I often read a book while stirring risotto...

-- This might be some of the strangest news I have heard in children’s literature: David O. Russell, director of I Heart Huckabees and Three Kings, is partnering (if you will…) with Simon & Schuster to write a middle-grade book series called Alienated. Russell has said that the series is about two kids who work for an “old tabloid that covers the world of freaks and aliens.” He will simultaneously write the screenplay for a film by the same name. Huh.

Thanks to Shelf Awareness (who got it from the NY Times) for this piece of news that still has me scratching my head…

-- I have recently discovered Café Tasse. And I think I’m in luuuuurve.

-- I anticipate my monthly issue of Saveur with bated breath – it is hands-down my favorite foodie mag. The latest issue proved why: there is this fabuloso article about how Saveur changed offices and now they’re in the East 30's here in NYC. Naturally, that means they had to design a brand-spankin’-new test kitchen. The article mentions the words “food editor”… and “kitchen assistant”… They talk about walnut chopping blocks and kitchen islands on wheels (multiple islands...I just want one). They talk about making the space warm and welcoming, yet functional. They mention that, when they’re working late at night, people will just sit on the countertops, chat, and generally hang out. Naturally, the article is chock-a-block of beautiful photos of said test kitchen. So here’s my question: what in the hell do I have to do to work there? I’m considering selling my soul… Which I suppose I couldn’t do because part of the reason I love food so much is because I’m an incredibly soulful person. But…whatev. I’m just trying to convey to you how badly I want a job like that…

-- Liz B. brought to my attention the issue of posting book jackets on blogs (or library websites, Amazon, etc.). Copyright law gives me such a headache; I find it endlessly confusing. I probably have quite a few things posted on my blog that I shouldn’t…but they add to my content, I’m not claiming the images as my own, and I’m receiving no money for them. And I’m not publishing the work in its entirety (i.e. the book). Doesn’t this count as fair use? My final thought is that I’m sure that if I was using something illegally, it would certainly piss people off and I’m sure they’d let me know.

I’ll probably be off for a couple days – my Soul Twin (BFF, if you must) is visiting from North Carolina. We’re basically going to spend the next three days eating and walking ourselves into a stupor. Which is my favorite thing to do with the Soul Twin. And my favorite thing to do in NYC…which is why I moved here.

Eat, drink, and do both as often as possible with your chosen family.

Newspaper Food Sections Around the Country

New York Times: * Apparently, Waverly Inn is the place to go. I wouldn’t know – that kind of thing is so not my kind of scene. Ugh. * Yet another article convinces me that I belong, not in the U.S., but in someplace like Italy, running my own inn and giving cooking classes. It's much sexier than doing a Barbara Kingsolver. * I loved Mark Bittman’s recipe for chapatis because I am attracted to any sort of bread baking that doesn’t require yeast and kneading: unfortunately, Bittman never explains if one can make them over a gas stove flame, for those of us in BBQ-less crappy NYC apartments (though, at the risk of sounding like a total arse, I distinctly remember that they made chapatis over a gas flame in Bend It Like Beckham. I'm just sayin'...). Making chapatis and chicken tikki masala are tops on my list of food-to-do’s.

San Francisco Chronicle: * Earthbound spinach won a taste test for the best bagged spinach. * Plums are all over the place lately and, in addition to lots of info about the different kinds of plums, this article has a recipe for Grilled Plum Salad with Brandy Mint Vinaigrette. Just what the doctor ordered this summer! * Like most foodies, I love cooking over an open flame, and this article reminisces about cooking sloppy joes over a fire at Brownie camp. Which made me think of making “banana boats” at camp. Anyone else? We’d split a banana with a knife, through the peel on one side without cutting through to the other side, and we’d place it in a piece of foil. Then in the crevice of the banana we would shove as many mini-chocolate chips and mini-marshallows as possible. Wrap up the whole thing with the foil. Then we would literally throw the packages in the campfire. A couple minutes later, a camp counselor would fish the “boats” out of the flames, and we would carefully unwrap them once they had cooled a little bit. I’m sure you can imagine the hot, gooey, sugar-sweet mess inside… Grab a spoon and enjoy!

