Cooking Up A Storm

Chefs Looking to Start Small Carve Out Temporary Quarters in Established Kitchens

2012-01-09T18:52:00.000-05:00

by Naomi Martin

Facing high risk, stiff competition and the need for expensive startup capital, entrepreneurs opening new restaurants in New Orleans have never had it easy. But now, with the recession causing banks to tighten lending, financing a new restaurant can be harder than ever.

Enter the "pop-up restaurant."

A chef "pops up" a temporary restaurant -- usually just one night a week -- inside the shell of another restaurant during its off-hours. Using the host restaurant's silverware, linens and cooking equipment, the pop-up's staff serves customers a limited menu of usually five options. Having swept through New York and Los Angeles, the phenomenon is now emerging in New Orleans.

For some chefs, pop-ups are a way to test-drive the local market and gauge demand before investing in a full-scale restaurant. For others, it's a way to try out life as a chef, while still maintaining a day job.

"Eleven years ago I opened up Dante's, and that was a hell of a challenge," said Eman Loubier, owner of Dante's Kitchen in Uptown New Orleans. "But the timing then was better than it is now. Banks were a little easier with loaning. It was a little easier to get financing."

Loubier recently opened a pop-up restaurant called Noodles and Pie, serving items like braised duck noodle soup and honey-pine nut pie with lavender whipped cream. Noodles and Pie opens Monday nights inside Coulis, a breakfast restaurant Uptown that typically closes at 2 p.m.

"It was really just a matter of necessity, not us wanting to do something trendy or cool," said Mike Friedman, who runs Pizza Delicious every Sunday and Thursday night out of a shared Bywater kitchen.

So far, there are about a dozen pop-ups on any given week in the city. Many are so popular that they routinely sell out of food within hours, a lofty goal that many traditional restaurants can only dream of.
That popularity owes much to the rise of social media. Each pop-up has hundreds of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, making it easy to update a mass audience on the upcoming week's location, hours of operation and menu. Even just a few years ago, it would have been nearly impossible for an unofficial restaurant to attract enough customers to stay viable, said chef Peter Vazquez, who runs a pop-up out of Stein's Deli on Magazine Street every Sunday night.

Read the complete story here.

Farewell to Argentina's Famed Beef?

2011-12-14T21:08:00.000-05:00

by Nancy Shute

When I think of Argentina, I think of beef from cows that graze on the endless pampas, tended by watchful gauchos. That grass-fed beef has been the centerpiece of Argentina's most famous dish, a slow-cooked asado on the parilla.

But while in Buenos Aires last week, I discovered that the pampas-raised beef of my reveries is practically a thing of the past. Today, most cattle in Argentina are raised in feedlots, just like in the U.S. That transition has been driven by soaring prices in the global grain markets over the past decade, making it far more profitable to raise soybeans, wheat and corn than herd cattle.

That may be good news for grain farmers, but it's not a welcome change for the chefs of Buenos Aires. "It's politics, not gastronomy," says Javier Urondo, chef and owner of Urondo Bar and Restaurant in the Parque Chacubuco neighborhood.

Urondo would much rather buy grass-fed beef, but says it's impossible because the industry doesn't identify meat by production method. "There's no way of knowing," the affable 54-year-old told me over a late lunch at Bar Seis in the Palermo Soho neighborhood. "Even my butcher doesn't know."

And because the change has been gradual, Urondo says, most customers don't notice the difference. (That thought was seconded in a September report on Argentina's beef production by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service.)
Dan Perlman, an American chef and writer living in Buenos Aires who runs his own "secret" restaurant, Casa SaltShaker, has also noticed the difference. "When I first came to Argentina, I said, 'This is what beef is supposed to taste like!' Now, it's just steak," Perlman says.

How exactly does grass-fed beef taste difference from grain-fed beef? As NPR's Allison Aubrey has reported, the meat from cows that dine on grass may be chewier and less fatty. She also cites a recent analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists that found that grass-fed steak has about twice as many omega-3s as a typical grain-fed steak.

The flavor used to be a selling point for Argentina, which has a long, proud history as the world's great exporter of beef, starting way back in the 1800s. But in recent years Argentina has ceded that crown to Brazil.

Government policies are also helping shrink the country's beef exports. For years, the price of beef was kept artificially low to encourage domestic consumption.

But that didn't suit the cattlemen too well. "The producers have responded by saying, 'we're going to switch to producing grains'," says Michael Boland, director of the Food Industry Center at the University of Minnesota. He's been following the transformation of Argentine beef closely, both as a researcher and as someone who loves to eat. "The Malbec and the beef," he recalls wistfully. "That, to me, is Argentina."

Read the rest of the story here.

Turning Star Chefs into Must-See TV

2011-12-05T13:20:00.000-05:00

At a recent meal at Jean Georges restaurant in New York, Charles Pinsky pushed a dish of foie gras on brioche with spiced fig jam toward his dining companion. "You eat mine. It's delicious, but I've had it about 200 times," said Mr. Pinsky, shrugging. Describing dining at El Bulli in Spain shortly before it closed, and attending the restaurant Chez Panisse's 40th-anniversary party, he waved his hand, muttering, "Yeah, yeah. I'm over it."

Being cynical about star chefs and immune to the glamour of haute cuisine may sound like the kiss of death for a producer and director of food television. But being easily bored may be Mr. Pinsky's greatest asset.
Throughout his 20-year-plus career, which has included four James Beard awards and dozens of public television cooking series and specials—with chefs and celebrities like Mario Batali, Jacques Pépin and Gwyneth Paltrow—Mr. Pinsky, 61, has been on a continual search for the "the next new idea."

Before he takes on a project, Mr. Pinsky said, he asks himself how it will be different from what he has done before. This principle pushed him into a series that he is developing with Phil Rosenthal, a comedy writer and the creator of the television show "Everybody Loves Raymond." The attraction to Mr. Pinsky is figuring out how to combine comedy and food.

To flesh out an idea, Mr. Pinsky schedules many long conversations with a potential collaborator, often over restaurant meals. In late August, he went on a four-day eating journey through Los Angeles and San Francisco with Mr. Rosenthal, whom Mr. Pinsky describes as "a skinny guy who can out-enthusiasm and out-eat just about anybody." The pair began at Mozza restaurant in Los Angeles, then flew to San Francisco to eat eggs with pork and kimchi at Boulette's Larder. Over the next couple of days, they came up with a series idea in which Mr. Rosenthal will accompany famous chefs as they live out their ultimate food fantasies, while providing comedic, direct-to-camera narration.

Each series begins with a scouting trip. As he scouts, Mr. Pinsky takes pictures with his BlackBerry of interesting characters or scenes, and writes a two-to-three-line description about who and where they are. Then he emails these mini-portraits, sometimes one or two per day, to a list of about 20 friends, including chefs Mr. Batali and Gary Danko, cookbook authors Mark Bittman and Julia Turshen and Mr. Pinsky's two sisters. There's little science to this method—Mr. Pinsky doesn't count votes—but he said that a big cheer from his list will usually lead him to shoot the story.

Scrolling through his BlackBerry, Mr. Pinsky landed on a picture of an elderly Korean woman in traditional dress stooped over a cauldron. She was demonstrating how to make cabbage and pork soup, a combination of ingredients that Mr. Pinsky's star, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, grew up eating in France. Mr. Pinsky said that his email panel loved the image and the idea that a world-famous chef and an old Korean lady had a comfort food in common. These scenes became a high point in a show he produced in Korea about the chef, his Korea-born wife and actors Heather Graham and Hugh Jackman.

Read the rest of the story here.

Kitchen Ink: Tattoos A New Part of Culinary Culture

2011-12-02T11:05:00.000-05:00

Stephanie Izard looks like the girl next door, all T-shirt and curly pony tail. Until she wipes the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. And then you see it.

The fish tattoo.

“Cooking is an art and tattoos are another form of art,” says the chef-owner of Chicago’s acclaimed Girl and the Goat restaurant, showing off the delicate drawing on the inside of her wrist. Roll up her pants and a pea tendril struggles up her calf, a tiny plant becoming strong. A bright green gecko sits on one hip. A dolphin resides somewhere unshowable. And across her back, the piece de resistance — a blossoming basil plant encircled by cartoonish flying pigs.

“People come into our restaurant and say ‘Do you only hire line chefs with tattoos?’” says Izard, the first and only woman to win Bravo’s “Top Chef.” ‘’No, we just happen to have lot of them covered in them.”

Once considered the province of sailors, bikers, ex-cons and, of course, college hipsters, tattoos have become standard attire in professional kitchens, a symbol of culinary culture as surely as a toque. Whether the drawings are egg beaters, lemon meringue pies or ancient tribal motifs, body art in the kitchen is now so mainstream that everyone from lowly kitchen rats to celebrity chefs proudly display their work on television, magazine covers, high-end catalogues and in the pages of their cookbooks, making culinistas ever more like rock stars.

“It used to be those cockamamie chef hats that denoted an expertise with a spatula,” says Rocky Rakovic, editor of Inked magazine, a publication dedicated to tattoo culture and that has featured several chefs. “But now time in many kitchens is represented by the amount of tattoos one has.”

Meat cutting diagrams — the different cuts of a pig or cow denoted by dotted lines — and kitchen knives done like daggers are popular with chefs, tattoo artists say. Cupcakes, hot dogs, pies, equipment — a stand mixer showing a reflection in the stainless steel bowl receives raves from tattoo connoisseurs — are standard when you’re talking food tattoos. Food Network chef Duff Goldman, also known as The Ace of Cakes, has a whisk.

Hugh Acheson, chef-partner of three acclaimed Georgia restaurants, who has four tattoos himself, including the names of his wife and children, as well as a Mayan god he got during a trip to the Yucatan peninsula when he was 16 (he swears he was sober). His favorite is the radish on the inside of his left forearm, which commemorates the first plant he grew at his house more than a decade ago, and which gets the spotlight in his new cookbook’s food photos.

But lots of chefs make little or no reference to their profession. In those cases, the ink — and the reasons for getting it — are as individual as the chef.

Bryan Voltaggio, the 35-year-old chef-owner of Volt Restaurant in Frederick, Md., and a finalist (along with brother Michael) on season 6 of “Top Chef,” has six tattoos, including a nautical star to guide him. The names of his children and their Chinese zodiac signs celebrate their births. And his lightening bolt — a tattoo he shares with even more heavily tattooed Michael — celebrates their friendship with childhood buddies (who also have the same tattoo).

Marc Forgione’s eight tattoos represent turning points in his life or career: the Navajo art that inspired him to open his own restaurant; the “1621” on both biceps documenting his recreation of the first Thanksgiving, the meal that cinched his 2010 win on the Food Network’s “The Next Iron Chef”; the tribal infinity symbol his parents gave him on his 18th birthday.

“I use them almost like a roadmap of my life,” says the 32-year-old chef-owner of Restaurant Marc Forgione. “They all have their own little story. It’s a badge of memory.”

Chefs with tattoos are nothing new, Rakovic says. What is new is their emergence from the bowels of restaurant life onto television and into the spotlight. But industry watchers like Dana Cowin, editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine, say the volume of ink has definitely increased during the past five years or so — and it should be no surprise.

“If you look at a chef with beautiful tatts you might also be looking at a chef that presents very beautifully plated food,” says Cowin, whose July 2009 cover featured the elaborately inscribed arms of chefs Nate Appleman and Vinny Dotolo and drew fire from a few readers who thought it was in poor taste. “So the opposite conclusion can be drawn: not ‘They’re heathens,’ but, ‘They must be appreciators of art.’”

Which is exactly why chefs like them. “Chefs are artistic people who get inspired by things and that has a lot to do with tattoos,” Forgione says. “We’re kind of artistic, rebellious, a little crazy.”

Read the complete story here.

George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation (1789).....Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T10:53:00.000-05:00

WHEREAS it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me "to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANKSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

NOW THEREFORE, I do recommend and assign THURSDAY, the TWENTY-SIXTH DAY of NOVEMBER next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed;-- for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish Constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted;-- for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge;-- and, in general, for all the great and various favours which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also, that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions;-- to enable us all, whether in publick or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us); and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

GIVEN under my hand, at the city of New-York, the third day of October, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.

No Need to Gripe About Tripe

2011-11-14T14:09:00.000-05:00

The French term jolie laide translates to "pretty ugly," and refers to the striking beauty found in what would conventionally be deemed unattractive.

Bandied about in the fashion world, the phrase has a place now in food too. Suddenly, the ugly ducklings of ingredients, such as odd meat cuts, are the gourmet swans. Case in point: tripe—a word with sour enough connotations. Calvin W. Schwabe's "Unmentionable Cuisine" describes it as "the beef stomach…actually all four stomachs of cattle, sheep and other ruminant animals."

Among the four digestive chambers hoofed creatures possess, it is the cow's reticulum lining that is getting all the culinary play, particularly its protein-rich "honeycomb" lining (shaped and textured like the bee variety).

Recently, Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi of Manhattan's Torrisi Italian Specialties teased the cow tummy into a calamari-like state. "It is very thinly sliced tripe that has been boiled for several hours," said Mr. Carbone. "We toss it with currants, peanuts, fermented chili and an emulsion of lemon peel."

Andrew Carmellini, chef of the Dutch in Manhattan, serves Barrio Tripe, cooked "low and slow with a lot of love and attention," he said. Simmered in beer—then garnished with avocado, lime and a Fritos dusting—his tripe dish has a Mexican foundation.

Meanwhile, in Oxford, Miss., John Currence of City Grocery Restaurant Group, is cooking tripe like chitterlings, frying the whole piece and serving it with either a Creole-spiced romanesco or a Southern-spiced harissa. (Chitterlings, or "chitlins," are pig intestines.)

San Francisco's offal overlord Chris Cosentino takes tripe still further. "We grill it, fry it crispy, even make dessert with it," he said.

In Italy, according to Jacob Kenedy, chef of London's Bocca di Lupo, tripe is an omnipresent cut served distinctly in each region. From Lazio, in central Italy, his is one of the most straightforward preparations -Trippa alla Romana balances the gut's strong taste with tomato, guanciale, mint and pecorino.

The cardinal rule of "tripery"? Pre-cook it for at least two hours. (Fill a stockpot with water, add lemon juice, some salt and turn on the gas.) A savory, warming bowlful proves the sumptuous ends justify the malodorous means.

Find a great tripe recipe here.

Say Goodbye to 'One of the Good Guys"

2011-11-11T09:16:00.000-05:00

The message dated Nov. 6 was simple and poignant: "Your Neighbor's Garden is closed."

The email and Facebook post made the rounds of the local food community following the death of Your Neighbor's Garden owner Ross Faris after a bicycle accident last Saturday.

As the message explained, "The family and staff have decided it best to end our season early and close the market as we take time to grieve."

It's OK. We understand.

We're grieving, too.

Anyone who met Ross at a local farmers market or stopped by Your Neighbor's Garden over the years can't help but feel the loss.

The City Market's Stevi Stoesz certainly does. She met Ross in 1996 when he helped her develop plans for the popular Downtown farmers market.

"He was my very first vendor and biggest cheerleader," said Stoesz, "for not only the farmers market at the City Market, but all the great area markets."

Local food activist, writer and consultant Wendell Fowler said simply, "I'm heartbroken. Ross was one of the good guys."

And R Bistro's Erin Kem spoke for all local food fans when she said, "I can't imagine a growing season without him."

Read more of Jolene Ketzenberger's tribute to this amazing and inspirational man here.

Good Old American Cooking — the Way the Native Americans Used to Make

2011-10-31T19:56:00.000-04:00

For years, unless you lived on or near a reservation — or happened to be visiting the cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian — you were unlikely to be able to go out for Native American food.

But now, residents of Denver, Colorado, are able to feast on Indian tacos, green chile stew, wojapi (a thick berry dessert) and more, thanks to Osage Indian Ben Jacobs and his restaurant Tocabe: an American Indian Eatery.

"I want native food to be much more in the public eye," says Jacobs, 28. "Feasting is a big part of our culture, and eating together is important to us, just like for many other cultures." Judging by Tocabe's success, Jacobs is getting his wish for many more Americans to experience indigenous eats.

Read the complete story here.

Top Military Cooks Embrace Week at Culinary School

2011-10-31T19:41:00.000-04:00

When Sgt. Arturo Torres joined the U.S. Marine Corps five years ago, he wanted to be an infantryman. After all, the Marines' reputation is largely built on the expertise of its infantry.

But the 18-year-old's mother didn't like the idea one bit - especially in wartime.

When Torres explained that to the recruiter in his hometown of Dallas, the recruiter made a suggestion: food service.

At first it didn't seem that exciting. But when Torres was deployed to Iraq three years ago and got to cook for then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, food service took on a whole new shine.

Air Force Senior Airman Ashleen Cacciatore thinks her last name might have had something to do with the reason she's now feeding 500 people a day at McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, a joint military base in Trenton, N.J. The 26-year-old originally wanted an assignment in mental health but was sent to the kitchen. Now, getting told "35,000 times a day that Air Force food is so much better than any of the other armed forces' grub" has more than convinced her it was the right decision, she said.

Torres, Cacciatore and 23 other cooks from the Marines, Air Force and Air National Guard were selected by the Hennessy Travelers Association's Educational Foundation for the annual Armed Forces Forum for Culinary Excellence at the Culinary Institute of America Greystone campus in St. Helena.

For a week the military cooks hone their skills at the venerable chefs school, learning everything from chopping techniques to how to prepare healthful meals. And Hennessy, an association of volunteers from the food-service and hospitality industries that raises hundreds of thousands of dollars from private donors each year, is picking up the entire tab, said Carmen Vacalebre, a Connecticut restaurateur and president of the group.

The group's mission is to promote educational opportunities for members of the armed forces serving in hospitality as well as help military cafeterias run more efficiently and effectively. The organization also helps former military cooks pursue careers in food service in the civilian world.

"These 25 individuals chosen for the forum have been identified as the cream of the crop," said Jack Kleckner, a Hennessy group member.

The hope is that the young cooks will go back to their mess halls and motivate others with their food and proficiency, said Art Ritt, an officer with the association. "We're trying to teach them how to think out of the box," he said.

One day this week, they were learning how to tart up leftovers, with Greystone instructor Tom Wong showing them how to use up yesterday's tomatoes by making salsa.

"It's a chance of a lifetime," said Jamie Schoewe, a staff sergeant in the Air National Guard in Milwaukee who spends one weekend a month cooking for the troops. "I can take everything that I'm learning back and teach everyone else."

Schoewe, 24, said she requested her kitchen assignment, which sometimes involves cooking meals for as many as 1,200 troops a day.

"There's something about preparing a meal for the people around you," she said. "It's nurturing."

She got some kitchen training in the Air Force's technical school, "but it was nothing like this," she said about the courses she's attended at the Culinary Institute.

Read the rest of the story here.

Food Trend Alert:: Ancient recipes

2011-10-16T18:15:00.000-04:00

Had enough bacon ice cream and Korean barbecue? The next food trend-in-the-making may be for you—Ye Olde Recipe.

Chefs are raiding ancient Roman texts, Renaissance manuscripts and 19th-century American cookbooks in search of authentic old recipes with which to tempt jaded foodies. Many of the recipes call for unfamiliar—and somewhat unappetizing—ingredients like songbirds, veal brains, the ancient herb hyssop and "preboggin" (pray-bo-ZHAWN), a fancy name for wild greens, also known as "weeds."

Some chefs have an insatiable appetite for recreating really old, hard-to-get recipes. An Italian restaurant in Chicago prepares a meal inspired by a 4th Century gourmand. Is history really worth resurrecting? Alina Dizik has details on Lunch Break.

With food-truck cuisine, Asian fusion and other blockbuster trends starting to feel a bit stale, adventurous foodies are drawn to the back stories and unusual ingredients of historic cuisine. In many cases, the trend overlaps with the slow-food movement's interest in unprocessed, home-prepared foods. For restaurants, recipes unearthed from the past are a fresh way to attract attention and boost sales.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, open since January in the Mandarin Oriental in London, specializes in dishes from Britain's past: Rice and Flesh (c. 1390), Savoury Porridge (c. 1660), Roast Marrowbone (c. 1720) and Spiced Pigeon (c. 1780). At Next, a creation of Alinea's Grant Achatz that launched earlier this year in Chicago, a rotating prix fixe menu features dishes such as Duck with Blood Sauce, in which duck parts are put through an antique duck press. The dish is based on a 1906 Paris preparation inspired by August Escoffier's 1903 text Le Guide Culinaire.

At Pensiero, a modern Italian restaurant in Evanston, Ill., chef Brandon Baltzley is putting together an historic menu for a 10-course, $140-a-person dinner later this month. The inspiration is the 10 tomes of Apicius, a collection of Roman recipes believed to date from 4th and 5th centuries. "[People] are bored," says Mr. Baltzley who found the books in a university library. "They like to do something they can say no one else is doing."

So far, Mr. Baltzley has confirmed he'll prepare the Meat Mincer, a gory second course of langoustine sausage, spelt and veal brains. For other dishes, he wants to experiment with pig udders and pig wombs—although they are highly unlikely to appear on the final menu because they aren't inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and farmers can't sell them. "You need to find a crazy farmer that will give it to you," Mr. Baltzley says.

One recipe he won't bother to explore: Stuffed Dormouse.

But with historic-menu ingredients costing as much as double those of a regular meal, chefs are pursuing the trend mainly in reservations-only tastings and other events during hours when a restaurant is usually closed.

