I knew that it was the usual thing, after cutting up the pasta, to flour it before freezing, but I was eager to sit down with our guest on the night that I made it, so I just tossed it in a bag and the bag in the freezer. It was a big lump of wide noodles. I tried to peel them off one by one, but they just came apart. So I changed my approach. I had already been soaking some dried porcini mushrooms for the sauce, so I just took that broth, strained it through two layers of cheesecloth, threw in a porcini-flavored stock cube, and some cream and boiled it up, then thickened with Wondra flour, readding the rinsed chopped porcinis at the end with a generous grinding of black pepper.
In the meantime, I broke and picked apart the frozen fresh noodles into whatever shapes I could. As long as they were a single layer, they were fine. I boiled them up in salted water, then put them into a Pyrex baking dish that, in retrospect, I should've greased. I threw in the porcini bechamel I'd made and stirred it up, topping with a generous amount of finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano. Baked at 400 for 15 minutes or so and we were done.
Maltagliati al Forno ai Funghi Porcini Secchi. It made for awesome leftovers. M called it "noodle kugel but with mushrooms and not sweet"... Hmph.
Anyway, maltagliati means, basically "badly cut" in Italian. The term should usually be reserved for remnants, say from making panzerotti or some other round stuffed pasta, that are cut into soups, but repurposing the term for badly frozen pappardelle sits well with me.
In other news, tapioca pudding has proven to be beyond my culinary capabilities. I tried two recipes with Brazilian pearl tapioca from Kalyustan, the spice shop in Manhattan, and just can't get it to thicken right. Forget it. I'm going back to rice pudding.
I remembered the pappardelle in the freezer, and as is usual, started constructing a dinner menu in my head based on what I suspected was in the fridge and pantry. What I hadn't counted on, though was my idiocy in storing the pasta. I knew that it was the usual thing, after cutting up the pasta, to flour it before freezing, but I was eager to sit down with our guest on the night that I made it, so I just tossed it in a bag and the bag in the freezer. It was a big lump of wide noodles. I tried to peel them off one by one, but they just came apart. So I changed my approach. I had already been soaking some dried porcini mushrooms for the sauce, so I just took that broth, strained it through two layers of cheesecloth, threw in a porcini-flavored stock cube, and some cream and boiled it up, then thickened with Wondra flour, readding the rinsed chopped porcinis at the end with a generous grinding of black pepper.
In the meantime, I broke and picked apart the frozen fresh noodles into whatever shapes I could. As long as they were a single layer, they were fine. I boiled them up in salted water, then put them into a Pyrex baking dish that, in retrospect, I should've greased. I threw in the porcini bechamel I'd made and stirred it up, topping with a generous amount of finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano. Baked at 400 for 15 minutes or so and we were done.
Maltagliati al Forno ai Funghi Porcini Secchi. It made for awesome leftovers. M called it "noodle kugel but with mushrooms and not sweet"... Hmph.
Anyway, maltagliati means, basically "badly cut" in Italian. The term should usually be reserved for remnants, say from making panzerotti or some other round stuffed pasta, that are cut into soups, but repurposing the term for badly frozen pappardelle sits well with me.
In other news, tapioca pudding has proven to be beyond my culinary capabilities. I tried two recipes with Brazilian pearl tapioca from Kalyustan, the spice shop in Manhattan, and just can't get it to thicken right. Forget it. I'm going back to rice pudding.
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