Washington Post: * I liked the article titled, “The Prodigal Tomato’s Triumphant Return.” It’s written by Tim Stark, who also wrote Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer. * Speaking of tomatoes, the recipe for Pasta with Fresh Tomato, Roasted Garlic, and Brie sounds delectable, especially the idea of letting the sauce sit 1-2 hours to let the flavors really develop (though this step isn’t necessary). Hell, I’ll eat anything that has Brie in it.

Chicago Sun-Times: * If your kitchen is anything like mine, you also throw away a ridiculous amount of produce each week that has gone bad. This article includes some ideas for using all your fruit and veggies, buying the right amount, and saving money and waste.

Eat, drink, and enjoy all the brilliant food-writing available to you

Good things to greet you in the morning...

* I love dem fightin' words in the morning (post-coffee, of course). Oz and Ends socks it to G.P. Taylor, rightfully so (did you know he's the next C.S. Lewis? It's okay - you're forgiven if you didn't). Apparently Taylor likes to hit back...Oh, I hope so.

* WhileI was drinking my coffee, I sifted through the cool pile of F&Gs that I recently got from Scholastic's Spring '09 list. Barbara McClintock...Jeremy Tankard...Mark Teague...Sara Varon...At this point I am so loving my job. And then I unearthed Tillie Lays an Egg by Terry Golson, photographed by Ben Fink, which features hilarious pictures of Golson's own hens. I have no cover art or pictures because it's so new, but take my word for it: this book is a hoot. What I can show you, though, is Terry Golson's so-cool "Hen Cam" (yeah, Susan, I am totally thinking of you right now) and Ben Fink's photography site (no info about the book yet). Look for Tillie in January 2009.

* This isn't the first time I've wanted Rebecca's job over at Cooked Books: today she is featuring a menu from McDonnell's Drive-In, a popular L.A. restaurant in the 30's and 40's. A couple things: 1) what is a Broadway soda??? The text is blocked and I want to know!, 2) a double-decker peanut butter and jelly sandwich...with lettuce? Intriguing..., and 3) I love the quote on the menu - "Good food is good health." Indeed.

* We Are Never Full has a fantabulous post up re: Forbes' Top 10 Richest Celebrity Chef list. Not surprisingly, Rachael Ray is at the top of it, worth $18 million clams a year. Now, I'll confess here that Rachael Ray doesn't bother me as much as she seems to piss off most people: in fact, I'll defend her because we "perky" gals need to stick together (Katie Couric is part of our clan too). What I do take issue with is that Rachael Ray just isn't really a chef anymore. Heck, I'd argue she's hardly a cook anymore. She is a brand. Get her off this list. Here are the rest:

2. Wolfgang Puck - $16 million
3. Gordon Ramsay- $7.5 million
4. Nobuyuki Matsuhisa - $5 million
5. Alain Ducasse - $5 million
6. Paula Deen - $4.5 million
7. Mario Batali - $3 million
8. Tom Colicchio - $2 million
9. Bobby Flay - $1.5 million
10. Anthony Bourdain - $1.5 million

I was mildly surprised that Mario Batali was as low as he was, and I was annoyed that Deen was on there at all. But as a commenter said over at We Are Never Full: "All I can say is at least Sandra Lee isn’t on that list…because if she was, a vein in my head would burst…" Ditto.

Eat, drink, and make peace with Food Network's success

Cue "Eye of the Tiger": I can't give up yet!

So you can imagine how out-of-this-world-excited I was today when I saw that NYU had posted the booklist for my first Food Studies class. Because I’m soooo geeky that way.

- Of Frankenfoods and Golden Rice: Risks, Rewards, and Realities of Genetically Modified Foods by Frederick Buttel (Woo hoo!)

- Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon (Yeah, baby!)

- Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming by Julie Guthman (Bring it on!)

- Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850-1930 by Richard Orsi (Awesome!)

- American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century by Bruce L. Gardner (Fantastic!)

- Centrality of Agriculture: Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature by Colin A.M. Duncan (Okay, I paused here – it’s an $80 book. Whatever! I’ll use plastic!)

- Larding the Lean Earth by Richard Stoll (Rock on!)

- Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogies by Sarah Duncan (Sheep? Cool!)

- Home Grown: The Case of Local Food in a Global Market by Bruce Halweil (Brilliant!)

So I bought everything on the list, except for American Ag in the 20^th Century, which I checked out from the library. I clutched my card like a 5-year-old using it for the first time. I checked out the book. I took it back to my desk at work and cracked it open with enormous anticipation. Here is a sample of what I read:

The bearing of inequality on poverty is that, for a given income standard, or poverty line, and a given level of mean income of a group, the greater the inequality of income the larger the percentage of the group below the poverty level.

And I do not lie: The Whole Book Reads Like This. Don’t believe me? Let me randomly skip 100 pages ahead…Okay, here’s a sample from this page:

Although the sales and membership of cooperatives grew under the Capper-Volstead Act, it soon became evident that exemption from antitrust was not sufficient to confer decisive market power upon agricultural producers.

To quote Georgia Nicholson: Oh, what in fresh hell?

Eat, drink, and try not to second-guess your decisions.

Wine Notes from Oregon

So I had a few glasses of wine in Oregon (snicker, snicker), though I didn’t actually go wine-tasting (seeing as I don’t want to take Kiddo with me, Adam is a beer guy, and the pretensions of wine-tasting are definitely not my mom-in-law’s thing). Instead, we did something much more our style: we drove to Cost Plus and picked out local Northwest wines there.

One wine was Snoqualmie Vineyard’s Naked Chardonnay from the Columbia Valley. “Naked” of course because it is made from organically grown grapes. I enjoyed this one because it was rather warm during our Oregon visit and I appreciated that this wine didn’t thwonk me over the head with its oak and butter notes. It was light in every way, yet still flavorful with just enough stone fruit, butter, and wood to give it some weight.

My mother-in-law and I both loved Firesteed’s 2006 Pinot Noir from Rickreall, Oregon. Cathie had already bought the bottle sometime before we arrived and we both liked it so much that, when we were at Cost Plus, she bought another bottle. It was well-balanced with mellow wood, full of herbal and floral scents and flavors. It tasted like nature, like it belonged in the outdoors.

In interesting (stark, even) contrast to the Firesteed was the 2006 Pinot Noir from Benton-Lane Winery (really cool label). This wine was “certified sustainable and salmon safe.” It was extremely fruit-forward…in fact, it kind of blasted me with it, along with the strong scent of roses. Cathie and I just weren’t fans of this one. It lacked the earthy, soil flavor and balance that I love in a pinot. This struck me as a pinot in cab’s clothing.

Now, my question is this: was the Benton-Lane just a different pinot from the Firesteed? Or was it a bad pinot? I’m taking a guess the Benton-Lane was just not good. Like children’s literature, in wine there is a difference between quality and taste. Sure, I enjoy wines that more knowledgeable people would call poor quality (Clos du Bois, dammit), but they’re just my personal taste. Likewise, there are great quality wines that just aren’t my taste, like Merlot. The B-L was neither my taste nor was it good quality. I’m in the midst of reading Natalie MacLean’s Red, White, and Drunk All Over and she had this to say about pinot noir:

“In the New World, pinot noir is sometimes brutally treated to extract maximum flavor to compete with bolder wines such as shiraz and cabernet sauvignon. Grapes are left to ripen to excess on the vines, the juice is fermented for an extended period and then heavily oaked. Wines made this way taste cooked, sweet, and heavy, qualities that prompt some to mock them as ‘vinicolas’.”

