I love lard, in measure. I love the color and aroma of it, and I love to make it. But for purely personal reasons, I don’t share the die hard lipophile’s passion for eating it. See, my paternal ancestors, who were all of an Italian demographic that used lard as its primary cooking [...]
Filed under: health, ingredients | 8 Comments »
I lost my writing mojo a couple of weeks ago following the death of close friend. I’m usually pretty resilient in the face of heartbreak but as my friend Michael Ruhlman wrote in a recent email “sometimes life drops a ceiling beam on your head” and there is nothing you can do until consciousness [...]
Filed under: junk food, musing, video | 8 Comments »
I’ve been saying for years that people who are only worried about themselves consuming antibiotics in food are missing the point of why putting antibiotics in animal feed is a bad idea
The likelihood that you will cultivate a strain of bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics by eating food that contains trace amounts of antibiotics [...]
Filed under: Food Safety | 3 Comments »
“Last week, protesters from PETA showed up at a Hempstead [Long Island, New York]elementary school, unannounced and uninvited, to try to convince youngsters leaving at day’s end that circuses mistreat their animals. The protesters handed out coloring books with stickers that read, ‘Circuses are no fun for animals.’”
Newsday
The best sauce in the world is hunger.
Filed under: Ethics, animal rights | 6 Comments »
Watch five once-famous restaurateurs and Sirio Maccione talk about what is takes to make a great restaurant. You will notice that none of them are chefs and recall that it was not that long ago that chefs became the principal public representatives of the restaurant business. Before chefs, it was the “suits” who ruled the [...]
Filed under: restaurants, video | 4 Comments »
by Mike Pardus
I’ve been seriously remiss in not documenting and thanking my friends Gable and Cathy Erenzo from Tuthilltown Spirits in Gardiner, NY, for sharing the “fruits” of their labors with me for almost a year now. Hand crafted, using only locally grown grains and fruits, doing everything from scratch ( most distillers buy spent [...]
Filed under: Mike Pardus, drink | 12 Comments »
Last night (Friday) we celebrated our daughter’s 15th birthday by hiding in our bedroom with the door locked while she and four of her friends had a “sleep-over” party. Actually, I’m kidding about hiding in the bedroom. I thought about doing something like that all week but it turned out to be unnecessary because the [...]
Filed under: cooking techniques, great food, slow food | 11 Comments »
Two products named Let’s Pizza have appeared in the marketplace in recent weeks. One is a vending machine that makes pizza from scratch in three minutes. The other is an iPhone application that allows the user to make a virtual pizza and eat a virtual slice. (Yum) The vending machine is kind of cool, but [...]
Filed under: "other" food, cooking techniques | 4 Comments »
Why are we so willing to believe health claims about foods that are not supported by strong empirical evidence? Is our desire to be healthy without having to think too much about what is required to maintain good health so strong that our innate skepticism buckles whenever an earnest friend, slick salesman or too-eager-to-write-good-copy journalist [...]
Filed under: health, junk food, science | 6 Comments »
After almost 30 years of working in the service of the gods of the hearth, you would think that a narcissist like me would have lots of pictures of himself in uniform. But the startling truth is that I’m not sure that I have any…until now. This is a photo of me (wearing my typical [...]
Filed under: CIA, chefs | 8 Comments »