Sarah Lohman, founder of Four Pounds Flour, a blog devoted to "historic gastronomy," recently posted recipes for Baked Alaska and a tamale recipe dating from 1890s New York. "We want to be eating the food that our forefathers ate," Ms. Lohman says.

If some old recipes sound less than scrumptious, here's why. People "ate more parts of the animal and more parts of a plant that today we'd throw away," says Francine Segan, author of "Shakespeare's Kitchen," a 2003 book of updated Renaissance recipes. The idea that cinnamon and nutmeg hid the taste of old meat isn't true, she says. "They wouldn't put expensive spices on top of rotten meat."

Marco Frattaroli, a Portland, Ore., chef, recently hosted a dinner inspired by the Renaissance at his restaurant, Bastas Trattoria, where he spit-roasted pig, rabbit and quail, rather than the robins and other songbirds specified in the old recipe. He is basing future menus on dishes from the Roman era and the Jewish Diaspora in Italy.

Read the complete story here.

Grilled Chicken, That Temperamental Star

2011-10-11T09:59:00.000-04:00

by David Segal

THE sauce will not behave.

It is supposed to drip twice, on cue, from the bottom right-hand corner of a forkful of tortellini — first as the fork is lifted above the plate and, second, after the fork pauses briefly in the air and starts to rise again.

Two drips. A sequence that lasts a second and a half, tops.

A dozen men at MacGuffin Films, a studio in Manhattan, are struggling to capture this moment. For more than an hour one recent afternoon, they huddle around a table rimmed with enormous stage lights, fussing over a casserole as if it’s a movie star getting primped for a close-up.

“Lights. Roll. Action. Drip!” shouts Michael Somoroff, a veteran commercial director who has shot television ads for Red Lobster, Burger King, Papa John’s and dozens of other fast-food and casual-dining chains. A specialist in the little-known world of tabletop directing — named for the piece of furniture where most of the work is set — Mr. Somoroff is hired to turn the most mundane and fattening staples of the American diet into luscious objects of irresistible beauty.

If you watch television, you’ve seen his work, and the work of the five or six other major players in this micro-niche of advertising. These men — yes, they’re all men — make glossy vignettes that star butter-soaked scallops and glistening burgers. Their cameras swirl around fried chicken, tunnel through devil’s food cake and gape as soft-serve cones levitate and spin.

Few outside the business know their names. But given the more than $4 billion in television air time bought by restaurant chains and food conglomerates each year, these directors arguably have some of the widest exposure of any commercial artists in the country. In a typical week, tens of millions of viewers see their work.

“Aside from movie directors,” Mr. Somoroff says during a break in shooting, “I don’t know anyone with an audience as large as mine.”

On this particular afternoon, he is filming a commercial for a chain that did not want to see its name in this article. And you can sort of understand why. If you’ve ever been to a restaurant and thought, “This does not look like the dish in the ad,” here’s the irony: The dish in the ad doesn’t look like the dish in the ad, either.
This casserole shot, for instance, is an elaborate tango of artifice, technology and timing. The steam wafting over the dish comes not from the food, but from a stagehand crouched under a table with the kind of machine that unwrinkles trousers.

The hint of Alfredo sauce that appears when the fork emerges from the pasta? That’s courtesy of tubes hidden in the back of the dish and hooked to what look like large hypodermic needles. Moments before each take, Mr. Somoroff yells, “Ooze!” That tells the guy with the needles, standing just outside of the frame, to start pumping.

As for that quarrelsome drip from the fork, it is the responsibility of Anthony DeRobertis, a special-effects rigger who holds his own hypodermic of sauce and is having a hard time synching with a hand model, a young man with a military haircut who is clutching the fork.

“Anthony, the second drip is about 10 minutes after the shot is over,” says Mr. Somoroff after five or six takes, sounding faintly annoyed.

“I’m right on it,” Mr. DeRobertis says.

“You’re on it, but it’s not dripping when it has to drip.”

A break is called and a tube is attached to Mr. DeRobertis’s sauce injector, which is then taped near the bottom tine of the fork, in a way that’s invisible to Mr. Somoroff’s immense Photo-Sonics camera.

Sauce and fork are finally in unison. After a few more tries, Mr. Somoroff has a take he likes enough to show to reps from the client and its ad agency, a group of whom are waiting in a nearby room that is decked out with a large high-definition TV. The pasta appears moist, the steam organic and the minuet of drip and hand nothing more than a diner on the verge of a blissful bite.

“I make my living basically taking food and painting a reality with it,” says Mr. Somoroff, leaning back in a chair in his office as the team preps another set-up. “And if I succeed in a given moment, you’re going to go buy that dish because you’re going to identify with the experience we’ve created. To do that with something as banal as food is the challenge. I mean, it’s easy to go out and shoot a beautiful sunset or a beautiful girl. They’re beautiful, O.K.?”

He gestures toward the middle of the studio.“I’ve got a noodle over here.”

THIS is a good moment to be a tabletop director in the big leagues, particularly if you specialize in food. Low- and mid-priced chain restaurants are one of the few segments of the economy that decided, during the recession and in its aftermath, to spend as much or more on advertising than they did in the years before.
Fast-food, casual-dining and pizza chains, as well as what are lumped together as “doughnut and coffee restaurants,” spent $300 million more on TV ads in 2010 than they did in 2007, according to Kantar Media, a market research firm. If patterns hold, the numbers will be even larger this year.

“Generally speaking, restaurant chains spend about 3 percent of revenue on advertising,” says Michael Gallo, an analyst at C. L. King & Associates. “Because these restaurant systems are large and have density, television is an easy way to reach customers in a cost-effective way.”

And any restaurant chain that forswears TV ads is in serious trouble.

“If you come off television, when your sales dip, it takes a long time to get them back to where they were before stopped advertising,” says Michael Branigan, vice president for marketing at Sizzler. “There are a ton of studies that show this. You lose brain share of your customers, and it is expensive to get revenues up again. If I stopped advertising, Sizzler’s revenue would be down, minimally, 10 to 15 percent for the year.”

Typically, companies use television commercials to introduce new products or to remind consumers about old ones. Regardless, the goal is the same: show the product, and do it in a way that makes people want to eat the TV.

Tabletop directors don’t handle the part of the ad where the family walks into the restaurant, or where Mom looks for a whisk. That’s farmed out to someone else. But say you’re the Checkers chain and you want to unveil “Chicken Bites,” a fried-chicken offering. You need to distinguish these “poppable” treats from a few dozen others on the market. And you need to give a hint of what they taste like.

“It’s breaded, seasoned chicken, so to the naked eye you can’t really tell,” said Kris Miotke, senior director of marketing at Checkers. “The question was, How do you define a fun, bite-size product in a way that shows both the inside and the outside?”

How about a hand tearing open a Chicken Bite? “Me, personally, I don’t want hands in my shot. I want the food to speak for itself.”

To solve this problem — how to create a hands-free, fried-chicken reveal, if you will — Checkers hired Michael Schrom. For 11 years, he has worked in 16,000 square feet of space in silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens, in the same building where “30 Rock,” "Gossip Girl" and other shows are filmed. Nearly all his clients sell food or beverages, among them Domino’s, McDonald’s, Applebee’s and Smucker’s.

“That took about 40 takes,” says Mr. Schrom of the Chicken Bites shot. There was no sleight of hand; each bite was cut open, pushed back together, then dropped on a table. The goal was to see moist white meat when it bounced.

“It’s far harder to get a cookie break with chocolate chips,” Mr. Schrom says. “We went through 100 cookies for Nestlé’s on one shoot. We knew when we got it because we could hear the clients in the other room, applauding.”

Mr. Schrom has the eyeglasses of an architect and the relaxed, contented air of a man highly entertained by his job. On this day, he is filming for a national chain — one that also requested anonymity — capturing what he calls “flavor cues.” In one shot, a stagehand pours chocolate syrup over a sheet of caramel. (You can almost hear a voiceover purring, “Chocolate.”) In another, cream bubbles up in a cup of coffee. In real time, these moments barely register. In slow-motion playbacks, with a digital camera that shoots up to 1,600 frames a second, the images are almost erotic. Which is no accident.

“You’re using the same part of your brain — porn, food,” Mr. Schrom says during a break. “It’s going in the same section; it’s that visual cortex that connects to your most basic senses. What we’re trying to do is be the modern-day Pavlovs and ring your bell with these images.”

He has several food stylists who work in a huge kitchen next to his set. They start with the very same food and recipes used in the restaurants and stores.

In part, this is a truth-in-advertising issue. Everyone knows that in 1970, the Federal Trade Commission settled a complaint against the Campbell Soup Company after its ad agency slipped marbles into a bowl in ads featuring its vegetable soup, apparently to force more veggies to the surface. That put a scare into the industry that endures to this day.

Anything that flatters the food, of course, is fair game, and that includes gimmicks you’re unlikely to find in a fridge. Glue is used to keep spaghetti on forks and pizzas in place. The ice in a beverage might be made of acrylic and cost $500 a cube. The frost coming off a beer could be a silicone gel, mixed with powder and water.

The difference between enhancement and fakery, though, becomes a little murky, and some directors tiptoe right up to, and well past, the marbles-in-the-soup line. If the tomatoes in a client’s red wine reduction aren’t visible, some fresh ones may be sliced up and tossed in. On rare occasions, the food you see on screen is merely a facsimile of the product.

Read more about the production of food porn, a.k.a. food styling, a.k.a."tabletop directing" here. (N.Y. Times, tiered subscription model)

Chef Paul Bocuse Harks Back to His Youth

2011-10-08T10:12:00.000-04:00

At Age 85, the French Icon Reflects on the Traditions, Influences and Events that Have Shaped His Expansive Culinary Career

By Jemima Sissons

As we enter a vast hall in Collonges-au-Mont-d'Or outside Lyon, France, a fairground organ booms into action, its high-pitch circus tunes almost deafening. Paul bocuse, short, with a slow gait and clad entirely in black, shuffles toward a towering contraption at the end depicting brightly colored carnival scenes. All at once, four other organs in the room bearing the name "Bocuse Circus" start, creating a surreal, discordant, almost dream-like air. Mr. Bocuse, considered one of the finest chefs alive today, spreads his arms in wonder and is reduced to a childlike rapture.

It is a somewhat bizarre setup for one of the world's most traditional chefs, yet Mr. Bocuse explains that like much in his life, the brightly hued organs are rooted in his childhood. "When I was a child, the fairground was very exciting in the village, so when the chance arose I bought the lot," he says.

At 85 years old, Mr. Bocuse now has the time to indulge his childhood passions. Although he still oversees his three-Michelin-starred restaurant L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges, as well as seven brasseries and a small hotel in Lyon, he isn't in the kitchen anymore. He also has restaurants in Tokyo, New York and Disney World Orlando.

His food continues to inspire others; for its 20th anniversary, D&D London's restaurant La Pont de La Tour will run a tribute menu from Oct. 12-31 that will include some of Mr. Bocuse's most famous dishes, such as his truffle and foie gras soup and Bresse chicken.

Mr. Bocuse talks a lot about his origins and growing up in the same house that is now L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges. Times were hard, even before the war, he says, but the family never starved. His father came from a long line of chefs, and the first thing Paul Bocuse cooked as an 8-year-old boy, under the watchful gaze of his mother, was a rognon de veau with a potato puree—the type of food he still serves today.

"I had a very free childhood," explains Mr. Bocuse, who still sleeps in the same room he did as a child. "We lived by the river and loved it. I was always playing outside, hunting, fishing. When I got bad marks at school, I would go fishing and cook it straightaway."

Mr. Bocuse still cherishes the role the river played in his life. "Whenever I go to bed, wherever I am in the world, I always want to know which side is the Saône. It is my savior river. This river has been the rhythm of my life."

He was conscripted during World War II when he was 18. After being wounded in Alsace, he ended up in a U.S. Army hospital, where a blood transfusion saved his life. And since 1944, he recalls, "I have always had a U.S. flag flying outside my restaurant."

Read the rest of Chef Paul Bocuse's story here.

Michelin Stars Align for Seven NYC Restaurants

2011-10-05T11:18:00.000-04:00

According to the latest edition of the Michelin guide, dining in New York got a little finer over the last year.
The city is now home to seven restaurants that earn the French dining guide’s three-star designation, its highest rating. Last year, the culinary guide said that five New York restaurants merited three stars.

Restaurateur Danny Meyer’s Eleven Madison Park, which has made dramatic changes to its menu under chef Daniel Humm, is arguably this year’s biggest winner, jumping from one to three stars in Michelin's view. The new guide, to be released Wednesday, also bestowed three stars on Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, an 18-seat restaurant that is part of a Downtown Brooklyn grocery store. Chef’s Table was last year’s sleeper surprise when it earned two stars. Other restaurants in three-star territory include Daniel, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin and Masa.

Now in its seventh edition in New York, the guide’s anonymous inspectors review hundreds of restaurants. This year 62 city restaurants received stars, up from 57 last year. The guide is closely watched by chefs and food-world insiders. While chefs frequently grumble about the guide’s sometimes arbitrary designations, celebrations nearly always ensue when a restaurant receives a star.

Read the complete story here.

Celebrity Chef Restaurants: The Rise Of The Emperor-Chefs

2011-09-27T13:41:00.000-04:00

by Joe Satran

In September 1991, chefs Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Todd English looked unstoppable. English had just been named the James Beard Rising Chef of the Year after leading his restaurant Olives in Charleston, Mass., to two years of wide acclaim. Jean-Georges had just opened his first solo restaurant, JoJo, a bistro on New York's Upper East Side, after over four years as the chef of Lafayette, where he'd earned a rave four-star review from the New York Times at the age of 31. JoJo, meanwhile, was quickly becoming a smash hit. Times restaurant critic Bryan Miller said that the dining room was so packed that it often evoked "Epcot Center during spring break," and declared the food, light on cream and butter, "cooking for the '90s." They were young, good-looking, prodigiously talented chefs cooking in a country that was just starting to grow taste buds -- why would anyone even want to stop them?

Twenty years later, they have become household names, received further accolades and thickened their wallets considerably. Jean-Georges now owns 27 restaurants, and English owns 20. Dishes they've invented -- Jean-Georges's molten chocolate cake and foie gras crème brûlée, English's fig-prosciutto pizza -- have become industry staples. They've made inroads to becoming a part of the mainstream, each releasing guides to home cooking this fall, and being featured in People magazine. They are celebrities and restaurateurs, rich and famous -- but are they still chefs?

That's the question that has haunted English, Vongerichten and the whole coterie of "emperor-chefs" since their ascension. (By "emperor-chef," we mean to exclude celebrity chefs, like Giada de Laurentiis and Ina Garten, who are more TV personalities than restaurateurs.) Pretty much everyone knows that, if you go into one of the 23 restaurants owned by Gordon Ramsay or the 13 owned by Bobby Flay, your chances of eating a meal actually cooked by the chef are slim to none. So the question of what the job of "emperor-chef" entails -- beyond appearing on TV, writing memoirs and cashing a fat check at the end of every month -- is a salient one.

It's a question that has been known to raise tempers. Alan Richman, the restaurant critic for GQ, is an especially harsh critic of empire-building by talented chefs. "Cooking is one of the most individual enterprises in the world," he told the Huffington Post. "There's nothing that lends itself less well to franchising than cooking."

Richman argues that the emergence of the emperor-chef -- a phenomenon he traces back to Wolfgang Puck, now the owner of 92 restaurants -- is a product of cooks' material aspirations. "For most of history, nobody got rich being a chef. Then they figured out a way to get rich -- it was TV and franchising," he said.

English and Vongerichten rose in parallel for most of the '90s. English won his second Beard Award when named Best Chef in the Northeast in 1994. He opened branches of Olives in Washington, Las Vegas and Aspen. He wrote cookbooks and launched other restaurant concepts: Figs, a more casual version of Olives, in Boston and La Guardia Airport; Kingfish Hall, a seafood eatery in Faneuil Hall; an Italian restaurant, Tuscany, in Connecticut's Mohegan Sun casino.

Meanwhile, Jean-Georges used JoJo as a platform for other ventures. He opened an NYC Asian-Fusion restaurant called Vong in 1993, then another in London in 1995. He waited until 1997 to return to haute gastronomy, with the eponymous Jean Georges restaurant in the Trump International Hotel. It is, to this day, his flagship, and one of the most highly-acclaimed restaurants in America. It won both four stars from the new York Times and the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant just months after opening. In 1998, Jean-Georges also received the Beard Award for Most Outstanding Chef in the Country.

It could be argued, though, that the two chefs' success in the '90s bred a kind of gastronomic hubris. There have been missteps.

Jean-Georges may have started to expand too quickly, as he began opening restaurants and building his empire both inside and outside New York. A few restaurants he'd opened such as Vong's Thai Kitchen in Chicago and New York's 66 and Matsugen closed after just a few years. More stingingly for a chef of such wide acclaim, Frank Bruni stripped stars from Spice Market, Vong and Mercer Kitchen in a blistering series of reviews in the Times.

"You couldn't see his name and say, 'Yep, that'll definitely be a great restaurant,'" Bruni said in an email to The Huffington Post. "You had to be a more informed, discerning diner than that, and to know that some Jean-Georges was 100 percent reliable, some not. ABC Kitchen, one of his newest, can be terrific. But that doesn't mean all of his new restaurants will be."

Read the complete story here.

Department Store Fine Dining Lives On

2011-09-23T17:50:00.000-04:00

by Michael Martin

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (MainStreet) -- The Broadway, Lord & Taylor, Macy's and more prospered and grew into 19th century shopping empires and centers of fashion commerce in cities such as Los Angeles, New York and London. Many of these grand department stores remained social epicenters through much of the early 20th century with legendary restaurants frequented by the creme de la creme of society. But through business consolidation and urban change, many of these restaurants are gone.

Others lived on to become fashionable -- and delicious -- reminders of shopping's gilded age.

Founded in 1907, Neiman Marcus has been a fixture in downtown Dallas for more than a century. On the renaissance-revival structure's sixth floor is The Zodiac, the store's flagship restaurant -- a gathering point for dapper businessmen and ladies who lunch. The design mixes terrazzo concrete floors with a modern design aesthetic of pale blue walls adorned with whimsical white plaster-framed mirrors with art nouveau detailing.

Today at The Zodiac, a lunch-only service begins with convenient half-bottles of Krug Grand Cuvee or a San Francisco bloody mary followed by fresh-baked popovers with butter. Texas-sized portions of salads follow -- Asian ahi tuna or steak, with heaping filet mignon and crumbled blue cheese. Executive Chef David Crow also serves a classic croque madame with truffle fries, or a heartier braised pot roast that's a dining room classic.

In New York, there's no shortage of showy department store eateries, including David Burke at Bloomingdale's and the epic BG Restaurant at Bergdorf Goodman. But Fred's at Barneys New York manages to remain a New York City standout. Named after the son of company founder Barney Pressman, the company's Madison Avenue flagship ninth-floor restaurant offers lunch and dinner. The space offers a more relaxed style than other upscale department store eateries; its walls are festooned in black-and-white photography and the crowds always includes some of New York's most eccentric fashionistas.

Divided equally among those that came to be seen and those looking to eat over business, this popular power lunch spot offers top-notch tuna tartare on mixed greens, lobster bisque and Neapolitan-style pizzas, including a signature "Wise Guy" with hot and sweet sausage. The Italian theme continues with pappardelle pasta in a beef ragu and carrot tortellini with ricotta cheese. The entrees offer a more American theme, including a lobster club, sauteed filet of sole and Angus sliced steak. The menu gets regional substitutions at Fred's locations at select Barneys New York stores in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Chicago.

One of the most famous department store dining rooms in the country is now known as the Walnut Room of Macy's State Street, once Chicago's famous Marshall Field's department store. Opened in 1907, the famous eatery is a downtown tourist stop for those looking to dine in a fabled setting preserved to feel like another time. The grand dining room occupies a showcase spot under a dramatic ceiling, and there's an elaborate marble fountain, opulent display of Austrian crystal chandelier and white-clothed tables, all ensconced in vintage walnut paneling.

Newer elements of the Walnut Room include a wine bar with communal table, opened in the store's centennial year. Open for lunch and pre-theater supper, the restaurant offers a menu mixing old-time classic such as a peach nest salad with chicken in a nest of shoestring potatoes with peaches, grapes and strawberries or Mrs. Hering's chicken potpie. Newer dishes have been dreamed up by Macy's own Culinary Council, a group of chefs consulted from around the country and resulting in such dishes as Tim Scott's farmers market chop salad and Tom Douglas' crabcake BLT.

In California it's been a tough history lesson for fabled dining rooms at legendary department stores such as I. Magnin & Co. in San Francisco, Los Angeles' Bullock's Wilshire -- now the attic of a law library -- and Robinson's, whose shuttered Beverly Hills location may be demolished. While dining rooms still exist at top departments stores, finding one here with the buzz of yesteryear is a tough prospect. One exception is Charlie Palmer at Bloomingdale's South Coast Plaza, which since 2008 has occupied a starry dining room that wouldn't look out of place on New York's Upper West Side, even if it is in one of California's poshest shopping malls.

Read the complete story here.

Chef Curren: Cooking Basics Don't Change

2011-09-14T23:41:00.000-04:00

By Chris Curren

I grew up fascinated with food and cooking. This seems strange now, looking back; no one in my family worked in the industry. My father did a short stint as a dishwasher and short-order cook at Howard Johnson’s while he was in graduate school, but as far as careers in the culinary world were concerned, I was oblivious.