In my vast knowledge of wine (hahaha!), I’m guessing that is what happened with the Benton-Lane. But I don’t know either. I find wine endlessly fascinating and confusing. So much so that I’m tempted to go back to the top of this post and replace all periods at the ends of sentences with question marks. Observe:

“In my vast knowledge of wine (hahaha!), I’m guessing that is what happened with the Benton-Lane?”

Eat, drink, and use declarative sentences.

REVIEW: Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

So after a marathon reading weekend, I have finished reading Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn. And now I’m going to talk about it so LOOK AWAY if you don’t want to read the spoilers!!!

So in some ways, the book was everything I wanted it to be…yet, in so many other ways, I felt bitterly disappointed. I vividly remember reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and thinking, if only for a moment, “Oh my god, Rowling’s going to do it! She’s really going to kill off Harry!” I really believed she might…after all, there was an 800-page build-up to The Moment. But as you all know, Rowling copped out. Not only that, but she even gave us a damned epilogue that is now the bane of the entire Harry Potter series.

Yeah, so Meyer did the same thing. Long story short, I feverishly read 700-pages, building up to the final showdown with the Volturi. And I actually found myself thinking, “Yes! Meyer’s gonna kill of Bella and Edward!” I actually found myself hoping she would, hoping that she’d be the rare brave author who wasn’t so infatuated with her own creation that she couldn’t take that big leap. It would have been so rad to have Bella and Edward die on the battlefield together, while Jacob lives happily ever with “Nessie” (!). But we all know that Meyer didn’t go there. Hell, she didn’t even give me a single battle scene, let alone any deaths (whatever, who cared about Irina anyway?).

The bane of the Twilight Saga will be Bella getting married and having a baby at 18 years old. Really. I can’t believe, with all the possible endings to a series, this is seemed to be the right conclusion to Meyer. A half-vampire, half-human baby that grows at an insane rate?! Wha…?!

What did please me, though, was that Meyer still managed to surprise me. For one, I really didn’t think she’d turn Bella into a vampire. So that was cool. For another thing, the whole middle section being narrated by Jacob was friggin awesome – it’s about time we got inside his head. Also, I wasn’t even convinced Meyer would have them get married. I certainly wasn’t prepared for Bella to get knocked up (yes, kids, you can get pregnant on your first time)! And have her body ripped apart by the monster fetus! And then have Jacob imprint on the baby! And, um, the sex was pretty incredible – down pillows torn to shreds! Bedposts totally destroyed! Vampires never get tired and can do it all night! Wow, we could all use a little vampire sex!

So I didn’t hate it…but I didn’t love it. I’ll always remember the first book…there’s no way Breaking Dawn will be memorable for me.

In conclusion, a couple more things:

- Okay, I’m admitting this publicly: I still don’t get the chess pieces on the cover. Can someone make me feel like an arse and explain it to me? I have no doubt I’m missing something obvious, particularly since nothing about this series is particularly subtle.

- Anyone else actually see Stephenie Meyer’s playlists for the series on her website? In the past year I’ve downloaded most of the songs and have them in their own playlist on my iPod (which I consequently listened to most of the time I was reading Breaking Dawn). That’s because I’m the biggest nerd ever. But I can thank Meyer for introducing me to Blue October and Muse.

- Check out Bookshelves of Doom’s spoiler-laden review. Yeah, what she said.

- I also agreed with Entertainment Weekly's review. And Teen Book Review put it well when she made a distinction between loving a book and enjoying your time reading it: I also did not love this book but I did enjoy reading it this weekend. Dear Author also had a good review with some interesting discussion going on in the comments section: with Bella getting married and pregnant at 18 years old, can we ignore the "inadvertent subtext informed by the religious culture of the author"? Another commenter also wrote this: "A masochistic girl who is in love with a gay vampire while a pedophilic werewolf loves her." This made me snort-laugh and reminded how silly all of this is, really.

