June 1, 2009
Posted by Lizy Yagoda, June 1, 2009 at 7:30 PM
According to Terrence Henry of The Atlantic Food Channel, Buenos Aires leaves much to be desired in terms of food and flavor. He notes that most restaurants use wood-fired grills, which he thinks blanket all foods with similar flavors. He also comments on the lack of variety in the street food available, saying that it is limited to empanadas.
Henry writes:
A great food city is a place that caters to all manner of the food-obsessed: vibrant street food, affordable ethnic and traditional dining, and highly acclaimed (and more important, highly respected by their peers) destination restaurants. It should have a connection to its seasons and soil (or sea, as the case may be). It should be a place that can alternately surprise and comfort, at any budget level.
What, to you, makes a city a "great food city"?
- Outstanding in the Field: Organization offers food tours of farms, with dinner often served, literally, in the field. [LAT]
- Celiac Disease: Gluten intolerance becoming more commonplace. [Chronicle]
- Homemade Ricotta: As simple to make as it is versatile. [Seattle Times]
- Fast-Food Chain a Symbol of Security: Safest places in strife-plagued southern Philippines seem to be where Jollibee locations open. [AP]
- The Obamas' Restaurant Choices: "Time and again, they've picked restaurants with the enviro-fashionable ethos of 'sustainable' and 'locally grown,' in keeping with an agenda that includes vegetable gardens and healthy eating." [WaPo]
- In Need: U.S. food pantries struggling to remain stocked. [AP]
- The House that Yogurt Built: Slideshow tour of Pinkberry founders' Malibu home. No surprise—it looks like a Pinkberry. [WSJ]
From Photograzing
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From Recipes
Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, June 1, 2009 at 5:30 PM
I found this recipe in Wine Bar Food by Cathy and Tony Mantuano. It's a beautiful book that showcases simple recipes from wine bars in Southern Europe. It's enough to make you want to blast through a few credit cards and fly over for just a little snack. In Venice they stop for these little tea sandwiches which are called "tramezzini." Good to know. The authors also explain that the sandwiches are good for "lunch, cocktail hour, or dinner," which could be translated as any time except breakfast—probably because wine needs to be involved.
To avoid offending the authors, I drank a delightfully crisp Italian Pinot Grigio. I'm sure a glass of water would work in a pinch. The sandwich itself is perfect for any occasion. The creamy mayonnaise is balanced by the slightly sweet shrimp, peppery arugula, and toasted brioche.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, June 1, 2009 at 5:00 PM
For newspaper reporters and editors, the Associated Press Stylebook is ... well ... if not the Bible, then Leviticus at least. It lays out all the rules and regulations that ink-stained wretches are supposed to follow when faced with sticky situations regarding spelling, grammar, and punctuation. While Serious Eats leans closer to the Chicago Manual of Style (go, serial comma!), I cut my teeth on AP and tend to pick up the latest version every couple of years. I'll definitely grab the 2009 edition, which has a few new food words in it, according to the AP Stylebook Twitter account. They include baba ghanoush, chipotle, Key lime, and Parmesan. [via @Atlantic_Food]
Cook the Book: Endangered Recipes: oneperfectegg, april1p, velcerick, omnomnom, and tamsinite. Winners were notified by email and appear on our Contest Winners page. Thanks to all who entered.
Posted by Robyn Lee, June 1, 2009 at 3:20 PM
"Nobody takes a ground up cow and grills it better than the Bosnians," says food-loving blogger Dumneazu in his post about his trip to Sarajevo. Cevapi from the Bascarsija district is the ground meat dish of devotion, specifically from the restaurant Zeljo. He describes what you'll find if you eat at Zeljo:
Like most cevapdzinicas, the menu is spare and no beer is served, but you can order fresh sour buttermilk by the glass to wash down the meat, which is served in a spongey flat pocketed bread known as somun. Traditional sides are chopped fresh onion and kaymak, a thick and slightly cheesy cream ball that melts over the cevap. This is the classic Sarajevo cevap: a small cylinder of meat, a mere morsel of amino acids and proteins that was once a happy little animal and is now a masterpiece, a high point of world cuisine, the excelsior of the grilled arts.
If you're not going to visit Bosnia anytime soon, you can try to make cevapi at home.
Related: Fresh Cevapcici from the Adriatic Meat Market
If you're not an Angeleno but still want to jump on the Korean taco bandwagon, Gourmet has recipes for creating your own. [via California Taco Trucks]
Posted by Robyn Lee, June 1, 2009 at 2:10 PM
Photograph by Windell H. Oskay of evilmadscientist.com
Evil Mad Scientist just relaunched their CandyFab project with a new machine: the CandyFab 6000. What can the CandyFab 6000 do for you? It can "print" 3-D objects out of sugar, like that drilled sphere you've always wanted! And while it can technically melt other substances that have a low melting point and come in granular form, sugar is preferable since it smells good, isn't toxic, and doesn't cost much. Evil Mad Scientist plans to sell CandyFab kits and share building plans later this year. To learn more about how this machine works, read about the making of the previous incarnation, the CandyFab 4000.
