Recent food world discoveries the ES crew is loving and hating…
We’re usually not partial to Rachel Ray-esque products that dumb down food to the lowest common denominator, but anything that gets s’mores in our mouths quicker is fine by us.
If you felt the need for a taste in your mouth to remind you all day long that you are an insatiable glutton. (Photo: Holly Bailey, via Grub Street)
I love fall, and being from Illinois, I expect it to start in September. Not October. Or mid-November. Five years in DC and I am still in a state of denial as to the duration of summer, even after having to scrap my son’s bear costume because it was too hot out last year. On Halloween. At the end of October.
Upon awaking yesterday, the sky was gray, the air was crisp and the garden was looking half-dead (thanks Irene). Three clear signs of fall, if you ask me. Dear Husband had the car and the drizzle was drizzling, so it looked like an indoor day with the baby, the perfect kind of day to make soup. I pulled out my trusty Twelve Months of Monastery Soups and thumbed through the fall section. Tomato brandy soup sounded perfect. I could finally finish off the bottle of brandy that had been languishing on top of the fridge since last November.
The recipe called for making garlic herb stock first, using a “bouquet garni,” which apparently consists of tying together different sprigs of dried spices. When the soup’s done, you remove the bouquet from the pot and leave the gray, soggy mess on the steps of an ex-boyfriend’s house. Or something.
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If you know me personally (or even via Twitter), you know I’ve been doing quite a share of dating recently. So when I stumbled across Thought Catalog’s 20 Foods To Avoid On A Date…I realized maybe I’m ordering the wrong shit.
Although I don’t always do first dates over dinner because I don’t like eating with people I’m not very familiar with…some guys just insist, and I mean come on. I’m a writer. I’m not about to turn down a free meal.
Here’s the start of their list (you can read the rest over at Thought Catalog):
Fine, I’m probably not going to eat buffalo wings or corn on the cob on a date. Or a gas station hot dog. Because…if that’s what you’re eating on a date, that’s the least of your problems. But really. Egg drop soup? SPAGHETTI? CHEESE SAUCE? I LOVE CHEESE SAUCE. For the love of god, what am I supposed to eat on a date?
And for the record, I ate olives with pits discarded in a nearby dish on two recent dates (with the same man) who still seems interested. What I’m saying is…if my date likes olives, I’m going to take advantage of that shit.
But what do I know. I AM single. Am I single because I’m ordering the wrong foods? Does dating mean I have to give up my foodie-ness until I become comfortable enough with a person to eat a burrito?
Maybe they were just doomed from the start.
My mom’s colleague in Texas sent us this pepper holder for the grill. I went over for dinner last night and she decided we’d try it out with some grilled jalapeno poppers. She cored the jalapenos (with the jalapeno corer) and stuffed the peppers with manchego cheese.
What you can’t see in the picture is how many times the damn things fell out of the holder. First, my dad put it on the grill the wrong way, so the legs of the holder fell through the grates and the peppers went everywhere.
Even after that though, every time we moved it, another one tumbled down onto the grill. All three of us kept scrambling to pick them up before the cheese melted onto the grates. As soon as one went in, another would fall out. We chalked this up to the peppers being too big for the holder (TWSS?) or our Pennsylvanian inability to figure out this device.
We left it on the grill for 30 minutes and the peppers remained pretty crunchy. I tried one and my mouth was on fire, like, running into the kitchen to drink milk out of the carton, on fire. We gave up on the grill and put them on a baking sheet in a 400 degree oven for another 20 minutes.
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Ed. Note: Long-time Simmer favorite Belmontmedina is pretty pissed off about what a certain Washington Post reporter tweeted yesterday. Let the rant begin.
The Washington Post‘s Tim Carman (who I am quite fond of, since his days helming the food coverage at Washington City Paper) ventured this opinion on twitter yesterday, pictured above.
FALSE.
Pizza and burgers I get. I am obsessive about pizza. Everyone has a favorite crust, preferred toppings, feelings about sauce (classic Neapolitan with buffalo mozz for me please). And burgers…well, you’re talking to a girl who stuffs various cuts of meat in her grinder like a mad scientist (chicken burgers are actually quite tasty with ground thighs). But Cheesesteaks? Not igniting the passion of BBQ? Please.