Off on another mini-holiday

I'm flying out tomorrow morning for the beautiful green yonder...otherwise known as Oregon. So I'll be back blogging in about a week.

In the meantime, read "Touched By a Vampire," Laura Miller's article over at Salon.com. Laura obviously doesn't think much of the series, but her article is thoughtful and articulate. Which I much prefer to the flaming and trolling, thank you.

Eat, drink...instead of hanging out at a Breaking Dawn party tonight!

Top 10 Cooking Books

I’ve run across a few Top 10 Cookbook Lists lately, namely over at The Amateur Gourmet and this article in The Star. I had heard of most of them and own quite a few; luckily, there were none that I took real issue with. Adam (The Amateur Gourmet, not my husband) mentions The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook “not to cook from, just to have.” I see what he’s saying – there are definitely books I keep around because they’re beautiful but I don’t really use them. However, I certainly wouldn’t put those books in my Top10.

So you see what’s coming, right? Yep, I have to do a Top 10 of my own. These are the 10 Books I Could Not Live Without in my Crappy NYC Kitchen:

1. Barefoot Contessa (all of them) – Ina Garten. I have all but Parties! and I use them multiple times a week. Most recipes are manageable for the novice cook. Note: her recipes aren’t terribly friendly for the one- to two-person family; her serving size is usually for 6-8 people, which always makes for a ton of leftovers for our 3-person family.

2. Field Guide to Produce: How to Identify, Select, and Prepare Virtually Every Fruit and Vegetable at the Market by Aliza Green. Truly, I couldn’t live without this. It tells you the origin of every fruit and vegetable, including when it is in season, how to store it, what to look for when buying, and complementary flavors. Amazon has the Look Inside feature on this one so you can browse through it.

3. Patricia Wells’ Trattoria by Patricia Wells. Tough call because I love her Vegetable Heaven as well, but Trattoria is still my go-to book for simple, fresh, easy recipes. No beautiful pictures in this one…just beautiful food.

4. The French Market: More Recipes from a French Kitchen by Joanne Harris and Fran Warde. Classic French food without being pedantic or clichéd. Beautiful color photos of France.

5. The New Food Lover’s Companion by Sharon Tyler Herbst and Ron Herbst. Another resource I can’t live without. Especially when my daughter asks me, every meal, which foods contain vitamin C – I’ve looked up apples, mushrooms, and many more… Also gives brief histories and discusses different varieties and preparations.

6. Timing is Everything: The Complete Timing Guide to Cooking by Jack Piccolo. I don’t live and die by the times listed in this book; however, when I have dealt with an unfamiliar cut of meat or a new vegetable, this book has been invaluable at giving me a cooking guideline.

7. What to Drink with What You Eat by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. As I mentioned before, the definitive guide.

8. Cooking with Jamie and Jamie’s Italy by Jamie Oliver. I’m hooked. Some recipes are super-simple (Fifteen Christmas Salad) and some appear to be so difficult that I can’t attempt them until I have a proper kitchen. A little something for everyone…

9. Everyday Italian by Giada de Laurentiis. I know, total cliché, right? Nevertheless, her recipes are a godsend for a full-time working parent. They’re easy to make with easy-to-find ingredients, not to mention that it actually includes recipes my Kiddo will eat (yay, pasta!). For better or worse, this continues to be one of my go-to cookbooks.

10. I know not technically cookbooks, but I could not live without Saveur, Gourmet, Food and Wine, Cooking Light, and Bon Appétit. I tear out the recipes and keep them in a notebook, which I wrote about here. If you can’t afford subscriptions to all these, your local library should have most, if not all, of them (and they all have lots of content on their websites). But for heavens’ sake, PHOTOCOPY the recipes! Do NOT rip out the pages of the library’s copy. Sheesh, people.

Note: I just checked out Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes from the library and, from my first glimpse through it, I think this could be a new favorite. Cream Puffs in Venice reviewed it.

Eat, drink, and cultivate your food library.