Despite this, I found myself as a youngster concocting God-knows-what anytime I was allowed near the stove. I thought my creations turned out well, but I doubt I would feel the same now. I’ve always been a creative person, and for whatever reason cooking became my medium of choice.

I can remember watching shows like “The French Chef” with Julia Child, “Yan Can Cook,” “The Galloping Gourmet” and “Great Chefs of the World.” This was back before the Food Network and the phenomenon of celebrity chefdom. These people had raw talent and an incredible knowledge of the basic principles of cooking.

I was enthralled and would write down recipes that I saw on the shows so that I could try and re-create them. The 10- and 11-year-old version of me could never quite manage to get them right, but still, I tried.

Today we all follow the media frenzy that was created by the Food Network, and the TMZ-esque nature of the current culinary scene. Not many of us realize the hard work, dedication and understanding of centuries-old techniques that go into actually being a chef today. I promise you it is not at all a glamorous lifestyle.

Everything we do in professional kitchens can be linked back to Auguste Escoffier. He revolutionized cooking. He introduced the brigade system (the basis for how modern kitchens work today) and honed cooking techniques for pretty much every ingredient imaginable. He truly is the father of modern cooking.

What drives me is the idea that cooking is a craft to be learned and perfected, though true perfection is almost unattainable. Today we all use technology to make our lives easier. We have tools like blenders, vacuum sealers, immersion circulators, ISI foamers — the list goes on and on. We use these at Blue 13, but I always strive to remember the basic principles that make a great meal.

What creates flavor? Acid, salt, heat. There is a need for texture in a dish. There are flavors that work together. All of these principles were set up by Escoffier. We can put all the “magic” we want into a dish, but at the end of the day, it just doesn’t work without the basic techniques executed well.

There is something to be said for a perfectly cooked piece of fish, which is not an easy task. I am sure many TV personalities would have a hard time doing that. We run around following those we read about or see on TV, those with the newest, craziest restaurant opening this month. But what really matters are those who have talent and ability, and are working hard to perfect their passion. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course. There are many talented chefs who are well-known and who are very much a part of the media craze.

Trends come and go, but the basics in cooking will always remain the same. Take away all the smoke and mirrors that restaurants use and at the end of the day, all modern cuisine is rooted in Escoffier’s principles.

Read the rest of the story here.

America Discovers the Sweet Potato

2011-09-08T00:55:00.000-04:00

Bouncing down a dirt road, past emerald fields thick with sweet potato plants, farmer Robert Garcia hunched over the steering wheel of his pickup truck and grinned with glee.

It's the beginning of harvest season and, once again, his bounty of orange- and yellow-fleshed roots is looking promising.

"You used to see cotton fields and grapevines out here," said Garcia, 54, whose family grows and packs sweet potatoes out of their Central California farm operations.

"Now the talk is sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes, how can I get more sweet potatoes?"

Forget the marshmallows and the Thanksgiving buffet table. The sweet potato has become a year-round food.

Over the last decade, Americans have more than doubled their consumption of the thin-skinned vegetable, according to the United States Sweet Potato Council: U.S. consumers, per capita, now wolf down 6.2 pounds of sweet potatoes each year.

Diners overseas, too, have developed a fondness for it. U.S. farmers exported 200.3 million pounds of sweet potatoes in 2010, up from 38.5 million pounds in 2000, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service.

Here in the U.S., sweet potatoes are showing up at presidential state dinners and on White Castle's menu. They're cropping up in soup bowls, eating up shelf space in grocery store chip aisles, and piling up high in French fry baskets. At Umami Burger, a fast-growing Los Angeles chain, cooks can barely keep up with the demand for their sweet potato fries dusted with cinnamon and salt.

"It has a nice sweetness but is still savory," said Adam Fleischman, chief executive of Umami Restaurant Group. "That combination, the sweet-savory, is really popular right now."

Besides, Fleischman said, "they're familiar to people, but still something different to try."

Garcia, the central California farmer, sees nothing but potential for growth. Ten years ago, he and his family farmed 240 acres of sweet potatoes in Turlock and surrounding areas. Today, they've expanded that to 400 acres and opened a packing plant in Livingston.

Inside the facility, the air smells sweet and earthy as workers gently drop the potatoes into a washing station and hand-sort them as they move down a conveyor belt. Nearby, boxes of potatoes sit waiting for trucks to take them to Costco and other grocery retailers in the U.S.

"People love them, and farmers notice that," Garcia said.

That growth was driven in part by a shift in nutritional and culinary circles. Although traditional white potatoes still dominate the potato market, doctors and weight-loss groups touted the benefits of whole roasted sweet potatoes — which are higher in fiber and Vitamin A than traditional white potatoes, and lower on the glycemic index.

Yet it was cooks' slicing up sweet potatoes and dunking them into a deep fryer that fed the public demand.

The number of restaurants offering sweet potatoes has grown 14% in the last three years, according to a survey of 704 restaurant menus conducted by Chicago-based market research firm Technomic Inc. Much of that increase comes from restaurants featuring sweet potato fries.

Packaged-food giant ConAgra Foods, seeing a lucrative market, opened a new $156-million plant in Louisiana this year devoted to processing sweet potatoes into frozen fries and other products.

"If you're in the restaurant business, you know the country is changing to healthier selections, or selections seen as being healthier," said Harry Balzer of the NPD Group, a market research firm that has been tracking U.S. eating habits for more than three decades.

"So restaurants are looking for a new version of something the public already loves: the typical French fry.... If companies can set up the same infrastructure for processing sweet potatoes that they have for [white] potatoes for French fries, the market could be huge."

Read the rest of the story here.

The Sea Change: Ever Finer Cruise Dining

2011-08-31T21:51:00.000-04:00

Cruise ship dining once conjured images of gluttons bellying up to the buffet. Now gastronomy trumps gluttony: A more discerning generation of foodies is selecting ships and itineraries based on culinary allure. In response, cruise lines — from mainstream to luxury — are going overboard to meet the more refined tastes of passengers.

The number of food-themed cruises, food-based shore excursions, and food market and galley tours is growing. Presentation has been upgraded too, with meals served on designer china, flanked by silver flatware and crystal, on tables sporting imported linens and fresh flowers.

"At every price point, cruising has never been as food-oriented," said Chuck Flagg, a frequent cruiser who owns a Cruise Holidays franchise near Atlanta.

Once upon a time, there were two choices: the main dining room or the informal, all-you-can-eat buffet. That landscape has changed considerably. On virtually all lines, cruisers can opt for open or reserved seating.

"You can pretty much choose when you want to dine, who you want to dine with and how you want to dress for dinner," said Naomi Kraus, cruise editor for Frommer's Travel.

"Food is so wrapped up in culture that it's an integral part of travel," added Bruce Good, public relations director for the Seabourn Cruise Line. On Seabourn's 200-person sister ships, Pride, Spirit and Legend, the 48-seat Restaurant 2 offers a "small plates" tasting menu at no additional charge. For those who prefer privacy, dinner can be delivered to your cabin piping hot course by course.

On the Queen Mary 2 and the Oceania and Regent Seven Seas lines, guests can choose from a health-conscious menu designed by Canyon Ranch. Royal Caribbean added seven new food venues when it relaunched the refurbished 2,500-passenger Radiance of the Seas.

Imagine eating a special meal hosted by the executive chef in the ship's galley during the busy dinner hours. For $75 per person one or two nights per cruise, as many as 10 Princess Cruises passengers enjoy a multicourse chef's table menu paired with wines.

The 1,250-passenger Oceania Marina has two private dining rooms (with surcharges) among six gourmet restaurants. La Reserve is an intimate 12-seat venue offering food and wine pairings by Wine Spectator ($75 per person). Privee, an ultra-contemporary small room, offers a chef's table with a seven-course tasting menu designed with the chef, for a flat fee of $1,000 for as many as 10 people.

Celebrity chefs also are lending their names and expertise to the trend. Jacques Pepin, executive culinary director of the Oceania Cruises line, has a French bistro called Jacques on the Marina. He is one on a long list of celebrity chefs linked to various lines. Cunard has a Todd English restaurant on two of its Queens;

Seabourn's menu is designed by Charlie Palmer, and the menus of Nobuyuki "Nobu" Matsuhisa are served in Crystal's Sushi Bar and Silk Road.

When a celebrity name isn't associated with a ship, guest chefs join certain cruises or replicate award-winning menus onboard. On Regent Seven Seas, television chef Michael Lomonaco conducted demonstrations, gave talks and led a wine tasting on a 10-day August cruise. Holland America has an exclusive agreement with Le Cirque to re-create the legendary eatery's whimsical experience on the 15 ships in its fleet.

Read the rest of the story here.

Preaching a Healthy Diet in the Deep-Fried Delta

2011-08-22T16:56:00.000-04:00

by Campbell Robinson

HERNANDO, Miss. — Not much seems out of place in the Mississippi Delta, where everything appears to be as it always has been, only more so as the years go by. But here in the fellowship hall of a little Baptist church on a country road is an astonishing sight: a plate of fresh fruit.

“You get used to it,” said Arelia Robertson, who has been attending the church for almost eight decades.

Despite a dirge of grim health statistics, an epidemic of diabetes and heart disease and campaigns by heath agencies and organizations, the Delta diet, a heavenly smorgasbord of things fried, salted and boiled with pork, has persisted.

It has persisted because it tastes good, but also because it has been passed down through generations and sustained through such cultural mainstays as the church fellowship dinner. But if the church helped get everybody into this mess, it may be the church that helps get everybody out.

For over a decade from his pulpit here at Oak Hill Baptist in North Mississippi, the Rev. Michael O. Minor has waged war against obesity and bad health. In the Delta this may seem akin to waging war against humidity, but Mr. Minor has the air of the salesman he once was, and the animated persistence to match.

Years into his war, he is beginning to claim victories.

The National Baptist Convention, which represents some seven million people in nearly 10,000 churches, is ramping up a far-reaching health campaign devised by Mr. Minor, which aims to have a “health ambassador” in every member church by September 2012. The goals of the program, the most ambitious of its kind, will be demanding but concrete, said the Rev. George W. Waddles Sr., the president of the convention’s Congress of Christian Education.

The signs of change in the Delta may be most noticeable because they are the most hard-fought.

A sign in the kitchen of First Baptist Church in Clarksdale declares it a “No Fry Zone.” Bel Mount Missionary Baptist Church in the sleepy hamlet of Marks just had its first Taste Test Sunday, where the women of the church put out a spread of healthier foods, like sugar-free apple pie, to convince members that healthy cuisine does not have to taste like old tires.

Carved out of the fields behind Seek Well Baptist Church in the tiny town of Lula is a new community garden. The pastor, the Rev. Kevin Wiley, is even thinking about becoming a vegetarian, a sort of person he says he has never met in the Delta.

Many pastors tell the same story: They started worrying about their own health, but were motivated to push their congregations by the campaign that began in Mr. Minor’s church.

“I’m not going to say it has to be done by the church,” Mr. Wiley said. “But it has to be done by people within the community. How long is an outsider going to stay in Lula, Mississippi?”

Certainly, others have been trying to help.

Mississippi finds itself on the wrong end of just about every list of health indicators. It is first among states in percentage of children who are obese, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. It is first in rates of heart disease, second in the number of adults with diabetes, second in adult obesity, near last in the percentage of adults who participate in physical activity, near last in fruit and vegetable consumption and dead last in life expectancy.

Read the rest of the story here.

Amid Economic Unease, Demand Climbs at U.S. Food Banks

2011-08-13T22:22:00.000-04:00

Washington (CNN) -- Feeding the hungry is the mission at Manna Food Center, a food bank in the suburbs of the nation's capital. This year, officials here are seeing more and more people who need their help.

America's slow recovery from the worst economic crisis in decades has left families across the country struggling to put food on their tables, whether or not they have a job.

With an unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent and millions of people working part-time jobs because they cannot find full-time positions, a record 45.8 million people -- one of every seven -- received food stamps from the government in May. Demand for this kind of federal help has risen in all 50 states.
Manna helps people who get food stamps and thousands of others who do not qualify for them. The center says the number of people it serves has risen dramatically in recent years -- from 82,683 in fiscal year 2008 to 172,627 people in 2011.

On a recent Friday morning, trucks arrived at the warehouse to drop off food the organization rescues from 40 area grocery stores, items that are reaching their sell-by dates but are still safe to eat. Volunteers worked to retrieve the deliveries from the loading docks, while others went from shelf to shelf filling boxes with goods or helping wheel them out to clients' cars.

In the office, people began lining up around noon to receive the 70 pounds of fresh produce, canned goods and other items Manna hands out to each family every 30 days. Old and young. White, black and Hispanic. Some came alone; others brought their children or other family members.

The economy is adding jobs, but not quickly enough to trickle down to the families the food bank serves.
"Any growth that the economy is feeling, the folks here at Manna are not feeling that yet," said Natalie Corbin, Manna's development director, during an interview in the center's main warehouse in Gaithersburg, Maryland. "In fact, our numbers, from year to year have continued to trend upwards. So until we see a dramatic change in the economy, we're going to continue to see a dramatic increase in folks who are coming here.

"We're expecting this winter to be the highest in history of Manna for folks needing food assistance."
Even people who have jobs are having a hard time feeding their families.

Read the complete story here.

Healthy Food Startups Avoid Recession's Bite

2011-08-04T11:08:00.000-04:00

By Deborah L. Cohen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Cleetus Friedman is convinced consumers will continue to pay a premium for healthier, locally sourced food, despite the sluggish economy that has many watching their wallets.

"You're not paying $12 for a sandwich, you're paying for an experience," said Friedman, who runs a Chicago-based catering company, City Provisions, where he makes his own smoked meats, condiments, organic desserts and fresh cocktails. "Everything is made by hand from farm-fresh products."

The effort requires constant education of staff and customers alike. But Friedman has survived the downturn, all the while learning to be more selective about new business, willing to turn away catering clients that won't pay enough for him to make a profit.

"If you're doing a wedding and you have $50 a person (budget)… that's not going to work for me," Friedman said, adding he targets food-savvy clients who understand the importance of fresh, local ingredients and are willing to pay for it. "When you put everything in - food and drinks - you're probably going to be $150 to $200 a person. Is that 20 percent more than competitors? Probably."

Friedman launched his catering firm in 2008, just as the recession was taking hold. He managed to land some funding to add an upscale storefront deli in 2010, building more awareness for his products and additional revenue.

"Our mission is to connect our community with food," said Friedman, 40, a vocal advocate for sustainable eating. "Local artisans, brewers, winemakers, cheesemakers, distillers - we know who makes it, where it comes from."

Read the complete story here.

Culinary School vs. On-the-job Chef Training

2011-07-29T15:17:00.000-04:00

By Betty Hallock, Los Angeles Times

July 28, 2011

Cole Dickinson, the chef de cuisine at Michael Voltaggio's soon-to-open West Hollywood restaurant, Ink, got his culinary education the old-fashioned way: in the kitchen.

That might sound obvious, but it makes him something of an anomaly as the number of culinary schools multiplies, drawing legions of novice cooks with the promise of turning them into top chefs.

Yet the less-touted, less-glamorized path of working one's way up through the restaurant kitchen ranks is starting to sound more appealing. At a time when for-profit professional cooking schools are coming under more scrutiny, some of L.A.'s rising chefs — like Dickinson — are succeeding without ever having stepped into the classroom.

For-profit schools across the country are facing a flurry of lawsuits claiming fraud; they're accused of misleading students about tuition costs, job placement rates and how much they'll earn after graduating.

The cautionary tale of a would-be chef goes like this: A starry-eyed youth dreams of helming a restaurant kitchen and enrolls in a $60,000 culinary program but upon graduation still qualifies only for a job as a $10.50-an-hour line cook and struggles to work off crippling school loans that, with interest, can balloon to nearly $100,000. Dream crushed.

Meanwhile, Dickinson has a coveted gig at one of L.A.'s most hotly anticipated restaurants. He was a 17-year-old bussing tables for Charlie Palmer in Healdsburg, Calif., when he first considered culinary school. "I didn't have the money. I had a single mom," Dickinson says, "so I got it in my head that I'd ask Charlie if he'd sponsor me and I'd come back and work for him. He basically said, 'Don't be an idiot. Work for me for a couple of years and I'll get you in wherever you want to go.'

In a year and a half, I'd worked my way around every station of that kitchen.... I don't regret not going to culinary school at all."

Besides his time with Palmer, Dickinson, now 27, worked at the Fat Duck in England, for Laurent Gras at L2O in Chicago, then for Voltaggio at the Tavern Room in West Virginia and at José Andrés' Bazaar in Los Angeles.

In interviews with a dozen chefs and restaurateurs, few recommended culinary school; none said it was necessary. "We get asked all the time," says Karen Hatfield, who, along with her husband, Quinn, owns Hatfield's in Los Angeles. "Quinn and I don't recommend it to anybody ever. It's such a huge financial burden now." (She went to cooking school; he didn't.) And yet all but one of the restaurant's kitchen staff of about 15 attended culinary school.

Palmer, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., who grew an empire out of his Manhattan restaurant Aureole, isn't so adamant. He advocates cooking school "if the person has the resources. But there's an enormous range as far as the quality of cooking schools. It's something especially younger students don't really understand."

Even at well-regarded not-for-profit colleges, such as the C.I.A., it might not make economic sense. A two-year associate's degree program at the Culinary Institute of America costs $50,000. A bachelor's degree is more than $100,000. According to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean annual wage of a restaurant cook is $21,990. (That's about one-third the cost of tuition for the culinary arts program at the for-profit Art Institute of California in Santa Monica.)

"Is it true that graduates [have to] pay their dues?" says Bruce Hillenbrand, vice president responsible for admissions at the C.I.A. "Absolutely, just like other graduates initially going into other careers." He points out that a C.I.A. survey shows that its graduates can expect to double their salaries within the first five years.

According to the C.I.A., the student loan default rate among its graduates since 2008 is less than half the rate at for-profit schools.

There are now several hundred culinary programs in the U.S., many operated by for-profit companies such as Art Institutes and Career Education Corp., the parent of Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, which has 16 locations in the U.S. More culinary schools keep popping up. Last year, Triumph Education Group launched the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Chicago and Austin, Texas, with plans to expand.

Enrollment in culinary programs at Career Education was 13,100 at the end of 2010, up 20% from 2009 — though new student enrollment was down 3% in the fourth quarter. The Pasadena Cordon Bleu is one of the company's schools slapped with a class-action lawsuit alleging fraud. A $40-million settlement of a class-action suit against San Francisco's California Culinary Academy, also a Career Education school, is pending.

"Learning the same foundational cooking techniques taught at the original Le Cordon Bleu in Paris affords opportunity," says Career Education spokesman Mark Spencer. "But as with all education, it's no guarantee of success."

Regarding the lawsuit against the Pasadena Cordon Bleu, Spencer says that "the plaintiffs' attorney trying to assemble a viable class-action case has met with several setbacks…. We're confident the school will prevail on the merits of the case."

Charlie Lucas, 22, has worked at Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica, staged at the highly acclaimed Benu in San Francisco and now has a starting position at Daniel Boulud's Café Boulud in New York. He also skipped cooking school.

Two years ago he wanted to try cooking professionally but had no experience and no money for school, so he went knocking on doors for a job. "I made a list of the best restaurants in L.A. from a 2004 Zagat and started handing out my résumé," he says. He landed at Rustic Canyon because, executive chef Evan Funke says, "he had great heart."

"I went home and practiced dices on potatoes," Lucas says. "Funke gave me a lot of books to read. I was cooking out of Alain Ducasse's encyclopedia for six months trying to understand the recipes, the flavor profiles.... In my two years [at Rustic Canyon] I mastered every station.

"By the time I knew I wanted to be a chef, I had learned what people learned in school. And I don't have student loans, and it's a really fortunate thing."

Funke, who is a former instructor at Pasadena's Le Cordon Bleu, says, "In 10 years he's going to be the guy to beat."

Disillusioned by his teaching experience, Funke is no proponent of culinary school. "I don't know what's behind this meat-grinder mentality of cooking schools," he says.

"I rarely hire culinary students right out of school," he says. "It's like buying a computer and doing DOS to tell it how to do commands. They're missing information — knife sharpening or even how to hone a knife. They don't know product ID, kitchen etiquette, meat, fish, chicken butchering. Ninety percent of this job is time experience."

Meanwhile, schools are "doing the same thing to culinary students that they did in the housing market," says Funke, pushing too much borrowing for what might be a mirage. "Nobody tells you that you're going to be somebody's prep monkey for a year picking parsley in some subterranean humid kitchen making minimum wage."

Read the rest of the story here.

Oprah, You Are Making Your Biscuits Wrong!

2011-07-25T14:36:00.000-04:00

By SAM SIFTON

Hanna Raskin is the restaurant critic for The Seattle Weekly, but in 1998 she was a greenhorn reporter at The Commercial Dispatch in Columbus, Miss. Oprah Winfrey was jobbing around the country that year doing publicity for “Beloved,” a film she had commissioned and starred in with Danny Glover. News came that Winfrey was holding a screening in Attala County, where she was born, and Raskin’s editor sent her across the state to watch it with the hometown fans.

“Beloved,” based on Toni Morrison’s novel, takes as its subject the impact of slavery on the human soul. Mystery, violence, sex and supernatural apparition are all part of the story.