Let’s examine, shall we?
Pizza and burgers are pretty universal, with various regions claiming various styles. So it makes sense that pizza and burgers would inspire strong convictions across the board. But I am under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that no one outside Philly and its immediate environs cares about cheesesteaks. (Except, of course, for those transplants that insist on irritating the rest of us by going on and on about cheesesteaks and the Eagles– sorry gansie).
But I’ll be charitable. Let’s give the cheesesteak-ers the Eastern seaboard from DC to Boston and the entire state of Pennsylvania, although I hear Pittsburgh is more Primanti Bros. than cheesesteak. Done.
Moving on to BBQ. I think we can all agree it inspires great passion. There are books. There are maps. There is an episode of Good Eats. You can immediately tell where someone is from based on their barbecue allegiance.
As a born-and-bred New Yorker, I’m predisposed to believe that bagels should be good enough on their own not to need much gussying up. Blueberry bagel? No thank you. Chocolate bagel? Only if you’re in Disneyworld. A good bagel should be fresh, doughy and fluffy enough that all it needs in the way of embellishment is a good schmear.
But I have to admit there is one new-school bagel variety I can get behind: the increasingly omnipresent asiago cheese bagel. Embarrasingly, I believe I first tried this kind 8 years ago at an Einstein Bros. Bagels shop, of all places (I know, I know, but I lived in DC at the time, and ES has already lamented the quality bagel crisis there).
I loved it. That rich, slightly burnt orange-y cheese on top can really take a mediocre bagel and make it great. Since then, I’ve seen asiago bagels all over the country, and I’m not about it. Not mad about it one bit.
But it got me thinking: why is asiago cheese the only kind that seems to ever be baked into a bagel? Why hasn’t this opened up a whole new world of cheesy bagel delights? Where are the parmesan bagels? The brie bagels? The cheddar and havarti bagels?
Is there some physical reason why asiago cheese is the only kind that works baked into a bagel? Does the asiago lobby have the bagel bakers on their payroll? Is their a conspiracy against cheddar? I don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth — it’s certainly not asiago bagels’ fault — but what’s the deal here? I want more cheesy bagels! Or at least I want some answers.
(Photo: Orijinal)
Along the same lines of the “hot coffee” litigation (come on, you didn’t know the coffee would be hot?), culinary school graduates are suing their culinary schools because they “were misled by recruiters about the value of a culinary education and their prospects after graduation.”
Not only is this ridiculous, but it is another example of people not taking responsibility for their actions. It is the generation of do-overs. Ooops, I got an F on my math test, can I have a do-over? I borrowed $500,000 to buy a house that I couldn’t afford, can I just walk away? I invested too much money into this ridiculous tech stock that I thought was going to sky-rocket. Why didn’t you talk me out of it? I want my money back. Since when did people start thinking it was okay to be let off the hook for everything? Why do we feel we are entitled to do-overs? When did risk become safe? This is not normal.
I’m sorry, but in the restaurant business, there aren’t very many do-overs. Do-overs cost money. You scorched an entire gallon of reduced balsamic vinegar? Well, a do-over doesn’t really exist for that. You burned it. You wasted about $30. People who want to sue a school for not disclosing to them obvious, common sense information should not be working in the restaurant business anyway, which may be one reason they couldn’t find a job. (Common sense is a necessary kitchen tool.) When I went to college, they did not tell me that I would someday want to quit my job as a financial advisor and go work in a kitchen for $10/hr. I feel like they should have known this. Maybe I could get my money back?
When did doing research and making informed decisions for yourself become someone else’s responsibility? I agree that some, if not all, expensive culinary schools are not worth the investment unless one is independently wealthy. All one needs to do is a simple online job search to see that an entry-level cook, including those with culinary degrees, makes slightly over minimum wage. This is what we call due diligence and takes a total of 30 seconds. Instead, let’s spend $20-30,000 first, and then worry about it. Sounds like a fantastic dumb idea to me.
Photo: AP/Eric Risberg