“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 figured out a way to discuss it while maintaining my own credibility as a reasonably objective commentator.

So, I’ve chosen to sit back and let others do the work of making sense out of Michael’s latest attempt to clarify a subject that is so freighted with nonsense that I have made gazing at books about cooking in my(Fabulous!) local bookstore into a kind of sport where the goal is to experience “awe and disdain” simultaneously.

Anyway, check out this review in the New York Times. It’s a good one!

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

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 put up on the farm last year and built a tomato trellis. If it ends up looking anything like his did, by the time the tomatoes start fruiting, it’ll be a beautiful hedge.

Asparagus are coming in and I’ve eaten a few. Not as many as the damned ground hog who almost always seems to beat me to it. But I’ve got a surprise for him (or her) in the form a brand new 1000 feet per second pellet rifle. A .22 would be a better bet, but I’m not allowed to discharge firearms in my neighborhood. We are packed too closely together here for that. So the pellet gun will have to do. Now, if I can only learn to shoot straight…

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 sauce in the world is hunger.

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 stand or Stop & Shop.

So say goodbye to Balducci’s and count the seconds until someone buys the brand and opens an online store…

Balducci’s Makes a Quiet Exit From Manhattan Times

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 a thieving, drug addled war-mongering Hitler wannabe, Goering was in every other respect a typical Nazi party big shot in that he pined for the days when the mythical Aryan people lived as hunter gathers in the primeval forests of the Fatherland. So he set up a back breeding program to recreate some of the real animals that the imaginary Volk had hunted to extinction (Or did the Nazis blame some other group for the demise of native species? I’ll have to check on this.)

Ancient cattle species re-introduced to Britain – Science- msnbc.com

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 smaller number were born on the farm. He’s raising black and red Angus, Devons and Limousin bulls (see slideshow below).

None of the males are castrated (i.e. there are no steers) so they are more or less free to have their way with the females. It is a hoot to watch the three huge angus bulls in the field just below the kitchen window vying for dominance and not at all unlike watching a trio of high school football players playing smackdown in front of a bunch of cheerleaders.

To date we have butchered about a half dozen bulls and cows. This week we are taking apart a Limosin (pronounced more or less as Lim-ou-zan) bull that came back from the slaughterhouse weighing 1070 pounds. Once the bones are removed and turned into beef stock, we will be left with about 650 pounds of meat (maybe more) for roasts, steaks, sausage, hamburger, biltong and dog chews.

Yes, that’s right, dog chews.

A few weeks ago I realized that the tendons and other tough trim that would not got through the grinder and were not especially useful for stock, could be fashioned into treats for dogs. So I am now proud to say that I can add pet food manufacture to my curriculum vitae.

Life gets curiouser and curiouser.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 the field that holds the bones of similarly inane cooking shows like The Galloping Gourmet and Emeril’s Kitchen.

There are lots of reasons why I don’t like the idea of “cooking as contest”. But the bottom line is I believe that cooking for a medal or prize money is contrary to what professional cooking is fundamentally about.

In my view, the baseline purpose of all professional cooking is to provide nutrition to others in an aesthetically pleasing form. If high income is generated along the way, or one becomes famous for the rare aesthetic value of her work, all the better, but entertainment (which is the primary purpose of all of these shows that pit chefs against each other) should never be thought of as anything more than an unintended coincidence.

Of course, the environment within a kitchen can be competitive, and it can be healthy for cooks to compete with one another to see who can do the best work in the least amount of time. But I think it is not only silly to turn a process whose fundamental purpose is to keep others alive and edified in art into the culinary equivalent of a boxing match, it also degrades the profession.

Surgeons and dentists are charged with a job that is similar to that of professional cooks and understand that their fundamental job is to attend to the health of their patients in manner that assures their survival and sense of “well being.” Yet there is no reality TV show where teams of heart surgeons compete against a clock to replace heart valves or a contest where dentists perform root canals while being judged on the aesthetic value of their work.

I’m sure there are many reasons why there is nothing on TV called “Iron Thoracic Surgeon” or “Hell’s Dental Chair,” and one of them has to be that most doctors understand that participating in such things is undignified and would lower the public’s opinion of their profession. So why are there so many chefs willing to risk appearing as if the most important thing in the world was winning a game?

The best sauce in the world is hunger.