There is also a brief sequence in which Sethe, Winfrey’s character, makes biscuits in her dark little farmhouse.
Biscuits are what take us into the kitchen today to cook: fat, flaky mounds of quick bread, golden brown, with a significant crumb. Composed of flour, baking powder, fat and a liquid, then baked in a hot oven, they are an excellent sop for sorghum syrup, molasses or honey. They are marvelous layered with country ham or smothered in white sausage gravy, with eggs, with grits. Biscuits are easy to make.

When the film ended, Raskin said in a recent e-mail, Winfrey took to the front of the theater to take questions about race, gender, oppression and literature.

It did not work out that way. Raskin: “The first audience member to speak said something like: ‘Oprah, y’all made your biscuits wrong. Don’t you remember how we make our biscuits round here?’ I believe the biscuit-making scene lasted about 20 seconds, but the roar of the crowd suggested the speaker wasn’t alone in her outrage.”

Biscuits are like that. You need to make them right or not make them at all, and most people will tell you most of the time that however you are making biscuits, you are making them wrong. This is true especially if you are not from the South or if you are from England, where biscuits are hard and dry and sit on the dividing line between cookie and cracker.

Some people mix their biscuits in a wooden bowl handed down from Grandmother. Some drop biscuits onto a cooking sheet, rather than cutting them out. Some people use lard as the fat, others butter. For some, a biscuit must be huge. Others say small. There are people who beat their biscuits or add salt to them and others who press sugar cubes into the dough. Liquids added to biscuit flour may include buttermilk, heavy cream, flat beer, sour cream or cola. Cream of tartar can make an appearance in a biscuit recipe, as can baking soda.

For Yankees, the principal biscuit issue is flour. Proper Southern biscuits (as proper Southerners will tell you) are made with soft red winter wheat flour, low in protein and gluten — traditionally White Lily brand or Southern Biscuit brand. These are only sporadically and expensively available in the North and West of the country, where the more traditional all-purpose flour is made from sterner spring wheat, with more protein and gluten in it, better for making yeast breads than tender, flaky biscuits.

Some Southerners believe that it is not possible to make a good biscuit north of the Mason-Dixon line. Nathalie Dupree, a biscuit doyenne out of Charleston, S.C., whose “Southern Biscuits” cookbook provides enough biscuit recipes to fill a lifetime, disagrees. “Any biscuit is possible for a Yankee,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Extensive testing in Brooklyn bears her statement out. Cake flour, a low-protein flour that is available in supermarkets from Boston to Chicago, north to Seattle and down to Los Angeles, makes a fine biscuit. Standard Northern all-purpose flour does as well, especially if you allow the dough to rest for 30 minutes or so before cutting it out and baking.

What follows are two simple recipes for biscuits, one made with cake flour and lard; the other with all-purpose flour and butter. The first results in a biscuit with a delicate, silken texture that does well with syrups and runny fried eggs. The second provides a crumbier result, with a density appropriate to the flour, that is marvelous with thick, creamy sausage gravy, heavy on the sage and black pepper.

Neither takes long to put together. Christopher Kimball, the professorial leader of Cook’s Illustrated, Cook’s Country and television’s “America’s Test Kitchen,” said in an interview that this feature is crucial to biscuit excellence. “The secret of biscuits is that they are dead simple, and you should be able to make them in your sleep or even in the midst of a blind-drunk hangover,” he said. “To hell with the gourmet stuff.”

All y'all (that's southern plural for "you") can read the rest of the story here. (N.Y. Times tiered subscription model).

Ketchup Goes Artisanal?

2011-07-20T11:48:00.000-04:00

There's a seasonal shift going on in the condiment firmament. Ketchup, the big red staple of American pantries, is catching up with the cool crowd as chefs and food entrepreneurs seek new inspiration.

"It's a very exciting time to be making ketchup," says Scott Norton, who with Mark Ramadan founded the recently launched Sir Kensington's Gourmet Scooping Ketchup.

Organic ketchup, spicy ketchup, gourmet ketchup, curry ketchup, all have blossomed in recent years, a development that James Oseland, editor-in-chief of Saveur magazine, has noted with approval. "Who doesn't love a good catsup?" he points out.

About the whole ketchup vs. catsup thing — like tomato vs. tomahto, this seems to be a matter of personal choice. Oseland uses both depending on his mood.

The big tomato in American sauce, of course, is Heinz, which launched its ketchup in 1876. Interestingly, this wasn't the company's first venture; Heinz began with a horseradish sauce in 1869. Today, more than 650 million bottles of Heinz ketchup are sold worldwide, adding up to more than $1.5 billion in annual sales.

Tradition is part of the appeal of Heinz; this year the company brought back the classic glass bottles for a limited time in stores. This is the bottle with the "57" on the neck denoting the "sweet spot" one taps to get the ketchup to exit at maximum velocity of .028 miles per hour. But Heinz, the market leader, also has been part of the changing sauce scene, expanding its products to include a no added salt version, organic ketchup, a Hot & Spicy bottle with a kick of Tabasco sauce, and Simply Heinz, which uses sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

Hunt's and Del Monte are two other big names in U.S. ketchup; additional brands that have found a place on the shelf include Annie's Naturals Organic Ketchup, Muir Glen Organic Ketchup, Organicville Tomato Ketchup and Stonewall Kitchen Country Ketchup, a product described as "ketchup all grown up."

Norton and Ramadan's ketchup chronicles began about three years ago when they started cooking homemade tomato ketchup as economics majors at Brown University.

"We love ketchup," explains Ramadan. They thought it was curious that there only a few dominant brands of ketchup, as opposed to mustard, for instance, and thought, "wouldn't it be fun to try to make something in our own kitchen."

They held tasting parties and came up with two flavor profiles, classic and spiced, now available online and in stores including Williams-Sonoma and Whole Foods Market. The ketchup, billed as having less sodium and sugar than leading brands, is sweetened with agave nectar, honey and raw brown sugar and includes apple cider vinegar for a tangy kick. Other ingredients include coriander, lime juice, allspice, cilantro and cayenne pepper.

In some ways the concept of gourmet ketchup sounds slightly oxymoronic. Ketchup, a burger's best friend, is unabashedly of the people and a product that tends to stir strong opinions.

Read the rest of the story here.

Another Growing Career Path for Chefs??

2011-07-13T13:47:00.000-04:00

Hy-Vee Brings in Full-time Chef

America is in the middle of a cooking Renaissance.

People are rediscovering the art of home cooking and the advantage it has on their family - from saving money to healthier meals.

The Empire Hy-Vee, located at 4101 S. Louise Ave., has just made the family dinner a little more attainable. They hired a full-time chef to oversee food displays, conduct food preparation demonstrations, hold classes and act as a resource to shoppers.

"To have a chef is a great asset for the store and the customers," says Jenn Colgan, registered dietitian. "Having that culinary expert available to give people ideas on how to incorporate new things in their meals and recipes" is a valuable service.

Chef Scott Teal started in June.

He is planning to demonstrate new items, highlight food trends and will begin holding classes in August.
"Making your own food is enjoyable and economical. The goal is to push that forward," says Teal of Brandon.

He will incorporate fresh and new ingredients to inspire novice and experienced cooks. Originally from Brookings, Teal got his training at the Texas Culinary Academy and stayed in Austin, Texas, for 20 years. A cook for 25 years, he has worked in restaurants and long-term care facilities. He's happy to be back in South Dakota, where he still has family.

New produce will figure heavily into his demonstrations and his recipes. For example, there is a new chocolate grape tomato. "It has a more brownish color and is new to the market. We're able to bring that in and expose the item to Sioux Falls cooks."

There will be a dedicated space at the store for his cooking demonstrations. He will show how to make a dish from start to finish. "It will take the guessing out of cooking meals. And people can watch while they're shopping."

It's a natural fit, Colgan says. He's a good resource for shoppers craving contemporary meal ideas or those wanting to try a new food. He will use locally grown food and fresh herbs when possible.

Today's push is to make meals healthier, and Teal "will help us incorporate more variety into our diets," Colgan says. Teal will be creating his own recipes and showcasing the store's recipes.

Read the complete story here.

Firehouse Cook is a Cheesecake Master

2011-07-11T11:01:00.000-04:00

Johnny Scruggs picked up the last perfect strawberry, buffed it on a paper towel, placed it at the summit of his masterpiece, sealed it in place with a drizzle of gelatin, then stepped back to admire his work.

The objet d’art was his strawberry cheesecake, a confection so prized in Prince George’s County’s fire circles that it has earned him the nickname “Cheesecake Johnny.”

He had shopped for the ingredients — fresh eggs, Philly cream cheese, Breakstone’s sour cream and unsalted butter — then amassed them on the kitchen counter at Northview Community Fire/EMS Station No. 816 in Bowie, where he is assigned as a firefighter and paramedic.

Hoping that an emergency wouldn’t occur while he cooked, he beat the ingredients by hand (he never uses a mixer), kissed them with just the right amount of pure vanilla extract, lined a pan with parchment paper, crafted a golden crust of graham cracker crumbs and, with the care of a mother touching her infant, poured the mixture into the pan.

“There it is,” he said, beaming proudly. “Now into the oven it goes.”

Firehouse cooking is a skill as old as the service itself, but Scruggs takes it to a new level. Popular for his standard firehouse fare, Scruggs draws raves for his cheesecakes, whose aroma, mingling with the scent of disinfectant and rubber from giant engine tires, has become familiar at the station.

“There are a lot of firefighters who can cook standard firehouse chili or barbecue some ribs, but without a doubt he is our most famous dessert chef,” said Mark Brady, a spokesman for the fire department.

Scruggs’s repertoire includes 47 varieties, including chocolate, chocolate-peanut butter (“which,” he said, “tastes just like a Reese’s” cup), coconut, coffee, sweet potato and every fruit from blueberry to key lime. He recently mastered a bean cheesecake and has experimented with a broccoli and squash flavor. Each cheesecake is infused with natural flavoring and is elaborately decorated. For those who want zing, he will add a taste of the hard stuff.

“A firefighter friend of mine’s 88-year-old grandmother wanted a Jack Daniel’s cheesecake, so I made it for her,” he said. “The alcohol burns off, so there is no effect from it. It wasn’t my favorite, but she loved it. I put a little bottle of Jack Daniel’s on as decoration, and he said she drank that after she ate the cheesecake.”

Once known only within the department, Scruggs’s desserts are now in demand for weddings, anniversaries, family reunions and other events across the region. “I’m already just about booked up for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it’s only June,” he said recently.

Mastering cheesecake baking was natural for Scruggs, who cut his teeth in the kitchen at home in Montclair, N.J. His mother, Bernice Smith, a teachers’ assistant, cooked basic weekday meals — meatloaf, roasted chicken and her special breaded shrimp.

His father, George Smith, a laborer whose sunup-to-sundown work schedule precluded him from getting into the kitchen on weekdays, produced weekend specialties such as slow-grilled barbecue and tender beef roasts.

“I can remember standing on a stool that was pushed up to the stove and watching my mother cook eggs and bacon,” Scruggs said. “It was like magic to me. She would take these raw [ingredients] and stand at the stove and miraculously, in a few minutes, breakfast would come.”

Scruggs tried to cook his first egg before he started school, its gooey contents missing the skillet and sliding into the fire below.

Despite the mess, he was hooked.

“I was the oldest of six kids, and there is a five-year gap between me and the next one, so I had a lot of responsibility,” he said. “My mom would leave a note on the fridge telling me, ‘Take this out of the freezer and thaw it,’ or ‘Start cooking the fish,’ so that by the time she got home at 5 or so, there was less stress on her. Later, I actually cooked dinner for the family.”

Read the rest of Cheesecake Johnny's story here.

TV Chefs: From Culinary Teachers to Reality Show Stars

2011-07-05T22:03:00.000-04:00

Smile, You're on Camera

By BRUCE PALLING

What is it that makes food and television go so well together—or, more to the point, achieve such high ratings? Apart from major sporting events and royal weddings, few U.K. programs generate such large audiences year after year as "MasterChef," now in its 17th series since it relaunched in 2005. "Celebrity MasterChef," one of the show's four current strands, recently drew eight million viewers. It isn't just in the U.K. that the show is popular—last year's finale of Australian "MasterChef" caused the traditional leaders' debate in the country's elections to be delayed because the time slots would have clashed.

"There have been three ages of TV chef programs," says Peter Bazalgette, who has produced more than 3,000 episodes of the groundbreaking BBC series "'Food and Drink," and the more populist "Ready, Steady, Cook." He went on to perfect the reality TV show "Big Brother," which is equally praised and reviled. "Until the '70s, the chef, such as Julia Child, would merely stand behind a counter with a bowl and simply tell you what to do. Then the formula changed, with the chef trying to do amusing things to entertain the viewer, until the current phase in this century, where you basically have a reality show, with a celebrity chef in difficult situations. This could be Jamie Oliver trying to make Americans eat healthily or Gordon Ramsay in one of his 'Kitchen Nightmares.' What we discovered was that the best chefs are extrovert showmen, martinets, so now they are full-throated reality shows."

It has become commonplace for aspiring media personalities who once headed to the jungle to enhance their image to now try their hand at cooking competitively in "Celebrity MasterChef." Even those well-established in gastronomic circles are branching into TV. Simon Hopkinson, one of the most private and highly regarded food writers in Britain, has renounced his earlier pledge never to appear on TV—his new series, "The Good Cook," starts next week on BBC One in the U.K.

Matthew Fort, a food writer and judge on "The Great British Menu," says one reason for the plethora of programs is that they are relatively cheap to make, and while gardening or DIY programs have loyal followings too, not everyone has a garden or the desire to do home repairs—but everyone eats three times a day.

He has a point. Food programs are attracting a wider audience. "I think what happened on 'MasterChef' was, for the first time, viewers witnessed ordinary people who were really good at something —just people who could have lived next door or been on the bus. And during the length of the program, they went on to be exceptional chefs and then do something different with their lives," says Karen Ross, the executive producer of the U.K. "MasterChef" series. "It was celebratory—something that everyone can relate to, because even if they don't cook, they all eat," she adds. "The big thing is the audience can relate in terms of 'I could do that, or be that—I really hate my job in the call center or as a doctor or a plumber, and this could free me in some way.'"

But with all this attention and excitement about cooking shows, the puzzling thing is that it doesn't seem to have translated into higher quality standards for food consumption as a whole.

Mr. Fort says food programs do have an impact in broadening public knowledge about different cuisines, but not when it comes to healthier eating. "If you look at the external evidence regarding the public's diet and overweight issues it is not very encouraging," he says. "The sales of prepared meals and microwaves are going up—families prefer to watch television together rather than eat together." But he adds that some shows, like Jamie Oliver's quest to improve school dinners, do help increase awareness about specific foods—even if they don't change the national diet. "When [British chef] Delia Smith uses cranberries or goose fat on a cookery program, there is a 3,000% sales increase, though admittedly from a fairly low base," Mr. Fort adds.

TV programs can also help boost chefs' profiles. "There is no better PR than a TV show if you are a chef," says Ming Tsai of Blue Ginger restaurant in Massachusetts, who has presented programs on the Food Network and PBS for more than a decade. "Suddenly people want to interview you about any subject under the sun and they will also want to try your restaurant—at least once. I put it down to what I call the irrational power of television." He voices concern, however, about those celebrity cooks whose primary goal appears to simply be famous. (Not that he doesn't participate in the new style of TV shows himself; he recently reached the semifinals in the popular U.S. series "The Next Iron Chef.") "Of course, 95% of good chefs are not on television," Mr. Tsai says. "And as for the ones who are but do not have a restaurant, I don't consider them to be chefs, merely culinary entertainers."

Read the complete story here.

Career Advice courtesy of Anthony Bourdain

2011-06-30T16:38:00.000-04:00

As told to Ramin Setoodeh

I was lucky enough to go to the Culinary Institute of America in my 20s, and my big mistake was that I was offered a chef’s job very quickly after I graduated, and I took it. I did that rather than going to France—or even staying in New York, but taking a low-level position at a great restaurant and putting my nose to the grindstone. Once I started down that path, years later I was still working in a procession of not-good restaurants. The lowest of the lows is cooking food for people you hate in a restaurant you hate, with no pride.

I was about getting the biggest paycheck then, so I could see music, smoke expensive weed, do cocaine, that kind of life. It was less important to me that I would get good at my craft. I deluded myself into thinking I was good. And by the time it occurred to me that I’d never worked for a three-star chef, I didn’t have the skills. It was late in the day.

After I graduated, I was working with friends in a restaurant in SoHo called WPA. We helped bankrupt the place in short order. We thought we were creative geniuses, and created a very chef-centric menu that was not what the dining public wanted. We were cooking out of our league. It was not a professional operation. We behaved like a cult of maniacs. I liked the life that went with being a chef. I was getting laid, I was getting high, I was having fun. I had no self-control. I denied myself nothing. I had no moral compass. At age 44, I had never had health insurance. I hadn’t paid my rent on time. I was 10 years behind on my taxes. I owed AmEx for 10 years. I was still living like a college kid—worse even. I essentially partied my way out of a big-league career.

A lot of young cooks who have read Kitchen Confidential ask me for career advice. I tell them if you’re serious about cooking and your craft, do the opposite of what I did. I learned a lot of important skills from my mistake that served me well in both publishing and television. I think the skills I learned as a junkie are skills of determining if this person is full of shit or not. I’m never going to be the kind of person who talks about himself in the third person or has the red M&Ms weeded out of my bowl. You know what you see in the mirror when you’re waiting for the lady on the subway to fall asleep so you can take her purse? I’m a pretty good judge of human nature.

Chef is Now a Glamour Position, Thanks in Part to Reality TV

2011-06-23T09:03:00.000-04:00

A career as a restaurant chef, once a blue-collar occupation, has now become a glamour profession.

Driven by reality TV, the Food Network, and food-related media buzz, interest in culinary education is at an all-time high.

Big-name schools like the Culinary Institute of America and Johnson & Wales University have responded by opening branch campuses across America.

Sensing a business opportunity, numerous for-profit ventures have also jumped onto the culinary education bandwagon. So many have opened in the last few years that fully half the schools currently accredited by the American Culinary Federation are being operated as moneymaking enterprises.

Now, with public higher education facing budget cuts and privately run schools subject to tighter financial aid regulations, the prospects for culinary education seem less rosy.

Compounding these funding concerns is a growing glut of culinary school graduates, many of whom imagined their degrees would be a shortcut to celebrity chef status.

Read the rest of the story here.

French Restaurant Hands Back Michelin Star to Bring in the Diners

2011-06-21T12:15:00.000-04:00

The only Michelin-rated restaurant in the southern city of Nimes has handed back its star to become a humble brasserie, in the hope of enticing back people put off by the higher prices that come with the accolade.

Le Lisita, opposite Nimes' famous Roman arena, clinched its first star from the fabled red restaurant guide in 2006.

But Michelin stars come at a price for chefs, as the guide expects a standard of service requiring more staff, which pushes up the price of a meal even before ingredients are bought.

Chef Olivier Douet said he had initially cherished the coveted accolade but that the 2008 financial economic crisis forced him into a painful rethink.

"I am not spitting in the soup – to have a Michelin star is a distinction, a very important recognition of merit," he said. However, he added that the onerous demands of the gastronomic restaurant barely allowed him to break even.

Such demands are said to have led top chef Bernard Loiseau to commit suicide in 2003 after it was rumoured he was to lose one of his three Michelin stars.

"In a starred restaurant, there is one waiter for five to six people. With a brasserie, a waiter can look after twenty to thirty customers," he told Le Parisien newspaper.

He will now offer a menu with starter and plat du jour for €23.60 (£20.79), which he hopes will allow him to triple the number of clients.

Like other aspiring chefs, Mr Douet had grand plans to expand his Michelin-starred eatery, located in a large property, to a luxury hotel project but "the bankers are scared to lend in a time of crisis to institutions like ours".

The Lisita hopes to capitalise on a French fashion for lively, high quality and affordable brasseries and "gastro bistros", which are doing a roaring trade along with "restauration rapide" – the French take on fast food.

Many Michelin-starred restaurants, meanwhile, are struggling.

Read the rest of the story here.

Alive and Cooking

2011-06-16T14:18:00.000-04:00

Over his long career as a celebrity chef, Todd Hall has been associated with numerous high-end restaurants. His newest, Temazcal Tequila Cantina, opened in Boston’s Seaport District this spring to overflow crowds. A two-time James Beard Foundation honoree, Hall moved here in 2009 to help launch Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar & Grille chain, another homegrown hit.

More surprising than any success Hall has achieved, though, is the fact that he’s still alive and cooking. A series of personal tragedies and self-destructive choices threatened to end Hall’s career years ago. In 1992, the youngest of his four children drowned in the family’s backyard swimming pool. Three years later, a parking-lot shooting — the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad — nearly killed Hall.

Drug-free for a decade now, Hall, who mastered Mexican cuisine while working in upscale Southwest kitchens, has designed Temazcal to reflect his formidable culinary ambitions — and flair for the unusual. In this cantina, menu items include lobster guacamole, roast suckling pig, goat basted in grapefruit and molasses, and nearly 300 brands of tequila, some rare. The restaurant overlooks Boston Harbor, seating 126 diners inside and another 40 on its waterside patio. Hall runs a kitchen staff of 12 and boasts of having one of the first restaurants to develop its own full-menu iPad app, allowing diners to browse pictures and recipes of what they might consider ordering.