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From Recipes
Posted by Caroline Russock, June 1, 2009 at 1:40 PM
Photograph from yomi955 on Flickr
As is the case with most things apartment-related, you win some and you lose some. My location isn't ideal, but my kitchen is spacious. And my backyard is big enough to have a vegetable garden and is home to a 30-year-old fig tree.
My love affair with figs is pretty recent. I spent the better part of my life thinking that they only existed in their chewy, dried form until I spent some time in Southern Italy and Southern California. The first time I tasted a fresh fig, picked right off the branch, still warmed from the sun, I was sold.
Sweet and honied, a slight crunch from the seeds, a tiny hint of tartness, there is nothing comparable to the humble fig.
This recipe for a Fig and Honey Galette is adapted from Rustic Fruit Desserts by Julie Richardson and Cory Schreiber. A galette is basically a rustic pie, minus the pie pan. All you have to do is roll out the crust, add the filling, fold the edges over, and bake until the crust is golden brown.
Win 'Rustic Fruit Desserts'
As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Rustic Fruit Desserts to give away this week. Enter to win here »
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Posted by The Serious Eats Team, June 1, 2009 at 1:15 PM
There are so many ways to end a meal. Some people like a rich chocolate dessert, others prefer a cheese course, some might need nothing more than an espresso or a digestif, and some of us indulge in all of these. Although I have been known to take the cheese-chocolate-coffee-after-dinner-drink-route, there are times when nothing hits the spot like a fruit-based dessert. A simple pie or cobbler with a scoop of ice cream or a dollop of whipped cream is prefect, especially when the weather is warm and beautiful summer fruits and berries are in season.
Peaches, plums, apricots, and berries of all shapes and colors have been begun showing up in the markets—or will appear sooner than you think. What to do with this abundance? Rustic Fruit Desserts is a comprehensive guide to seasonal baking written by Julie Richardson, owner of Baker & Spice, and James Beard Award–winning chef Cory Schreiber of Wildwood. Both restaurants are located in Portland, Oregon.
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Posted by Erin Zimmer, June 1, 2009 at 12:25 PM
The Sham Wow, the shammy-towel-sponge wonder, should watch its back. The paper towel also has many skills. Crumple it up into a ball, throw it into the air, and it will fall down (fall down!). Fold a paper towel up into a vaguely diamond shape, put a string on it, it's a kite. You can even rip them into craploads of squares. Looks like Vince of Sham Wow/Slap Chop has a little protege. The video, after the jump.
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From Recipes
Posted by Kristen Swensson, June 1, 2009 at 11:40 AM
From the tiniest two-person barbecue to the most massive of community cookouts, grill season hath officially begun, folks. And while burgers and dogs may abound, it’s important not to forget our beloved vegetables. They’re healthier, cheaper, and much less likely to stain your shorts when they fall from your flimsy-ass paper plate.
This year, I inaugurated the season with Quinoa and Grilled Zucchini, a lovely, mellow grain salad from the ever-gorgeous 101 Cookbooks. The recipe combines eggs, pine nuts, goat cheese, and a subtle avocado-cilantro dressing to tasty effect, and includes a large helping of flame-broiled summer squash for texture and a char-tinged flavor. Plus, it’s not half as hard to assemble as it looks. Trust.
I did alter Heidi Swanson’s original recipe a bit to lighten the caloric load. Changes included halving the pine nuts, taking out the egg yolks, reducing the olive oil to a single tablespoon, and swapping in low-fat yogurt for the full-fat kind. All in all, it was good stuff, and those switches are reflected below.
Happy grilling season, everybody! And remember—eat your veggies.
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Posted by Daniel Zemans, June 1, 2009 at 10:30 AM
It would be difficult to overstate the joy I got from attending the
All Candy Expo, the annual meeting/celebration put on in Chicago by the National Confectioners Association. The two-and-a-half-day spectacle gives candy companies a chance to introduce new products and tap into new markets; retailers a chance to discover products they have not sold before; distributors a chance to find new clients; and, most important, everyone a chance to try more different kinds of candy in three days than most people do in their lives. There were so many great things to try at the Candy Expo, and I feel the need to share a lot of it with the Serious Eats community. As a result, this is going to be a long post. I encourage you to grab a candy bar or two, make yourself comfortable and come along for an exploration of sugary goodness. I apologize in advance for the jealousy you are about to feel.
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Posted by Robyn Lee, June 1, 2009 at 9:55 AM
Apples + deep space = danger. Another cute and somewhat twisted comic from Buttersafe.
In tribute to the coolness that is the James Bond franchise and its current lead, Daniel Craig, Del Monte has introduced 
