“Ratio” Cookbook Is a Recipe for Cooking as Easy as 3 – 2 – 1 – Review – NYTimes.com

I’ve not said much here about Ratio, Michael Ruhlman’s latest book, because having helped hammer out some of the underlying philosophical concepts and science (I think that is a fair characterization of my contribution. But one can never be sure how much of an effect one has on another person’s work.), I have not [...]

Now for something cheerful

Like a lot of you I have been busy getting my garden going. I built a cedar frame for a plot that last year was a pumpkin patch. There’s radishes, beets and peas coming up in there now. Sick and tired of staking tomatoes with bamboo stakes, I decided to emulate something that Trent Hendricks [...]

Egypt orders slaughter of all pigs over swine flu

This is fraking crazy and cannot be interpreted and anything other than an expression of contempt for pork (and pork eaters). At the very least, it is an out of the ballpark overreaction.
Egypt orders slaughter of all pigs over swine flu
The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Nation of Dunces?

Are enough people stupid enough to cause a decline in pork sales because they are afraid becoming infected with swine flu? Apparently so, which is why American swineherds have lobbied federal officials to refer to the epidemic as an outbreak if H1N1 virus instead of swine flu.
U.S. officials want ’swine’ out of flu name
The best [...]

Balducci’s is like, gone!

I don’t really care that the pretentious overpriced gourmet bloat mart that Balducci’s had become by birth of the naught-naughts is going the way of the passenger pigeon. But it is worth noting that at one time it was a really cool place to buy stuff that you could not get at your local farm [...]

Ancient Nazi cattle species re-introduced to Britain

The title of the this post is accurate. The auroch or something very close to the auroch is now roaming fields and woodlands somewhere in Britain after having gone locally extinct sometime during the Iron Age (circa 800 BCE) thanks in part to the efforts of Luftwaffe leader Herman Goering.
It seems that apart from being [...]

More Bull

Farmer Trent Hendricks, my butchery and charcuterie enabler, has been steadily increasing his stock of cattle over the winter months and now has a pretty healthy herd of grass fed animals whose ultimate fate is to become food. Almost all of the animals have been bought or traded into the farm as heifers, while [...]

A Light Snack

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Ratio This!

See Michael Ruhlman on The Early Show (CBS) as he promotes Ratio, his- to my mind sucessful- first attempt to bring Platonic order to the fundamental preparations of western cooking.
Watch CBS Videos Online
The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bad Game

Padma Lakshmi, game show referee

For once I will not mince words and say exactly how I feel about television shows that present cooking as a competitive sport: I hate them, they suck.

Top Chef, Iron Chef, The Next Iron Chef can all metaphorically burn in Hell’s Kitchen and their ashes scattered across [...]