Boston developer Jon Cronin, who hired Hall as a consulting chef on Remy’s sports bars, says he was fully aware of Hall’s checkered past before bringing him in as a partner in the opening of Temazcal. Cronin even read an unpublished memoir Hall wrote, in all its sordid detail, before going into business with him.

Working with Hall carried significant risks, but Cronin admired how Hall had pulled his life and career back together. “Everything Todd’s gone through and where he’s gotten to now is such an achievement,’’ he said. “Look, I’ve worked with several local organizations that treat addiction. If he falls back in six months, so be it.’’

But Hall is also “the hardest worker I know,’’ Cronin added, and his take on Mexican cuisine is an attractive addition to Boston’s restaurant scene. “To me, Todd’s a winner,’’ he said. “His is a fantastic story.’’

In many ways it is also a disturbing one, if ultimately uplifting.

Read the rest of Chef Hall's story here.

Four Leadership Tips from General Colin Powell

2011-06-13T13:50:00.000-04:00

This year marks the third time Colin Powell, former secretary of state, national security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has delivered the keynote address at this year’s NRA Show.

Powell took the stage Sunday afternoon to answer questions, share anecdotes of his life outside the government and share management tips with the restaurant industry.

Powell said he continues to use the same management principles he learned as a 21-year-old in the Army.

Leadership is all about followers, Powell said. You need to put your followers — or in the case of restaurants, your staff — in the best position to get things done. Give them a sense of mission in addition to goals, and make sure you communicate to them your belief.

Powell’s top tips for being a great leader:

Take care of your troops. Give them resources, technology and training
Be infectious. Why would anyone follow you otherwise? Good leaders not only motivate but also inspire. “People are searching for this kind of passion in every organization,” said Powell.
Recognize performance. Promotions and financial benefits work, but the best recognition is more personal. Tell someone, “You’re doing a great job,” or “I couldn’t do my job without you.” Let people know you see them as essential to the team, no matter their job.
It’s not all about the soft stuff. When people are not performing well, you have to let them know. Your good employees always know who isn’t carrying his fair share, and they want the leader to do something about it. If you don’t, you lose their respect. Also, don’t reorganize around a problem. Either retrain someone or fire him.

At the end of his speech, Powell took questions from the crowd, one of which was, “What makes you a loyal customer?” Powell said he always wants to be treated with respect and courtesy. When someone in retail or restaurants pays immediate attention to him and seems genuinely interested, that means a lot. That courtesy inspires him to become a loyal customer.

Memorial Day...

2011-05-29T13:53:00.000-04:00

is more than just a long weekend and the traditional beginning of summer and grilling season. For those who don't know what it's about, or who have forgotten, here's a small reminder.

This letter is thought to have been sent to Lydia Parker Bixby by President Lincoln when it was initially reported that Mrs. Bixby had lost all five of her sons in a single battle. As it turned out, she had lost only two sons in the battle. His kind and thoughtful words were typical of his recognition of the horrible price being paid by so many families supporting the Union.

President Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby was printed by the Boston Evening Transcript on November 25, 1864, the same day it was delivered to her by the adjutant General of Massachusetts, William Schouler. The following is the text of the letter as it appeared in the Transcript:

Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln

Online Ingredients for Success

2011-05-24T14:23:00.001-04:00

Waiter Develops Restaurant Reason to Help Others Who Are Sometimes Forgetful

Last summer, a diner at Eatery asked a waiter what is used to make the mascarpone dumpling filling.
The waiter at the Hell's Kitchen restaurant stared blankly before offering this insight: "Mascarpone." Then he made up nine other imaginary ingredients—right as the restaurant's owner walked by.

"He heard me totally lying to these people," the waiter, Michael Mignogna, said recently. "I totally botched it."
The aspiring stand-up comedian-turned-waiter was given an ultimatum: Learn the intricate menu—or lose his job.

He decided to stay. Over the course of two weeks, Mr. Mignogna snapped pictures of every dish, developed a system to categorize information, designed a set of icons to specify everything from potential allergens to temperature choices and cobbled together a rough website that was made available to other waiters at the restaurant.

Then, six weeks ago, the 28-year-old Mr. Mignogna launched Restaurant Reason, a social-networking site that enables restaurants to train staff, do on-line scheduling and provide an internal discussion forum.
Instead of firing him, Eatery became his first customer.

"A light bulb went off in his head," said owner Sean Connolly, who has since purchased a subscription for his second restaurant, Whym. "Michael's really surprised us."

Gone are the days when a waiter could simply say he recommends the catch of the day with the chef's special sauce. An increasing level of sophistication among chefs is matched, if not surpassed, by demands from diners, who expect detailed descriptions of where the fish was caught, how it was prepared and even its transportation mode to the plate. An array of dietary restrictions and food allergies have complicated menus further, restaurant owners and managers said.

Waiters are drilled in which salads contain gluten, and which sauces harbor sugar; they are trained to decode mysterious descriptions such as "pastrami-style salmon" (it has to do with the spices) and tested on which dishes contain nuts.

"Some of the cooks don't know all the ingredients [if it's not their station]," said Eatery chef James Henderson. Waiters these days, he said, "have to know a lot."

Most restaurants rely on tastings and printed packets that can run into dozens of pages and need to be reprinted as menu items change.

"They're printing up all this paper," said Eatery waiter Jeff Davies, "and there's always something wrong with every one."

The most high-end establishments still tack up schedules on the walls, requiring staff to come to the restaurant to view their shifts and stations.

"We're still there—low-tech," said Kevin Mahan, the managing partner at Gramercy Tavern, who estimated that each employee packet can run to 50 pages. "There just hasn't been anything presented that would make some of this easier or less paper, which would be nice."

Read the rest of the story here.

ORANGE CHIPOTLE HOLLANDAISE SAUCE

2011-05-22T23:06:00.000-04:00

A very flavorful variation on one of the mother sauces. For an even easier option, just add the pureed chipotle, the lime juice and cilantro to a good quality mayonnaise.

2 Tbsp chopped shallots

¼ cup dry white wine

¼ cup orange juice

3 egg yolks

1 cup melted unsalted butter

1 tsp pureed chipotle in adobo

1 Tbsp lime juice

1 Tbsp chopped fresh cilantro

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a small saucepan, combine the shallots, white wine, and orange juice.

Bring to a boil and cook until reduced to 2 tablespoons.

Remove from the heat and cool.

In the top of a double boiler over simmering water, whisk the egg yolks and wine reduction until ribbons start to form.

Whisking constantly, drizzle in the melted butter a bit at a time until all is added and an emulsion forms.

Remove from the heat.

Add the chipotle, lime juice, and cilantro, whisking to incorporate.

Adjust seasoning to taste with salt and pepper.

Cover and keep warm until ready to serve.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

SALMON and LOBSTER CAKES

2011-05-22T22:58:00.000-04:00

(Makes 12 cakes – Serves 6 as an appetizer)

1 Tbsp olive oil

½ cup yellow onion, minced

¼ cup green bell pepper, brunoise

¼ cup red bell pepper, brunoise

¾ cup mayonnaise

2 eggs

2 Tbsp Worcestershire Sauce

½ cup grated Parmesan cheese

1 cup Panko bread crumbs

½ tsp sugar

12 oz poached salmon, chopped

12 oz cooked lobster tail meat, chopped

Kosher salt, to taste

Black pepper, to taste

Add the oil to a sauté pan over medium heat. Stir in the onion and peppers and sauté until soft.

Remove to a large mixing bowl and allow them to cool.

Add the remaining ingredients, except lobster and salmon and mix thoroughly.

Add lobster and salmon and mix gently. Do not over mix. Form the mixture into 2 ounce balls, and flatten them into ¾-inch patties.

Refrigerate and allow cakes to rest for at least thirty minutes prior to cooking.

Heat a lightly oiled sauté pan or griddle to medium high.

Cook the patties on both sides until heated through.

Transfer to a serving plate and garnish with wedges of lime and sprigs of fresh cilantro and serve with chipotle hollandaise sauce.

Chicken Goulash

2011-05-22T22:49:00.001-04:00

It's been a while, so I decided it's time to post a few new recipes. This is the main dish that I prepared for my C.E.C. practical.

Chicken Goulash

(Serves 4)

2 Tbsp vegetable oil

4 chicken thighs

4 chicken legs

1½ tsp kosher salt

1 tsp Black Pepper

1 yellow onion, medium diced

1 red bell pepper, julienned

1 green bell pepper, julienned

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 Tbsp paprika

1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes

½ tsp dried thyme

2 Tbsp tomato paste

½ cup red wine

2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 cup canned diced tomato in thick puree

2 cups chicken stock

1 Tbsp cornstarch

½ cup sour cream

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

In a large, heavy pot, heat the oil over moderately high heat.

Season the chicken with Kosher salt and pepper and cook the chicken until browned, turning, about 8 minutes in all, and remove.

Pour off all but 1 tablespoon fat from the pan.

Reduce the heat to moderate and add the onion, garlic, and peppers to the pan.

Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is translucent, about 5 minutes.

Reduce the heat to moderately low and add the paprika, red pepper flakes, dried thyme, and tomato paste to the pan. Cook, stirring, for 30 seconds.

Deglaze the pan with the red wine, scraping the bits from the bottom of the pan.

Stir in the Worcestershire sauce, tomatoes and chicken stock. Bring to a boil, and reduce to simmer.

Add the chicken and simmer, partially covered, until the chicken is done, about 20 minutes.

Skim fat from the surface as needed.

Remove the chicken. Dissolve the cornstarch in ¼ cup cold water and add to the pot.

Cook, stirring constantly until the sauce is thickened and shiny.

Temper the sour cream with ½ cup of the sauce and stir it into the sauce.

Add the chicken and fresh parsley, and season to taste with salt and black pepper.

Serve with noodles, potatoes, or rice.

For Chefs, Cookbooks Paved Path to Culinary Enlightenment

2011-05-18T11:26:00.000-04:00

Looking through some cookbooks these days could almost make a person feel dirty.

“I think you’re first drawn to a cookbook because it’s like food porn,” says Matthias Merges, the chef who ran Charlie Trotter’s kitchen for 14 years. “Most cookbooks — you can see the way that Ten Speed Press does theirs and now [visual art and design publisher] Phaidon is in the cookbook arena — it’s all tabletop-beautiful.”

In other words, cookbooks look better every year. They are great lookbooks. But does anyone actually learn anything from cookbooks? Some of the city’s most celebrated chefs say they have.

Merges credits the Time-Life “Foods of the World” series, which he first read when he was about 8 years old.

“When you’re young, you never know the breadth of the food world,” says Merges, who plans to open his first restaurant, a Japanese yakitori-inspired restaurant called Yusho in Logan Square, in late July or early August. “When my brother and I discovered those Time-Life books, it opened up the whole world to us. It was like, what was that show? Wild Kingdom. Or Jacques Cousteau.”

One night, on their parents’ anniversary, the Merges boys decided to make an ambitious dinner, sukiyaki, or Japanese hot pot, combining beef and vegetables in a single pot. Before he started flipping through the Time-Life series, young Matthias had no idea such a dish even existed, let alone how to make it.

Later, in other volumes, he learned how to cure meats and fish. The Indian book taught him that curry was so much more than just a spice in a bottle labeled “curry.” It is a mix of spices, for one, and it also is a stew, and it differs from country to country. All of this, a boy who would one day become a professional chef, learned from spiral-bound cookbooks.

Some professional chefs learned from cookbooks even after the age of 10.

Jason Hammel and his wife Amalea Tshilds own and operate Lula Cafe in Logan Square and Nightwood in Pilsen. Hammel worked as a chain restaurant line cook in graduate school and is basically self-taught. For years he devoured cookbooks, walking around with one particular volume, The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller, under his arm.

Now, more than 10 years later, he still consults his tattered copy of that seminal book, which introduced him to big-pot blanching.

“The idea is, if you’re going to blanch a green vegetable it’ll be greener and brighter if you use a big pot with a lot of hot water,” he says.

The visual beauty of cookbooks is proof that we eat with our eyes first, and brilliantly green vegetables are much more appealing than vegetables the color of Army pants. But sometimes, even now, Hammel’s cooks crowd their veggies.

“There’s been a million times when I’ve come in and instead of explaining it to them, I just slap down the book with the page open and I say, ‘You need to read this,’ ” Hammel says.

From The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers, Hammel learned about the importance of pre-seasoning.

“Salting ahead of time is one of her major concepts and one part of her book that I love,” he says.

Hammel, who calls Rodgers’ book “probably the best-written cookbook that exists,” often gives the book to his cooks to read.

“One cook didn’t give it back,” he says.

Read the complete story here.

Restaurant Trend: Career Waiters

2011-05-10T20:02:00.000-04:00

As the old joke goes, two people meet at a party. Guest 1 asks Guest 2 what he does for a living. "I'm an actor," he answers. "Ah," Guest 1 says, nodding. "What restaurant do you work at?"

Being a server has traditionally been the ideal job for aspiring actors, models and artists since well, forever. The flexible hours, social interaction and possibility of generous tips (especially if one is hot, according to a study by Cornell University), make it the perfect occupation for someone trying to make good money while aspiring to be something else.

But more and more servers are taking waiting tables more seriously, seeing it not as a side job, but as a full-fledged career. "It's not a particularly new phenomenon in Europe or in fine dining," says Philip Iordanu, general manager at the New York City restaurant Beaumarchais. "But I do think that both waiting and cooking are becoming more legitimate career choices with the glamorization of the restaurant industry in the media, which is a very positive shift."

Anthony Breyer, 28, started waiting tables to earn extra money while he was a college student—and soon found himself wanting more than just a job in restaurants. "During the daily pre-shift meetings, when we taste new dishes, learn about wines and service points, I began to develop a genuine enthusiasm for the job," he says. "I began seeking out further information and practice on my own time and that's when it began to evolve as a career for me."

Read the complete story here.

Chef Eric LeVine, Five-time Cancer Survivor, is on a Mission

2011-05-02T22:20:00.000-04:00

Chef Eric LeVine thought he was done with cancer, that he had long buried that part of his life under years of chemotherapy treatments and dinner services. But there cancer was again – taunting him in front of television cameras, over a basket of mussels, pears and frozen waffles.

A few weeks before, LeVine, 41, had ended seven years of remission with a shattering diagnosis: He had cancer, for the fifth time. And not just any cancer – an advanced form called Richter's syndrome. Doctors said his chances were slim, and sent him for aggressive chemotherapy and radiation that made his muscles spasm and his body ache.

One night last August, he drove into the city for chemotherapy. The next morning, he headed to a television studio to be a contestant on the Food Network show "Chopped."

LeVine was drained and nauseated and thought about canceling, but desperately wanted to prove that "you can have a life-threatening illness … and still push, and still have fun." So he struggled to pull himself together for the show's notoriously bizarre ingredient challenges.

LeVine, the new executive chef of the Montammy Golf Club in Alpine, will be honored Thursday by the American Cancer Society at a fund-raiser in Manhattan.

The chef is no stranger to awards, but this one brings a new kind of validation to someone who established his career while battling both cancer and his own attitude.

"I became selfish and self-absorbed and it didn't need to be that way. I did a lot of damage to people," the charismatic chef says. "In my mind, I used to think, It's about me. And then I came to the realization a couple of years ago that I have an ability that can help others."

Raised by a single mother in Brooklyn, LeVine began peeling onions and potatoes for a local caterer when he was 11 and quickly learned that he felt most at home in the kitchen. Later, he would start his own catering company and cook in France, Italy and Japan, even before graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1990. Then followed high-profile jobs at Aramark and the Marriott Marquis.

He was 31, with a catering company and two young children, when he began tiring easily and noticed a nagging numbness in his leg. He had chondrosarcoma, a bone cancer.

That launched a four-year cycle of diagnosis, treatment and remission – only to be followed by another diagnosis. After he beat chondrosarcoma, he was quickly diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Then, acute myelogenous leukemia.

LeVine took his usual determination right into the hospital. "I've always thought I would beat whatever came my way," LeVine says. "That's the upbringing that I had — to fight. Even the chefs I worked for [taught that] you never give up, you never give less than the best you can give."

Read the rest of Chef Eric's inspiring story here .

Effort Underway To Improve School Nutrition

2011-04-29T14:06:00.000-04:00

April 29, 2011
Written By: Travis Brown

SNOW HILL -- After spending more than a month working with local elementary school cafeterias as part of a Team Nutrition Grant program, Chef Paul Suplee called the effort to improve school nutrition a success. He did admit, however, that it was a small step but expressed hope that it would lead to similar efforts in the future.

Suplee, culinary arts instructor for the Worcester County Technical High School, and his students teamed up with cafeteria workers at five local elementary schools to design sets of easy-to-make yet nutritious meals that could then become part of the school’s regular menu. Suplee and his students spent one week cooking and planning with each school. At the end of the five-week period, the schools will share all of the meal ideas that had been generated with their counterparts, resulting in a widely expanded cafeteria menu for all of Worcester County.

“We’re just trying to educate the kids,” said Suplee. “So far we’ve had good results.”

He stressed the fact that the perceived worry over lack of nutrition in schools isn’t as dramatic as many believe and praised the cafeteria employees his team worked with as having done an incredible job, especially since they are always working with limited resources.

In response to that scarcity of funds and resources, Suplee used a portion of the $30,000 Team Nutrition Grant to outfit some of the more underequipped kitchens with new chef’s knives and other small-ware.

“They need to have the tools to do their jobs,” said Suplee of the cafeteria workers.

Read the complete story here.

Chefs' Recipe for Recycling - Repurpose, Reinvent

2011-04-22T11:20:00.000-04:00

Remember the stereotypically lavish chef of kitchen lore who would roast an olive inside a little bird inside a bigger bird on up to an ostrich, and then throw away everything but the olive? That guy wouldn't last too long in Bay Area kitchens.

Driven both by thrift and the desire to keep the planet cleaner, chefs are finding new uses for items that once would have been flung in the garbage, recycling and reusing just about everything but the squeak.

"Everything we use has value. Someone harvested it, someone grew it, someone cared about it," says Russell Moore, chef-owner of Camino in Oakland.

At Camino, Moore reuses fruit cores to infuse brandy, candies citrus peel for garnishes and sautes the outer leaves of greens with oil and olives to make herb jam for the cheese board.

Water is served in old gin bottles; wood for the dining room fireplace comes from orchard prunings; and the restaurant's seats are reused church chairs and pews. Leftover wine is turned into vinegar.

At San Francisco's Zuni Cafe, chef and co-owner Gilbert Pilgram also makes vinegar from leftover wine. And the kitchen sees the appeal of peelings, too. Pea shells flavor fish stocks, and in the summer, the liquid generated by making tomato concasse (peeled, seeded and chopped tomatoes) is used to thin the organic tomato juice for Bloody Marys. In winter, the juice drained from organic canned tomatoes is used in pizza sauce.

Sometimes reducing waste is about convenience as much as conscience.

Read about more ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle here.

Teen Chefs Whisk Their Way Toward Scholarships

2011-04-13T14:06:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK — The stakes were high Tuesday as 19 young chefs from New York City high schools whisked crepe batter, chopped herbs and seared chicken breasts in a competition for scholarships worth up to $100,000.

The two-hour cooking challenge at the Institute for Culinary Education in Manhattan was part of the Careers through Culinary Arts Program, or C-CAP, which has awarded nearly 5,000 scholarships since it began in 1990.

The program started in New York and has expanded to seven locations including Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. It has helped to train hundreds of culinary professionals, a couple of whom were back Tuesday as judges.

"It made all the difference in being where I am today in my career," said Kelvin Fernandez, 25, a graduate of the program who is now chef de cuisine at the Strand Hotel in Manhattan. "It gives you the opportunity to network."

The atmosphere in the two adjoining kitchens where the students wielded knives and sautÃ© pans was intense. The students were required to prepare two recipes: a classic French chicken dish and dessert crepes with pastry cream and chocolate sauce.

Each student carefully laid out his or her mise en place — salt, pepper, butter, mushrooms, eggs. They yelled "Behind, behind!" as they rushed around the crowded kitchens.

Hansel Serra from the High School for Hospitality Management was the picture of concentration as he placed a towel under his cutting board to steady it, then began dicing shallots.

Serra's shallots ended up chopped so finely they could have been mistaken for grains of rice. His parsley and tarragon were tiny specks of green.

"It's in the wrist, really," he said afterward.

Read the complete story here.

Sixty Great Chefs + Versailles = An AVERAGE Meal?

2011-04-11T17:51:00.000-04:00

VERSAILLES – The generals in crisp white uniforms plotted their strategy in the grand Hall of Battles in the Palace of Versailles. They were there not to recall the military victories of France’s past depicted in the graphic paintings lining the walls, but to celebrate the ritual of dining.

Inspired by the United Nations designation last year of the French meal as part of the "intangible cultural heritage of humanity", 60 of the world’s big-name chefs gathered at Versailles on Wednesday to help prepare a $1,270-a-head dinner for 650 guests in black tie, fancy dress and a fair amount of fur and feathers.

The dinner was a public relations extravaganza for the Relais & Chateaux hotel and restaurant group, which brought in its own chefs and paid $114,000 to rent Versailles for the night. (The cost of electricity, water, security and staff members was extra.) Les Grands Tables du Monde sent several chefs of its own.

Versailles is the most glorious chateau in the world, the place where Louis XIV raised fine dining to an art. But it is also a museum without a kitchen. A long, white marble corridor with sculptures of kings and noblemen had to be lined with 17 portable work stations, each consisting of one table, one oven and one electric burner, but no gas or running water.

“Let’s be honest,” said Patrick Henriroux, chef of the two-star Michelin La Pyramide in Vienne near Lyon. “This is not about creating in a kitchen. It’s more like cooking on a camping trip.”

As vice-president in charge of the grand chefs for the group, Mr. Henriroux was camp director. He organized his high-profile and potentially high-maintenance gastronomic greats in teams of three before deploying them to their humble work stations. With so many knives, “I had to make sure they got along,” he said.

Daniel Humm of New York’s Eleven Madison Park paced up and down the long corridor. Hélène Darroze, one of only two women among the five dozen chefs, was hugged and kissed a lot. Marc Meurin of Le Château de Beaulieu bonded quickly with his kitchen-mate, Philippe Mille of Les Crayères in Reims. “We’ve been great friends for an hour already,” Mr. Mille said. For their brief time together, three-star Michelin chefs Marc Haeberlin, Michel Troisgros, Jean-Michel Lorain, Annie Féolde, Jean-Georges Klein, Patrick Bertron, Régis Marcon and Eric Pras and all the two-stars, one-stars and no-stars worked as equals.

By most accounts, even their collective talent could not overcome the logistical hurdles. Most of the raw materials had to be pre-cooked and prepared off-site by the caterer Potel et Chabot. The chefs were asked to offer inspiration from their signature dishes, but their task was less to cook than to slice, dice, heat and accessorize food wheeled in on metal racks or stacked in white boxes.

Adding to the complexity of the meal, each chef prepared one course for about forty people. The cold appetizer chefs chose scallops or lobster; the hot appetizer chefs sea bass or morels, and the hot main course chefs duck or saddle of lamb.

One chef ranted that the 2002 Dom Pérignon Millésime Champagne was insufficiently chilled. Another searched fruitlessly for more squares of Savoy cabbage.

Guests muttered that the caviar dollops on the lightly smoked sea bass were too cold, the gelled Breton lobster claws too bland and the canard de Challans too naked. “Where were the great sauces to celebrate history and tradition?” said Jean-Claude Ribaut, the food critic for Le Monde. “Everything was a little flat, just average.”

Louis XIV might not have been entirely surprised.

Read the complete story here.

Chefs: Is There Gold in Going Gluten-Free?

2011-04-07T13:19:00.001-04:00

If Lyndhurst resident Melissa Van Riper wants a night out to eat with her husband, friends or family, her options aren't very plentiful locally. It's not that Lyndhurst doesn't have any good restaurants; you could throw a stone and probably hit one decent eatery or another offering everything from Chinese and Italian to Portuguese fare and Turkish cuisine. The problem is Van Riper has Celiac disease and unless a restaurant has a gluten-free menu, she doesn't dare go near it.

"I travel for gluten-free," said Van Riper, who is 27 weeks pregnant with her first child and fears her daughter will also have Celiac disease, which is a genetic disorder. "We go to Boonton, we go to Pompton Lakes, we go to all these places that have gluten-free food."

Celiac disease is a digestive disease that damages the small intestine and interferes with the absorption of nutrients from food. When Celiac sufferers eat foods containing gluten, a protein in wheat, rye and barley, it destroys the intestine's nutrient absorbing lining, or villi. If a person with Celiac eats gluten he or she suffers severe stomach pains, and prolonged gluten intake can cause malnutrition, no matter how much someone eats.

Adhering to a gluten-free diet is essentially the only way to tame Celiac disease's effects, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. About one in 133 people have it and many don't know it. Van Riper was diagnosed just over a year ago, having been through about 10 doctors before one actually performed a genetic blood test and colonoscopy to give her the proper diagnosis after years of suffering from severe stomach woes.

"I could have had it my whole life. I was gastrointestinal sick for seven years," said Van Riper. "Because I was so young, no one ever did a colonoscopy. People can have bloating, eat something and it doesn't agree with them; you keep getting stomachaches and may not know that you may have a genetic disease."

Lyndhurst's Health Administrator Joyce Jacobson, after hearing Van Riper's story, wants to do something about the problem. When Van Riper called about a month ago asking how she could obtain her marriage license, she also wanted to talk to someone about gluten-free awareness. Jacobson answered the call and found the issue confounding, but noteworthy, because the health department was in the midst of holding food handling courses. In her two previous classes with 42 attendees, not one, she said, offered anything gluten-free at their eateries. She had Van Riper come in and speak to the third class of 15 to inform them about the benefits of offering a gluten-free menu option. The two are now going to embark on an awareness campaign starting with an open community support group in May to any residents of Lyndhurst and surrounding communities that have Celiac or want to know more about it. Then they want to bring evidence to restaurants that Celiac is more common than thought and restaurants would benefit from offering gluten-free menu options.

Read the complete story here.

Does the "Mediterranean Diet" Really Exist?

2011-04-04T12:10:00.000-04:00

Every Saturday, a fleet of cars and trucks pulls into a windswept parking lot just off the Mediterranean. Under flapping white awnings, women slit open eggplants the size of a large man’s thumb and stuff them with a mix of chopped garlic, red peppers and walnuts. This is Souk el Tayeb, the farmers’ market that has helped make Beirut a hot destination for globe-trotting foodies. But if you want to see how the new generation of Lebanese really wants to eat, you have to go somewhere else. You have to go to Roadster Diner.

Roadster is a chain of 1950s-Americana restaurants. Its original motto, “There goes my heart,” evokes both Elvis and his artery-clogging diet. The Roadster in my Beirut neighborhood had a life-size statue of a grinning black man with huge white teeth singing into a microphone. Unlike the strenuously authentic Lebanese restaurants beloved by tourists and visiting food writers, Roadster’s nine retail franchises across Lebanon are always packed with locals.

In Europe and the United States, the so-called Mediterranean diet — rich in olive oil, whole grains, fish, fruits and vegetables and wine — is a multibillion-dollar global brand, encompassing everything from hummus to package trips to Italy, where “enogastronomic tourism” rakes in as much as five billion euros a year. Studies at Harvard and elsewhere correlate the Mediterranean diet with lower rates of heart disease, diabetes and depression. In America, health gurus like Mehmet Oz exhort followers to “eat like a Greek.” But according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Mediterranean people have some of the worst diets in Europe, and the Greeks are the fattest: about 75 percent of the Greek population is overweight.

So if the Mediterranean diet is not what people in the Mediterranean eat, then what is it?

Find out by reading the rest of the article here.

Charlie Trotter, a Leader Left Behind?

2011-04-01T01:54:00.001-04:00

Charlie Trotter stood in his chef’s whites before an audience of high school students in the Studio Kitchen, the private-dining annex to his eponymous restaurant here. The students, dressed to the nines and seated at a banquet table, were from Providence-St. Mel, an academically rigorous Catholic school in the city’s rough East Garfield Park neighborhood.

They were there as Mr. Trotter’s guests, part of what he calls his excellence program, wherein, three nights a week, 50 weeks a year, youths from disadvantaged backgrounds are treated to an elaborate multicourse tasting menu, a tour of the restaurant and a succession of inspirational speakers, often including the chef himself.

As waiters whirled around the students, removing empty plates and filling Champagne flutes with sparkling organic grape juice from Germany, Mr. Trotter listened approvingly as a commis named James Caputo expounded upon the importance of discipline and teamwork. When he was done, Mr. Trotter thanked him and asked him to hang on for a moment. “Chef, ” Mr. Trotter said, “on a scale of 1 to 10 -- 1 being, oh, I don’t know, a Russian gulag, and 10 being nirvana -- how would you rate what it’s like to work for me?”

“Ten, easily,” Mr. Caputo said.

At this, Mr. Trotter pretended to look affronted. “Ten? That’s all?” he said.

This was obviously shtick, but it was also a sly acknowledgement of his reputation as fearsome autocrat. Though he can be genial and very funny, he has never been able to shake his label as a tyrant of fine dining.
In fact, it’s the main way his name has been coming up of late. Grant Achatz, the chef and an owner of the Chicago restaurant Alinea, devotes an entire chapter to Mr. Trotter’s scariness in his new memoir, “Life, on the Line.”

Otherwise, Mr. Trotter hardly seems to figure in the national food conversation anymore. In the very years when Chicago has gloried in newfound recognition as a major restaurant destination, with the spotlight trained upon alumni of Mr. Trotter’s kitchen like Mr. Achatz, Homaro Cantu (of Moto), Giuseppe Tentori (of Boka), and Graham Elliot (of Graham Elliot), the man who put the city on the fine-dining map has somehow fallen below the radar.

November’s inaugural Michelin guide to Chicago restaurants was telling. Alinea, the standard-bearer of technologically forward cuisine, got three stars, the guide’s highest rating, as did the modernist seafood restaurant L2O. The one-star tier was rife with relative newcomers of gonzo-hipster bent like Longman & Eagle, where the menu features a wild-boar sloppy Joe. In between, at a dutiful but unsexy two stars, was Charlie Trotter’s.

“I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel sad about that,” Mr. Elliot said. “I mean, I wanted to quit every day I worked there, but I’m proud that I got through it, and in some ways I look at Charlie as my father. To see him getting two stars instead of three, and not getting any articles or anything, it makes you feel bad — like seeing your dad lose his job.”

Read the complete story here.

Thirteen Indiputable Universal Laws

2011-03-25T14:17:00.000-04:00

A friend shared these in this morning's e-mail:

Law of Mechanical Repair - After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch and you'll have to pee.

Law of Gravity - Any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.

Law of Probability -The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act

Law of Random Numbers - If you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal and someone always answers.

Law of the Alibi - If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire..

Variation Law - If you change lines (or traffic lanes),
the one you were in will always move faster than the one you are in now (works every time).

Law of the Bath - When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone rings.

Law of Close Encounters -The probability of meeting someone you know increases dramatically when you are with someone you don't want to be seen with.

Law of the Result - When you try to prove to someone that a machine won't work, it will.

The Coffee Law - As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold.

Law of Physical Surfaces - The chances of an open-faced jelly sandwich landing face down on a floor are directly correlated to the newness and cost of the carpet or rug.

Wilson's Law of Commercial Marketing Strategy - As soon as you find a product that you really like, they will stop making it.

Doctors' Law - If you don't feel well, make an appointment to go to the doctor, by the time you get there you'll feel better. But don't make an appointment, and you'll stay sick.

Chefs Create Countless Variations of the Veggie Burger

2011-03-24T14:44:00.000-04:00

THEY were the four syllables that had the power to make both carnivores and vegetarians ringe: veggie burger.

For meat-lovers, the veggie burger was long seen as a sad stand-in that tried to copy the contours and textures of a classic beef patty while falling pathetically short of the pleasure. And for meat-refusers, the veggie burger served as a kind of penitential wafer: You ate this bland, freeze-dried nutrient disc because you had to eat it (your duty as someone who had forsaken the flesh) and because at many a restaurant or backyard barbecue, it was the only option available.

If that has been your mental framework since the days when Jerry Garcia was still with us, it might be time to take another bite. To borrow a phrase from the culture that produced it, the veggie burger seems finally to have achieved self-actualization.

Across the country, chefs and restaurateurs have been taking on the erstwhile health-food punch line with a kind of experimental brio, using it as a noble excuse to fool around with flavor and texture and hue. As a result, veggie burgers haven’t merely become good. They have exploded into countless variations of good, and in doing so they’ve begun to look like a bellwether for the American appetite. If the growing passion for plant-based diets is here to stay, chefs — even in restaurants where you won’t find the slightest trace of spirulina — are paying attention.

“I just think it’s important to accommodate everybody,” said Josh Capon, who opened Burger & Barrel in SoHo last fall and quietly slipped a chickpea-based veggie burger onto a menu heady with pork chops, charcuterie and carpaccio. “And I don’t think somebody should feel like they’re eating an inferior burger. If you’re going to do a veggie burger, it should have that richness and mouth feel and overall texture. When you pick it up, it should eat like a burger.”

He will get no argument from Adam Fleischman, the owner of the expanding Umami Burger chain in Los Angeles. Even though his Earth Burger includes no meat, it offers the taste buds a gooey, decadent tradeoff by dandying up a mushroom-and-edamame patty with ricotta, truffle aioli and cipollini onions.

At Cru, a largely vegan and raw-food-focused cafe in that city’s Silver Lake neighborhood, the dietary and structural restrictions only seem to open up pathways of metamorphosis. Cru’s South American sliders are made of sprouted lentils and cooked garbanzo beans pulsed with garlic and spices. They’re deep-fried, dressed with a mojo sauce of blood orange and paprika and Peruvian aji amarillo chilies, and served on leaves of butter lettuce instead of a bread bun.

“We’re trying to stay away from that dry, tasteless veggie burger thing,” said Cru’s chef, Vincent Krimmel. “We have a lot more to play with now.”

Reda the complete story here.

U.S. Now Drinks the Most Wine in World

2011-03-18T00:55:00.000-04:00

The United States has passed France as the world’s largest consumer of wine.
According to the wine industry, wine shipments to the U.S. from U.S. states and foreign producers grew 2 percent last year to 330 million cases with an estimated retail value of $30 billion.
France and Italy still lead the world in per-capita wine consumption, but the U.S. is catching up.

Read the complete story here.

Chefs Take The Deprivation Out of Lenten Fridays

2011-03-10T21:33:00.000-05:00

No matter how much you like fish and chips, they can get tiresome if you eat them every Friday during Lent. And there’s no need for monotonous fare, unless you choose it as a form of abstinence.

“People are looking for something different than fish and chips,” said Richard Daniels of Quincy, a chef at Stars on Hingham Harbor.

Daniels and other chefs cook up lobster mac ’n’ cheese, pan-seared scallops, linguine with shellfish and other fish and pastas dishes that have complex flavors but are relatively easy to prepare. And some chefs reinvent dishes strongly associated with meat by replacing the meat with a variety of fresh, high-quality ingredients and seasonings.

“I have fun playing with tons of ingredients and creating a contemporary fusion kind of food,” said Pankaj Pradhan, chef and owner of Red Lentil, a 2-year-old vegetarian restaurant on the Newton/Watertown line.

Years ago, Catholics might have felt unusual on meatless Fridays. But today, many non-vegetarians choose meatless meals at least once a week, prompted by concerns about fat in their diet, animal welfare and the environmental stress of meat production. About half his customers are not vegetarians, Pradhan said.

“People come who have eaten meat their whole life, but they want to try things unrelated to animal products,” said Pradhan, who prepares food inspired by the cuisines of Mexico, Italy, Greece, the Middle East and India, where he grew up. “They’re thinking about their health and the environment.”

Shepherd’s pie is one of the most popular dishes at Red Lentil. After experimenting with combinations of protein, vegetables and carbohydrates, Pradhan created a dish with layers of mashed Yukon gold and sweet potatoes, spinach, corn and soy sausage, served with a gravy made from ground cashews and soy milk and drizzled with cilantro sunflower pesto. Other meatless adaptations are sweet potato quesadillas, moussaka pizza and brown rice risotto with roasted butternut squash, red peppers, peas and goat cheese.

At Stars, Daniels serves vegetable risotto to complement pan-seared scallops.

“This method uses high heat and sears in the juices so the scallops don’t dry out,” he said.
Since Daniels introduced lobster mac ’n’ cheese several years ago, it has become the second most popular dish during Lent, after fish and chips. Bearing little resemblance to traditional macaroni and cheese, cavatelli pasta is baked with shiitake mushrooms, fresh peas and lobster pieces in a sauce of cream, white cheddar and parmesan. It’s topped with bread crumbs and white truffle oil.

Read the complete story here.

Fresh Sprouts at School

2011-03-09T13:07:00.000-05:00

When you think about it, farms and schools have the same goal: to plant seeds and nurture growth. At Sunset Beach Elementary School the figurative ideal has gone literal. Seed-planting, plus a healthy dose of support from educators, parents, farms and the community, has sprouted and nurtured students' love of gardening and their taste for locally grown fruits and vegetables.

On the school campus, students tend a garden and an orchard, thanks to donations from the community and support from the Kokua Hawaii Foundation. The 'AINA Kine Student Farmers' Market Club funds a biweekly healthy snack supplied mostly by local farms, and a weekly lunchtime salad bar comes via support of the foundation.

All this focus on local, healthful food began converging at the school in February 2009, when parent Erin Delventhal noticed that fruit from neighborhood trees was "left on the ground half the time."

"I knew they could be put to good use, so I set up a meeting with the principal and Kim Johnson of the Kokua Foundation, who also has kids at the school," she recalls. The school organized a farmers market club for students and asked the community to donate home-grown produce for the first sale. On market day they had a table full of food that generated $180 in one hour.

"When we asked the club what they wanted to do with the money, they said they wanted to provide the students with a healthy snack," Delventhal says. "The first snack was watermelon."

Since then, 15,000 healthy snacks have been served to the student body.

"Working with local farmers, I am usually able to purchase produce that is allowed to ripen naturally," says Delventhal. "Buying local gives the students the best-tasting snacks and, ultimately, influences their food choices. For instance, after serving starfruit from Poamoho Organic Produce in Waialua, we saw students lining up, quarters in hand, ready to purchase starfruit at the student farmers market."

Several months after that first market, the club received a grant from the foundation to plant a garden at the school. It also hosted a community tree drive that led to an orchard of guava, starfruit, kumquat, orange, lemon, lime, tangerine, grapefruit, sapodilla, wax jambu and sweetsop trees. Under the trees, the children planted sweet potato, pumpkin, zinnias,
gardenias, lilikoi and pineapple.

Meanwhile, the school organized a fresh lunchtime salad bar.

Today, produce from the school garden takes its place on the farmers market table alongside donations, and Thursday lunches include a trip to the salad bar. And the students love it.

Read the complete story here.

Purist Chefs Ban Ketchup, Decaf and Toasted Bagels

2011-03-07T18:41:00.000-05:00

At a pea-size Lower East Side bistro known for its fries, the admonition is spelled out on a chalkboard: No ketchup. At a popular gastropub in the West Village, customers cannot have the burger with any cheese other than Roquefort.

And at Murray’s Bagels in Greenwich Village and Chelsea, the morning crowd can order its bagels topped any number of ways but never — ever! — toasted. “It’s really annoying, because a toasted bagel is kind of fierce, right?” Jamie Divine, a product designer and frequent patron, said with a hint of an eye-roll.

New York has spawned a breed of hard-line restaurants and cafes that are saying no. No to pouring takeout espressos, or grinding more than a pound of coffee at a time. No to taming the intensity of a magma-spicy dish. And most of all, no to the 21st-century conviction that everything can be accessorized to the customer’s taste.

“People just assume that every restaurant should be for everyone — I could understand that if we were in a town with, like, 20 restaurants,” said David Chang, whose small empire of Momofuku restaurants is known for refusing to make substitutions or provide vegetarian options. “Instead of trying to make a menu that’s for everyone, let’s make a menu that works best for what we want to do.”

He added, “The customer is not always right.”

This coterie of food purists — or puritans, perhaps — is hardly limited to New York. The chef-owner of the Michelin-starred Chicago restaurant Graham Elliot does not serve decaffeinated coffee at his new sandwich shop and coffee bar, Grahamwich, because, Mr. Elliot said in an e-mail, “we decided to let our inner purists shine through and showcase coffee for what it is — a flavorful, caffeinated elixir.”

Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant, recalled a San Francisco spot that would not supply salt or pepper because the chef supposedly seasoned every dish perfectly.

But New York has a hallowed history of persnickety cooks: Kenny Shopsin became something of a cult figure for the litany of rules — including no parties bigger than four, and no more than one order at each table of any particular dish — enforced for years at Shopsin’s diner in the West Village, now a small outpost at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side.

Arthur Schwartz, a food writer and historian, recalled a restaurant that the New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme opened in Manhattan more than 20 years ago that also prohibited dining companions from ordering the same dish. “It didn’t last very long,” Mr. Schwartz said, “because in those days we all said: ‘Too many rules. New Yorkers are not going to do this.’ ”

Yet in a city filled with newcomers seeking a sense of belonging, rules can be part of the attraction. “One reason people go to a particular restaurant is they want to feel part of a particular community,” Mr. Schwartz said — even if that community is based on nothing more than a shared appreciation for carefully tended espresso that never touches a paper cup.

“You’re supposed to drink espresso fast,” said Caroline Bell, an owner of Cafe Grumpy, explaining that paper lets the heat dissipate too quickly.

When some customers at the three outposts in Brooklyn and Manhattan became, well, grumpy over the lack of takeout espresso, Ms. Bell instituted a policy meant to be taken more with a wink than with the snarl of the cafe’s logo: Patrons can get an espresso to go, if they pay $12 to drink it from a porcelain cup they can keep. “People actually do that,” she said. “There’s a guy that comes in every day to Chelsea with that cup and gets espresso.”

Some restaurateurs say they limit choices because it allows them to serve items consistently prepared the way they want.

“Cooks are creatures of habit,” Mr. Chang said. “To do this ‘Can I get this with no olives, can I get the salad chopped, sauce on the side’ — some of those special requests are ridiculous. My personal opinion is that a lot of people say they have a special allergy or they don’t like something so they can get better service.”

Read the entire story here.

Beef Industry Carves a Course

2011-03-06T23:29:00.000-05:00

Cattlemen's Group Promotes Red Meat, Trains Recruits to Win Over Consumers

by Stephanie Simon

Colorado native Jen Johnson loved raising cattle and eating steak, a lifestyle some of her friends at Princeton University found a bit hard to swallow.

Ms. Johnson tried winning them over with sheer enthusiasm. But she soon realized she needed help persuading her salad-nibbling sorority sisters to order steaks. So she went back to school to get her MBA—Masters of Beef Advocacy.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which represents beef producers, launched the MBA two years ago. The course trains ranchers, feedlot operators, butchers, chefs—anyone, really, who loves a good, thick rib-eye—in the fine art of promoting and defending red meat.

Nearly 2,000 graduates have completed the program. The cattlemen aim to train at least 20,000 more, in the hope of building a forceful counterweight to the animal-rights advocates who denounce beef production as inhumane, and the vegetarian activists who reject beef consumption as unhealthy.

The advocacy effort comes at a tough time for the beef industry. Beef consumption in the U.S. plunged from a high of 94 pounds a person in 1976 to less than 62 pounds in 2009, according to the American Meat Institute, a trade group representing beef processors.

School districts across the country have adopted "Meatless Mondays" and are dishing out bean burritos in lieu of burgers. And this winter, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued new dietary guidelines advising consumers to replace some of the meat in their diet with seafood.

Meanwhile, veggie evangelists at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have turned heads with ever-more-racy campaigns, including sending models clad only in strategically placed leaves of lettuce to hand out tofu hot dogs on street corners nationwide.

PETA says its tactics work. Last year, the nonprofit fielded 850,000 requests for "vegetarian starter kits" packed with recipes like Tofu Tamale Pie and testimonials from celebrity supporters like actress Natalie Portman.

"We're winning," said Bruce Friedrich, a PETA vice president.

Not so fast, the MBAs respond.

Beef has its own celebrity backers—actor Matthew McConaughey has done radio spots—but industry strategists decided that the best way to promote the product was to put the men and women who produce beef front and center.

Their goal: convince skeptical consumers that the shrink-wrapped sirloin tips in the supermarket aren't artery-clogging commodities mass-produced on factory farms, but wholesome meals turned out with great care by hard-working families. To that end, MBA students are encouraged to strike up conversations with strangers.

Ranchers are urged to talk about the hours they spend caring for cattle—all those trips to the pasture at 3 a.m. to help a laboring cow give birth. Retailers could mention nutritional facts—that a three-ounce serving of eye-round roast has just slightly more fat than a skinless chicken breast, for example.

Ms. Johnson, 26 years old, has taken to sending email blasts to her friends from Princeton, describing a morning she spent artificially inseminating cows or explaining how grazing helps ranch land thrive. The majority of beef cattle in the U.S. are raised on grass on family-owned ranches before they are sent to feedlots for fattening and then on to the slaughterhouse for processing.

"We can change the dynamic of the discussion going on with the consumer with two phrases: We care and we're capable," Daren Williams, an executive at the cattleman's association, told a recent MBA class in Denver.

But critics of the industry say true transparency about how burgers come to be may backfire.
Constant reminders that a juicy quarter-pounder was once a wobbly-legged, big-eyed calf may put some people "in the mood to have a steak," said Michael Pollan, who has written several books critical of modern beef production. "For others," he said, "it puts them in the mood to become a vegan."

Read the complete story here.

Cooking for the Commander in Chief

2011-02-28T15:07:00.000-05:00

As world leaders and celebrities streamed into the White House last month for the highly anticipated state dinner honoring China's President Hu Jintao, White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford had a discomfiting thought: "In five minutes we're going to serve 200 people. This is not the time to fail." She donned her Dolce & Gabbana bifocals, a move signaling to her staff that it's "game on," she said, though in the heat of preparation, her glasses often steam up and she'll wind up casting them aside. (She recently found them in the refrigerator.)

The importance of last month's dinner went beyond its usual social value. When Mr. Hu visited in 2006, he was invited to lunch, which the Chinese took as a slight. So, at a time when the U.S. is pressing Beijing on economic issues like the value of its currency, but relying on its help with thorny regional problems like North Korea, the pressure was on to underscore the value of the relationship by pulling out all the culinary stops.

The Chinese asked for a "quintessentially American" dinner. What does that mean to a Philippines-born, French-trained chef, married to a chef of Irish descent? To Ms. Comerford, quintessentially American "reminds you of home." Her family Thanksgiving table is an amalgam of Mayflower and Manila, some 20 dishes prepared by the couple with baking help from their 9-year-old daughter, Danielle. The chef's sweet potatoes are a presidential favorite: She roasts them with oranges and star anise.

Ms. Comerford, 47, attended the food-technology program at the University of the Philippines. She got her start in Chicago-area hotels, including the Sheraton and Hyatt Regency near O'Hare airport. In Washington, she did a stint at Le Grande Bistro in the Westin Hotel before she was recruited by former White House chef Walter Scheib III to work at the presidential residence in 1995. Laura Bush appointed her to the top job in 2005, making Ms. Comerford the first female, and the first ethnic minority, to hold the position.

Her friendly manner carries an undercurrent of toughness. When her assistant suggested her "spring rolls" are a signature dish, she shot him a look and said, "No, that's not who I am." A Cristeta Comerford meal is known for its Asian spice, colors and "extra garlic," she said. One recent afternoon, she prepared seared lamb loin on chickpea purée for an Obama family dinner, the purée's strong garlic balanced by parsley and mint. The dish was finished with orange zest and streaks of vibrant finishing oil, made by cooking light olive oil with handfuls of parsley until the oil glows a vivid green.

Her starting point for the menu for the state dinner, as with any meal, was a review of the best ingredients available locally, arrayed on one of her stainless-steel work tables. Seeing the items together helps her to draw new lines between them, creating different combinations.

Read the complete story here.

U.S. Chefs to Honor French Dining at Versailles

2011-02-16T23:14:00.000-05:00

Four star chefs from the United States are slated to take part in an international salute to the French way of dining in April at Versailles, the one-time home of French kings, just outside Paris. Thomas Keller and Eli Kaimeh of New York's Per Se, Patrick O'Connell of The Inn at Little Washington in Virginia and Daniel Boulud of New York's Daniel are among 60 "grand chefs" assembled for this dinner by Relais & Chateaux, a global network of about 500 hotels and gourmet restaurants.

This April 6 dinner in honor of French gastronomy marks the inclusion last November of the "Gastronomic Meal of the French" on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The dinner for 650 guests paying 890 euros ($1,200) each will take place in Versailles' Gallery of Battles.

Read more about the event here.

Just How Much Beef is in Fast-Food Meat?

2011-02-15T22:01:00.000-05:00

That question emerged after a recent lawsuit alleged that Taco Bell was passing off mostly meat substitute as real beef in its tacos. The Yum! Brands Inc. chain swiftly countered the accusations, taking out prominent newspaper ads stating that its seasoned beef was the genuine article, containing 88% beef, 3% added water, 4% seasoning and 5% other ingredients, such as oats and sugar.

The controversy exposed a conundrum for consumers. Despite extensive regulations governing certain areas of food processing, there are scant data available to the public about what really goes into some of their favorite restaurant meals. And what information is available—often on fast-food chains' websites—often omits crucial details.

Restaurants' food-content claims can be difficult to verify. When asked for the composition of several of their own dishes, most of the nearly 20 chains contacted by The Wall Street Journal declined to share numbers, citing the proprietary nature of their formulas. Federal regulations don't require restaurants to disclose such information, and there are no rules stipulating minimum meat content in menu items. While determining nutrient information, such as calories and protein, is relatively straightforward, food-testing laboratories say they can't definitively identify the composition of prepared food because the cooking process blends ingredients in a way that is tough to undo.

Unless a food lab knew for sure which ingredients were present, "there is serious potential to be seriously flawed" in estimating just how much of those ingredients are being used, says Kantha Shelke, an independent food technologist in Chicago. "It's a guesstimate at best."

The Taco Bell flap began with a lawsuit filed by a Montgomery, Ala., law firm on behalf of a California woman who claims that "a substantial majority" of the company's beef filling isn't beef. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, didn't provide supplementary evidence. One of the firm's lawyers, Dee Miles, told National Public Radio and other news organizations that tests found that about 35% of the filling was beef. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Miles now declines to comment, and his firm hasn't disclosed where or how tests were conducted or provided detailed results.

"The claims made against Taco Bell and our seasoned beef are absolutely false," Taco Bell said in the newspaper ads. The company didn't respond to requests for additional comment.

Read the complete story here.

Ambitious Chefs Buck the Economic and Culinary Trends

2011-02-08T15:26:00.000-05:00

February 07, 2011|By Craig LaBan, Inquirer Restaurant Critic

Hold the obituary on fine dining, and pass the 12-course tasting menu, please.

It's a refrain chef Marc Vetri hopes to hear often after March 15, when his signature gem, Vetri, abandons a la carte dining altogether for $135 tasting menus, a decadent splurge previously required only on weekends.

In a move that seems counter to these recessionary times, not only is the city's best Italian restaurant raising the cost of midweek dining, but Vetri is also shaving six seats from the townhouse dining room. At 36 before, it was already a picture of tight-squeeze intimacy.

"When people walk in and just order an appetizer and entree and then leave, they're not getting what we really set out to offer. They're not getting the whole experience," says Vetri.

The upscale moves may foretell a trend on the horizon born of pent-up desire, as other young chefs have plans to open small venues dedicated to gastronomy. Ambitious tasting menus elsewhere are also gaining new traction.

The notion seemingly flies in the face of the most recent currents, which have brought mainly trouble for "whole experience"-style fine dining, as white-tablecloth formality unraveled under the pressure of economic turmoil and a cultural shift toward more casual venues.

Walnut Street's Restaurant Row continues to crumble. Restaurant Week-style bargain menus abound year round. The Four Seasons Hotel has been exploring the potential of an independent operator for its luxurious Fountain Restaurant.

And in a bid to survive two years ago, Georges Perrier's bastion of prix-fixe luxury, Le Bec-Fin, embraced an a la carte menu for the first time in its four decades, even started serving hamburgers at lunch, before announcing last year plans to finally close - moves Perrier has since reconsidered and regretted.
"I think I panicked too early and made changes I should never have done," conceded Perrier, who said his prix-fixe menus, which range from $40 to $185, are now back up to 80 percent of his meals.

Indeed, the irony is as rich as beurre blanc. Perrier's legendary restaurant, of course, began its life at 1312 Spruce St. - the townhouse address where Vetri has now ascended to the hot list of an international dinerati, which sometimes comes in from London, L.A., Chicago, or New York (not to mention Rittenhouse Square) just for dinner.

Achieving that level of fame has been a steady evolution for Vetri, a James Beard Foundation Award winner. Vetri and his business partner, Jeff Benjamin, have since opened larger casual venues (Osteria, Amis) to offer more flexible options to the salad-and-pasta crowd. Thus, the flagship has become a focal point for Vetri's dogged pursuit to craft the nation's ultimate experience in alta cucina.

New Italian china and Venetian vases have been ordered. Snazzy new uniforms for the staff ("nothing formal - but playful!") are in the works. The vestibule is being rehabbed. A new chef de cuisine, former Vetri sous Adam Leonti, is due back from a six-month kitchen stint in Bergamo. And demand for the elaborate tasting meals, with their inventive seasonal dishes and hand-painted menus, has grown over the last two years from weekends only to half of Vetri's midweek meals, when a la carte was still an option.

Read the complete story here.

French Chefs Team Up to Safeguard Gallic Gastronomy

2011-02-03T19:22:00.000-05:00

(Reuters Life!) - Worried that France's global gastronomic influence may be on the wane, 15 of its top Michelin-starred chefs are cooking up a plan to put it back on the menu and enlist the help of the state to promote it.

Critics of French cuisine argue that for too long it has rested on its laurels, not moving with the times to use alternative ingredients and adapt to a changing culinary world order as new chefs push the boundaries.

With that in mind, the who's who of French cuisine, including Alain Ducasse, owner of London's famous Dorchester and 26-Michelin star holder Joel Robuchon, gathered at the Eiffel Tower on Tuesday to unveil the country's first chef lobbying group -- the College Culinaire de France.

"We are in a time when everyone is working for themselves," Robuchon, who operates restaurants in Las Vegas, Monaco, Hong Kong and elsewhere, told Reuters TV. "We wanted to create a group that works together for the excellence of French gastronomy and export it overseas where it is still unknown."

The catering industry alone in France accounted for about 50 billion euros ($68.66 billion) in 2009 and is the fourth biggest private sector employer taking on almost 500,000 people each year.

Unlike other sectors, the chefs argue that the authorities have taken it for granted and left it to fend for itself.

"We want them (authorities) to take note and if possible help economically such as through marketing," Alain Ducasse told Reuters. "We have a beautiful past and we can look forward calmly, but competition exists and we shouldn't forget that."

The chefs' art, once dominated by a French swagger, has changed after thousands of budding cooks learnt their trade in France's top kitchens, only to ply their trade elsewhere and take the culinary experience to new levels.
For Guy Savoy, one of the chefs considered to have nurtured the lighter and more modern French cuisine, part of the problem is a sense of guilt about promoting France's heritage.

"It's not arrogant or pretentious to say France is the global essence of gastronomy ... it's the reality and we have to stop punishing ourselves just because one or two countries have a few cooks that make a lot more noise than a few thousand French chefs. This (association) is an attacking team."

The final straw was perhaps at this year's Bocuse d'Or -- the Oscar's of the cooking world held biennially in France's gastronomic capital, Lyon. French chefs were nowhere to be seen as the top three chefs all came from Scandinavia.

Read the complete story here.

Granola Leaves the 60s

2011-01-27T13:48:00.000-05:00

Though it is strongly associated with the 1960s, granola has been around for more than a century. In 1863, sanitarium owner James Jackson created a graham flour product for his patients. He called it "granula."

Forty years later, at another sanitarium, John Harvey Kellogg created a similar product substituting oats for graham flour. He, too, called it granula — until he was sued by Jackson. Kellogg renamed his dried cereal "granola."

Granola did not really catch on, however, until a century later. The healthful eating movement of the 1960s started, with young adults rejecting generation-old political views as well as processed foods.

With an emphasis on whole grains and organic ingredients, cereal companies such as Kellogg, Post and Quaker Oats decided to rebrand and remarket their whole-grain granolas. In 1972, Pet Inc. introduced Heartland Natural Cereal, with the other cereal companies following close behind. And in 1975, Nature Valley rolled out the first granola bar.

Today shoppers can find granola in any flavor: vanilla, peanut butter, chocolate raspberry, maple cranberry; and with a variety of mix-ins: sunflower seeds, cashews, chocolate-covered pretzels and shredded coconut. With so many options, it can be hard to find one product with all the preferred ingredients.

Some consumers like dried fruit, while others do not. Some want a sweeter, more indulgent granola, and others want the bare-bones oats. There are even websites where you can order your own custom-made granola.

Read the rest of the story and learn everything you ever wanted to know about granola here.

Chefs Add Flavor to High School Cooking Program

2011-01-25T11:56:00.000-05:00

Seventeen-year-old Marissa Diaz has a secret -- she loves watching Julia Child's old cooking shows.

She admits that viewing reruns of the late, warbly-voiced kitchen icon isn't the usual video-watching fare of teenagers. But the trailblazing celebrity chef, who made French cuisine accessible to many Americans, inspires Diaz.

"I recently watched her make a fish fillet," the excitable teen said. "She was adding scallops, lobster, eel -- let your imagination go wild!"

Diaz, along with a half-dozen classmates from Adrian Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, experienced all things cooking Saturday. They worked alongside renowned chefs Martin Yan and Sir Roy Salazar at the Art of Home Show at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

The Wilcox students, as well as several from Peterson Middle School in Sunnyvale on Friday, assisted the chefs and even gave their own cooking demonstrations. They are enrolled in the Santa Clara Unified School District's culinary arts program, part of the district's vocational education courses, which range from fashion design to automotive technology.

"It's a great way for kids to link into something they love," said Tabitha Kappeler-Hurley, spokeswoman for the district's career education program. "And maybe they'll make a career of it."

Read the complete story here.

Sam Brown Comes Home to His Culinary Beginnings

2011-01-24T21:17:00.000-05:00

Second Helpings is pleased to announce the addition of Chef Sam Brown as Director of Culinary Job Training.

Chef Brown's hiring marks a homecoming of sorts - Brown is both a 1999 graduate of the program (Class #9), and previously lead the program for four years. A graduate of the Cordon Bleu Culinary Arts Institue, Chef Brown brings more than ten years of culinary experience and leadership. Chef Brown has held Executive Chef positions at Aramark Food Services, Centerplate Dining Services in the RCA Dome, and is an adjunct professor at Ivy Tech Community College. The American Culinary Federation of Indianapolis awarded Brown "Chef of the Year" in 2001, a "President's Award" in 2005 and a "Chef Professionalism Award" in 2006. Chef Brown most recently led food service at Fairbanks Hospital.

"I am very grateful and excited to come home to Second Helpings, where I received my first success in the food service industry," Chef Brown says. "I'm excited by the opportunity to help train unemployed and displaced adults, which is desperately needed in our community right now. We're going to help a lot of people get jobs."

Second Helpings' Culinary Job Training program is a ten-week, intensive training program, educating unemployed and displaced adults in the culinary arts. After graduation, we help them launch meaningful careers in the culinary industry. Since 1998, we've graduated 429 students. Graduates of the program work in positions all around Indianapolis, including the Colts Complex, Hilton 120 West, Levy Restaurants in Conseco Fieldhouse, Bravo and Lucas Oil Stadium.

"Sam brings a truly unique perspective to our culinary job training program," says Jennifer Vigran, Interim CEO of Second Helpings. "As a graduate of our program, he remains the strongest role model we could possibly offer our students. His experience as a chef, employer and a culinary instructor makes him the ideal candidate for Second Helpings at this time."

Welcome home, Chef Brown.

For Healing, Meals Made to Order

2011-01-17T11:00:00.000-05:00

JULIEN COLLOT, who is 8 and has had leukemia, has been on a low-microbial diet since his two bone-marrow transplants, in 2006 and 2007. When he developed diabetes last year, he had to go low-fat and low-sugar as well.

So Pnina Peled, the executive chef at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, makes Julien his beloved shrimp scampi with Promise, a butter substitute, and eggplant Parmesan using egg whites, whole-wheat bread crumbs and soy cheese. When Julien told Ms. Peled about his love of pumpkin spice cake, she presented him one baked with egg whites and applesauce. After he rejected the hospital’s whole-wheat ravioli, she hauled her pasta maker on the subway from Brooklyn to roll out a handmade version.

“She came in on her day off with a stack of cookbooks and sat with us to come up with a menu for him,” Julien’s mother, Jacqueline Collot, said the other day as her son relished whole-wheat spaghetti dressed with sesame oil and topped with green beans minced fine to look like scallions — Ms. Peled’s response to his stated craving for “unspicy spicy noodles.”

“What Pnina offers Julien is a combination of love of food and the freedom that was taken away for so long,” Ms. Collot added. “To see him interested in meals gives us great comfort.”

Ms. Peled, who came to Sloan-Kettering a year ago after working in some of the city’s finest restaurants and winning an episode of the popular Food Network show “Chopped,” is part of a revolution in hospital food.

Bland broths, neon Jell-O and unidentifiable white-meat products are slowly becoming scarce. Instead, hospitals like the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have extensive room-service-like menus and give patients the freedom to order meals whenever they are hungry, while the kitchen staff at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis is happy to duplicate recipes provided by parents.

Sloan-Kettering patients, too, order meals from one of 75 room-service menus — kosher, halal, vegan, low-sodium, etc. But Ms. Peled said that when she started, she saw that patients who did not find anything appealing on the menu often would not eat at all, which motivated her to make the food service more flexible.
She has a team of 35 chefs from diverse backgrounds catering to the special requests of patients, particularly the younger ones, who come to the renowned cancer center from around the globe. In recent months, one chef has been serving dal, curries and rotis to a 16-year-old patient from India; another has made yellow rice for a 3-year-old Latino boy who wanted the version like his mother’s; and a third devised a menu of low-microbial foods for an 8-year-old girl from Italy who wanted dishes that reminded her of home, like fish Francese (it has a lemon sauce).

“There’s no substitute for a good diet, and appetizing food can make all the difference,” said Dr. Susan Prockop, a pediatric oncologist at Sloan-Kettering, noting that eating well can speed recovery and keep patients off intravenous nutrition.

Dominique Symonette, the registered dietitian in charge of pediatrics at the hospital, said that cancers, and chemotherapy, often result in mouth sores, nausea, vomiting and difficulty swallowing. Low-sodium, low-sugar and low-microbial diets — which limits raw and fresh food because of the risk of infection — are common for patients with compromised immune systems or those who are taking steroids or other medications long term.

Enter Chef Peled or one of her three sous-chefs, who spend an hour each afternoon meeting with pediatric patients and their parents to discuss food preferences. (Adult patients at Sloan-Kettering can also make personalized requests, but as the mother of a 2-year-old, Ms. Peled, 37, has a soft spot for sick children.)

Veronica McLymont, director of food and nutrition services at the hospital, says the customized approach has not increased costs because when the children get what they want, less food is wasted.

Read the complete story here.

Vegans No Longer Just an Oddity

2011-01-06T14:32:00.000-05:00

You've come a long way, vegan.

Once mocked as a fringe diet for sandal-wearing health food store workers, veganism is moving from marginal to mainstream in the United States.

The vegan "Skinny Bitch" diet books are best-sellers, vegan staples like tempeh and tofu can be purchased at just about any supermarket, and some chain restaurants eagerly promote their plant-only menu items. Today's vegans are urban hipsters, suburban moms, college students, even professional athletes.

"It's definitely more diverse. It's not what you would picture 20 years ago, which is kind of hippie, crunchy," said Isa Chandra Moskowitz, author of vegan cookbooks like the new "Appetite for Reduction." She says it's easier being a vegan now because there is more local produce available and more interesting ways of cooking.
"It's not just steamed vegetables anymore and brown rice and lentils," she said.

Veganism is essentially hard-core vegetarianism. While a vegetarian might butter a bagel or eat a cake made with eggs, vegans shun all animal products: No meat, no cheese, no eggs, no honey, no mayonnaise. Ethical vegans have a moral aversion to harming animals for human consumption, be it for a flank steak or leather shoes, though the term often is used to describe people who follow the diet, not the larger philosophy.
In a 2009 survey, advocates at the not-for-profit Vegetarian Resources Group reported about 1 percent of Americans are vegan, roughly a third of the people who reported being vegetarians. A separate survey released last year by the same group found a similar breakdown for Americans aged 8 to 18.

Read the complete story here.

The Long View: French Gourmand Jacques Pepin

2010-12-29T14:50:00.000-05:00

Chef Jacques Pepin — or, as Julia Child called him, "the best chef in America" — has spent more than six decades in the kitchen savoring food. Even now at 75, he still swears that "the greatest thing of all is bread and butter." "If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it's hard to beat bread and butter," Pepin tells NPR's Renee Montagne.

During World War II, food was scarce. The family didn't have much to eat at their home near Lyon, in Bourg-en-Bresse. Ever resourceful, Pepin's mother sent the young boy and his brother to live on a farm during the summers. There, he would have milk and whatever produce grew on the farm.

That farm is where Pepin first came so close to cows — and what he remembers most was their warm milk. "It was really lukewarm and very creamy and delicious. That was probably one of my first memories of food," he says.

Back at home, his mother worked hard to conjure up meals out of practically nothing. Even today, Pepin says his mother "is very miserly in the kitchen. She can cook anything."

Listen to the interview and read excerpts from Pepin's autobiography: The Apprentice: My Life In The Kitchen here.

A New Cookbook for Food Geeks

2010-12-09T16:26:00.000-05:00

"Cooking for Geeks" Gets into the Science of Cooking
Steve Cavendish, Tribune Newspapers
December 8, 2010

For most cooks, food is a question of how. How many teaspoons? How many pounds? How many degrees?

For geeks, food is fundamentally a question of why.

Instead of "How do I brine a turkey?" it's "Why does osmosis push moisture back into the bird?"

Instead of "How should I brown these potatoes?" it's "Why does a Maillard reaction make food tasty?"

Food geek Jeff Potter delves into these questions and more in his book "Cooking for Geeks" (O'Reilly, $34.99), an excellent walk through the science of food and the basic techniques to turn that knowledge into flavor.

Now, to be sure, Harold McGee (who appears in an interview in the book) traveled down the science portion of this path already in his seminal "On Food and Cooking." But Potter taps into the trend of food experimentation and gadgetry that has invaded our kitchens.

"Overly intellectual. Obsessed with details. Going beyond the point where a mainstream user would stop," Potter writes. "A geek is anyone who dwells with some obsession on why something works and how to make that something better. And it's become a badge of honor to be a geek."

Read the entire story here.

Hospital Chefs Cook From Scratch to Offer Wellness Meals

2010-12-07T16:41:00.000-05:00

BRISTOL, Tenn. – Sous Chef Shelly Herndon pointed to a green plate holding grilled salmon topped with pineapple chutney, rice pilaf and mixed vegetables that she proudly put on display in the Bristol Regional Medical Center’s cafeteria line.

“Everything here is made from scratch,” the hospital’s assistant chef said before the lunch rush started pouring in. “We’re doing this so people can eat healthier.”

Herndon and her colleagues started preparing low-fat, low sodium entrées like the grilled salmon plate and serving them to the hospital’s 800 to 900 daily customers as part of a new wellness program the hospital launched Oct. 25.

“We are a hospital and we provide wellness,” said Carol Fleenor, the hospital’s director of food and nutrition services. “It just fits in with our mission to provide healthy options for our customers.”

The cafeteria’s staff cooks the wellness meals using special recipes developed by Sodexho, the hospital’s food services company, that contain less than 800 milligrams of sodium, 100 milligrams of cholesterol and almost no saturated or trans fats.

By meeting those nutrition goals, the wellness meals are designed to help people fight two major health problems – heart disease and obesity – that affect a rapidly growing segment of the population both in the region and across the country.

Fleenor said the hospital cafeteria started offering wellness meals six weeks ago because customers regularly asked for healthier menu options when they filled out surveys evaluating their dining experiences.

The cafeteria prepared only 30 to 40 wellness meals each day when the program started, she said, but quickly increased to 80 meals a day. Now, she said, the cafeteria is serving the special menu items to about 10 percent of its daily customers.

“We still have French fries and other things like that available,” Fleenor said.

She also said many customers are picking the wellness menu items over the hospital’s regular menu items, which might not be as healthy as the special meals.

Still, Fleenor said, the cafeteria has no plans to do away with any of its regular menu items and is instead relying on an aggressive marketing campaign and pricing structure to get its customers to pick the wellness items.

When the hospital signed up for the wellness program, Fleenor said, staff decorated the facility’s hallways with signs and posters that provide information on healthy eating and a link to a Sodexho-managed website that gives them more information about nutrition.

They also sell the wellness meals, such as Herndon’s salmon plate, for prices that are about 10 to 20 cents cheaper than regular menu items: The new grilled chicken meal costs less than fried chicken and turkey burgers are sold for less than hamburgers.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle the hospital faced when rolling out the new menu was retraining its cafeteria staff to follow the recipes to the letter and not add things here or there as they cooked the food, Chef John McGiboney said.

Read the complete story here.

Thanksgiving Dinner Rules

2010-11-16T16:58:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Monica Mingo for sharing this.
Print and give a copy to each guest that enters your home.

10 RULES FOR THANKSGIVING

1. Don't get in line asking questions about the food. "Who made the potato salad? Is it egg in there? Are the greens fresh? Is the meat in the greens turkey or pork? Who made the macaroni and cheese? What kind of pie is that? Who made it? Ask one more question and I will punch you in your mouth, knocking out all your fronts so you won't be able to eat anything.

2. If you can't walk or are missing any limbs, sit your ass down until someone makes your plate for you. Dinner time is not the time for you to be independent. Nibble on them damn pecans and walnuts to hold you over until someone makes you a plate.

3. If you have kids under the age of twelve, I will escort the little moochers to the basement and bring their food down to them. They are not gonna tear my damn house up this year. Tell them that they are not allowed upstairs until it's time for Uncle Butchie to start telling family stories about their mommas and papas. If they come upstairs for any reason except for that they are bleeding to death, I will break a foot off in their asses!

4. There is going to be one prayer for Thanksgiving dinner! JUST ONE! We do not care that you are thankful that your 13 year old daughter gave birth to a healthy baby or your nephew just got out of jail. Save that talk for somebody who gives a damn. The time limit for the prayer is one minute. If you are still talking after that one minute is up, you will feel something hard come across your lips and they will be swollen for approximately 20 minutes.

5. Finish everything on your plate before you go up for seconds! If you don't, you will be cursed out and asked to stay your greedy ass home next year!

6. BRING YOUR OWN TUPPERWARE!! Don't let me catch you fixing yourself a plate in my good Tupperware knowing damn well that I will never see it again! Furthermore, if you didn't bring anything over, don't let me catch you making a plate period or there will be a “misunderstanding”.

7. What you came with is what you should leave with!! Do not leave my house with anything that doesn't belong to you. EVERYBODY WILL BE SUBJECTED TO A BODY SEARCH COMING IN AND LEAVING MY PROPERTY!!!

8. Do not leave your kids so you can go hopping from house to house. This is NOT a DAYCARE CENTER! There will be a kid-parent roll call every ten minutes. Any parent that is not present at the time of roll call, your child will be put outside until you come and get him or her. After 24 hours, I will call DSS on your ignorant ass!!

9. BOOK YOUR HOTEL ROOM BEFORE YOU COME INTO TOWN!! There will be no sleeping over at my house! You are to come and eat dinner and take your ass home or to your hotel room. EVERYBODY GETS THE HELL OUT AT 11:00 pm. You will get a 15
minute warning bell ring.

10. Last but not least! ONE PLATE PER PERSON!!! This is not a soup kitchen. I am not trying to feed your family until Christmas dinner! You will be supervised when you fix your plate. Anything over the appropriate amount will be charged to you before you leave. There will be a cash register at the door. Thanks to Cousin Alfred and his greedy ass family, we now have a credit card machine! So VISA and MASTERCARD are now being accepted. NO FOOD STAMPS OR ACCESS CARDS YET!

Chef with Big Heart Directs Action Every Day in Colts Dining Hall

2010-11-12T09:11:00.000-05:00

Local chef DeWitt Jackson is thankful -- and not just at Thanksgiving.
Jackson, executive chef for the Indianapolis Colts, said that after seven seasons with the team, he's still grateful for the Second Helpings program and resulting opportunity to serve up three meals a day to hungry NFL football players.
"I just take care of them," Jackson said.
It's a job that doesn't go unnoticed -- even by the front office. Colts president Bill Polian said the team appreciates Jackson's daily efforts. "DeWitt has served the club for years," said Polian, "and our players and staff value and appreciate his contributions."
Taking care of the nutritional needs of elite NFL players is a long way from the dish room of a local hospital, where Jackson started his culinary career more than 15 years ago. He still marvels about where his work has taken him and hopes his experience will encourage others.
"If it can happen for me," said Jackson, "it can happen for anybody."
The 49-year-old Indianapolis native had always been interested in cooking -- in fact his father was a chef -- and his ambition and ability soon took him out of the dish room at Riley Hospital for Children to the position of cook's assistant and then onto the line as a grill cook.
But he was married with a family, and the position simply didn't pay enough, said Jackson, so he took a job outside the food industry.
"A job opportunity came along at Carrier," said Jackson. "I wasn't liking it very much, but it was paying the bills."
One night, Jackson recalled, he saw a TV commercial for Second Helpings, the local food rescue organization that also has a culinary training program for unemployed and underemployed adults.
"I said to my wife, 'I'm going there tomorrow,' " Jackson said. "I had a good job, but it wasn't the job I wanted."
To advance in the food industry, Jackson knew he needed training. He persuaded local chef Sam Brown, director of training at the time and a Second Helpings graduate himself, to let him into the program.
"I liked cooking, but I needed to have more confidence, to have the right foundation," Jackson said.
Brown, who is now executive chef and director of nutritional services at Fairbanks Hospital, said he knew Jackson would succeed. "It was apparent right from the beginning that he had the skills he needed to be successful," said Brown. "He just needed the opportunity."
Jackson's experience offers the perfect example of what Second Helpings graduates can achieve, said Ben Shine, the organization's communications and development manager. "He's one of our big shining stars," he said.
After graduating from Second Helpings, Jackson was working at the former Adam's Mark hotel when a call came from the Colts.

Read the rest of Chef Jackson's story here.

No Meat, No Dairy, No Problem.

2010-11-03T21:49:00.000-04:00

Or at least that can be the case if you know what you’re doing, according to nutrition experts.

The vegan lifestyle requires people to avoid consuming animal products in their diets. That means no meat, no eggs, no cheese and no milk. For many vegans, it also means not using anything made with leather or other animal products.

With Vegan Awareness Month taking place through November, animal rights proponents and vegans around the country are campaigning on the positive aspects of a diet consisting of fruits, vegetables, beans and grains.
Health and nutrition experts say it’s certainly possible to keep a proper diet and take in all the required nutrients and vitamins to stay healthy without eating meat or dairy. Studies show that vegetarians and vegans tend to have a lower-than-average risk of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other preventable conditions.

But it does take a little more work to keep a proper diet, especially in some specific areas.

“If someone is going to decide to be a vegan, it can’t just be taken lightly, that decision,” said Hannah Richter, a dietitian with Auburn Memorial Hospital. “One would hope they’re making it because they’re choosing a healthier lifestyle, and therefore making smart decisions about the foods they choose.”

Those two don’t inherently go hand-in-hand, Richter pointed out. Avoiding meat doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding processed and unhealthy food.

“In any eating plan, it’s important to choose and focus on whole foods,” Richter said. “You can be a vegan and still eat a lot of sugars and high-fat things that aren’t good for you.”

Read the complete story here.

Chef Loses Sense of Taste But Still Loves To Cook

2010-10-30T12:50:00.000-04:00

In the pint-size kitchen of his San Francisco home, chef, restaurateur and cookbook author Carlo Middione hunches over a counter, methodically rolling veal meatballs as tiny as necklace beads to add to a pot of simmering chicken broth.

At the dining table, he ladles the soup into bowls, adding a shower of freshly grated Parmigiano to each. Then he digs in, lifting a spoonful to his mouth.

The soup, a favorite recipe of his mother's, is one he's made countless times. But these days, he can no longer taste it. The distinctive flavors of garlic, parsley, sage and rosemary in the meatballs are elusive. The savoriness of the broth is undetectable. If he concentrates, he can he pick up a trace of salt. That's it.

Three years ago, Middione's palate went from Technicolor to black. After a car accident in which his small sedan was rear-ended by a Toyota Tundra, Middione lost his ability to smell and taste.

For a man whose senses were once so acute he could sniff a vinaigrette and tell if it was balanced, or determine whether a pot of boiling pasta water was salted just by smelling it, the loss was devastating.
It led to him closing his 29-year-old Fillmore Street restaurant, Vivande Porta Via, on New Year's Eve 2009, and to relearning how to cook and eat when the senses he once relied on could no longer be fully trusted.

"When I see a strawberry now, I can verbally describe what it tastes like," he says. "But if I tasted it, I might not taste anything. I get phantom tastes and smells now. Some people think that's a good sign. It's like if the phone rings, and it turns out to be a wrong number. At least you know the phone is working."

Middione has some company in the professional chef world. Most notably, chef Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago lost his sense of taste after undergoing chemotherapy for tongue cancer. And Kirk Webber, chef-owner of Cafe Kati in San Francisco, lost his sense of taste after suffering two concussions in a mugging in 2003.

These chefs eventually regained their ability to taste, although they are considerably younger than Middione, who's in his mid-70s.

When taste disappears, it's often because of the loss of the sense of smell, says Barb Stuckey, an executive at Mattson, a large food-development firm in Foster City, who is writing a book on the subject that features Middione. Anyone who's ever tried to figure out the flavor of a jelly bean while chewing it with pinched nostrils knows that all too well.

Loss of smell, and thus taste, also occurs naturally with age, but Middione suffered head trauma. The impact not only cracked Middione's sternum, ribs and several teeth, but he says it also jostled his brain so severely that it sheared the neurons that connect to his olfactory nerve, which is instrumental in the sense of smell.
Generally, those neurons regrow and reconnect. Sometimes they reconnect perfectly; sometimes they don't ever rejoin; and other times they form wrong connections that result in phantom smells.

Read the rest of the story here .

Grocers Flocking to the Inner Cities

2010-10-29T20:38:00.000-04:00

By Carol Wolf

Wal-Mart Stores is gearing up to open small outlets next year in U.S. cities, where it hopes to sell a lot of groceries. Trouble is, at least a half-dozen others are also seeking accelerated growth in urban America. CVS Caremark, Walgreen, Supervalu, and Family Dollar Stores all are offering more fresh food at their urban outlets or opening small stores in neighborhoods with limited access to nutritious grub.

While selling food is a mature business, 23.5 million Americans live in underserved urban areas—a market potentially worth $100 billion a year, says Jim Hertel, managing partner with retail consultant Willard Bishop. "It's easy to go into a liquor or convenience store and find potato chips," he says. "But in terms of something you would feel good serving your family, not so much."

The big grocery store chains largely abandoned the cities in the 1970s and followed their customers to the suburbs. There they found abundant, cheap land and built superstores and parking lots large enough for 1,000 cars. Now they have saturated that market and are turning their attention back to urban neighborhoods that have long been served by mom-and-pop stores—or not at all.

About five years ago, Family Dollar began selling a limited selection of mostly packaged and frozen food in New York, Chicago, and Detroit. As the concept caught on, the company began carrying staples such as bread, eggs, and milk. "We have a bulkhead in many major urban areas, and we'll continue to build on [that]," Chief Operating Officer R. James Kelly said in October.

Now other retailers that traditionally haven't carried groceries are moving in. Pharmacy chain CVS Caremark is adding fruit, salads, sandwiches, and other prepared meals at a growing number of its city locations. The second-largest U.S. drugstore chain, behind Walgreen, plans this year to remodel about 300 urban stores to carry food items in Boston, New York, Washington, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Eventually one-fifth of its 7,000 stores could be reconfigured, CVS says.

While CVS is aiming at a cross-section of consumers, Save-A-Lot, a no-frills grocer owned by Supervalu, targets households with incomes below $45,000 in neighborhoods where supermarkets are scarce. The U.S. government is offering $400 million a year in loans and tax incentives to lure stores offering better quality food to these underserved areas by 2017, part of First Lady Michelle Obama's campaign to reduce childhood obesity.

Read the complete story here.

Survey Says: Diners Love Local and Hate Texting

2010-10-28T10:32:00.000-04:00

A new Zagat survey tracks American dining out trends and behaviors

October 27, 2010 | By Bret Thorn

New Orleans diners tip the best, Hawaiians the worst, diners think that texting at the table is rude and that food should be locally sourced, organic or sustainably raised.

Those were among the findings of Zagat's survey of 153,000 diners as it compiled its 2011 America’s Top Restaurants guide, which was released Wednesday.

Sixty-eight percent of participants in the survey said they thought it was important for the food they eat to be locally sourced, organic or sustainably raised, and 60 percent said they would even pay more for such food. Nearly a third, 31 percent, said they sought out restaurants specializing in such “green” cuisine.

Most diners — 85 percent — said it was fine to take pictures of food and each other at restaurants, but 63 percent said texting, tweeting and talking on cell phones was rude and inappropriate.

Diners are eating out a little less than before the recession — 3.1 times per week, compared with 3.3 percent. Thirty-nine percent said they are paying more attention to price, 33 percent said they’re eating in less expensive places, 17 percent said they were cutting back on alcohol, and 21 percent said they were ordering fewer appetizers and desserts.

Still, the national average price of a meal rose 2.2 percent in the past year to $35.37. New Orleans, where the average tip is 19.7 percent, has the lowest average meal cost among Zagat survey participants — of $28.36.

Right behind New Orleans diners in tipping are Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Ohio, where tippers leave an average gratuity of 19.6 percent

On the low end, Hawaiians tip 18.4 percent on average, and diners in Sacramento and San Francisco tip an average of 18.6 percent.

Las Vegas is the most expensive city to eat in, with an average meal price of $44.44.

Read the entire article here.

See the complete Zagat survey results here.

Throwing Away Our Food

2010-10-20T16:13:00.000-04:00

The U.S. produces about 591 billion pounds of food each year, and up to half of it goes to waste, costing farmers, consumers and businesses hundreds of billions of dollars.

In his new book, "American Wasteland" (Da Capo Press, 2010), Jonathan Bloom examines the story of discarded food, from vegetables left to rot in the field to unsold hamburgers shovelled into restaurant trash bins.

He also offers potential remedies, such as taxes on landfills, expanded composting programs and incentives for farmers to harvest all that they grow and to donate what they can't sell.

THE CYCLE OF FOOD WASTE

Food waste begins at farms. With lettuce, for example, the average harvest rate has been estimated at 85% to 90%. The rest of the lettuce—heads that don't look or feel perfect on quick inspection—are left in the field. One cucumber grower said that at least half of the cucumbers on his farms aren't harvested,mostly because they are too curved (making them hard to pack) or have white spots or small cracks. Farm losses are generally higher for hand-picked fruit and perishable vegetables than for machine-harvested commodity crops like corn and wheat; about 9% of commodity crops planted in the U.S. aren't harvested.

Look at the rest of the cycle of food waste here.

Charities in Trouble

2010-10-20T09:29:00.000-04:00

Donations to top charities nationwide are dropping. Central Indiana is not escaping the trend.

Chefs See Double-edge Sword in Reality TV Shows

2010-10-15T20:54:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Chefs acknowledge cooking on television is an effective way to promote their restaurants and cookbooks but some of them do not savor the frenzy and demands of reality competition shows.

In the United States, cooking competition shows are part of a growing genre, which garners advertising support from the food industry.

These series, such as "Top Chef Masters" and "The Next Iron Chef," are known as much for their emotional exchanges between contestants and judges as their cooking challenges.

Some of New York's top chefs said appearing on television has become part of their job as chefs emerge from their kitchens as celebrities.

"It's a marketing tool," Jimmy Bradley, head chef and owner of the Red Cat in West Chelsea, said during the New York City Wine & Food Festival that ended on Sunday.

Many chefs who have appeared on these competition shows have become celebrities with attendees at the festival lining up to see their cooking demonstrations or to be photographed with them.

Chefs who have competed said these shows were powerful as they reached a nationwide audience of potential diners or buyers of their cookbooks.

"To win is to have a successful business," said Bradley, who sees the financial rewards stemming from appearing on these shows as possibly more important than winning the competition.

At the same time, these chefs feel the shows' grueling filming schedule, scrambling for ingredients and their use of appliances are less than ideal to showcase their talents.

"It's a bit of humiliation," said Gabrielle Hamilton, chef and proprietor of Prune in Manhattan's East Village.

Read the complete story here.