Tori

It's been a while since the prime of my Tori Amos listening phase, but these are cool pics, so I'll add 'em to the blog. From undented.

Mike McGrath / NPR

He has a show called You Bet Your Garden on WHYY that I just love. He talks about growing tomatoes on NPR today.

Jon Thor Birgisson (of Sigur Ros) / NPR

Really cool bit with the frontman from Sigur Ros on All Songs Considered. In the first 12 minutes they discuss Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Audrey Hepburn.... I just love listening to an icelandic accent.

Vietnamese Crepes

Made this before, but not since the blog began. Super tasty; relatively simple; looks complex-ish, but it's easy == a winner. The recipe is from 'the Little Saigon Cookbook' by Ann Le. I quite like the book, it has stories behind the dishes which makes everything more personal and interesting. We had the cripy coconut and turmeric crepes with a ground beef filling, a salad plate with arugula and spinach from S Bee's garden and mint from mine (more herbage and veggies would have been nice, but it's too early in the season), and Nuoc Cham -- the traditional dipping sauce.

Crepes:
(straight from the Little Saigon Cookbook)
1 1/2 c water
1c coconut milk
2 1/2 c (10.67 oz) rice flour
salt
1/2 T corn starch
1T turmeric
scallions/chives

Filling:
garlic
kale
~10 crimini mushrooms
1/2 lb hormone free ground beef
the rest of the can of coconut milk

Nuoc Cham:
(straight from the Little Saigon Cookbook)
1 fresh chile, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
8T warm water
1 1/2 T sugar
1 1/2 T fresh lime juice
3 T fish sauce

Combine everything for the Nuoc Cham and let it sit at room temperature for a couple of hours.

Combine the water and coconut milk, add rice flour. Whisk for a while, eventually it dissolves. Add the cornstarch and turmeric and salt. Eventually it dissolves... Let sit for 15 min.

Saute the garlic, add kale, shrooms, beef. I added the rest of the coconut milk to the pan too, probably would have been better served to save it for something else, but no biggie.

Add a little of the cooked filling to a nonstick pan. Add ~1/2 c of crepe batter, swirl the pan so it is a very thin layer. Cover. Cook 3-5 min. You are supposed to add mung bean sprouts and fold the crepe over them but we didn't have them. Serve with salad platter on the side, pour Nuoc Cham over everything. Bueno.

Liquid/Light

mint tea

peach-cello

Crème Fraîche

At long last, the crème fraîche post. I've been sitting on this one for forever, trying to use it in different ways. Crème fraîche is heavy whipping cream that has been fermented like yogurt. It is most affiliated with Parisian cooking as the cream from outlying villages, in getting shipped to the big city, would lightly ferment in the course of the journey. That's the food origin mythology anyway.... It keeps for atleast 10 days in the fridge. While ultrapasteurized cream seems to basically keep forever (I have some from December in my fridge that I use, I'm writing this towards the end of March) regular whipping cream doesn't last much after it's sell by date, that's why I first started making the stuff.
Making it is pretty simple and forgiving. You have to heat up milk to make yogurt as it does something to the protein structure. Cream is all fat, no protein, so it's easier. Warming it to room temperature on the stove is best, but using cold cream is fine, too, it will just take longer. So, the jist of the recipe is 1 pint of cream (preferably Straus pasteurized, but Organic Valley ultrapasteurized does work), stir in 2T of buttermilk or yogurt (seems like the bacteria in buttermilk lead to thicker crème fraîche, but could just be the nature of my current yogurt culture), let it sit in a pilot-light-warmed oven for however long it takes -- between overnight and 24 hours or so.

I've used it in sherbets I,II; adding a bit to savory sauces I,II; a dollop on a taco; and the dollop on the side thing with persimmon sorbet. The dollop on the side thing was excellent, and is it's suggested use in french cookbooks (dollop with fresh fruit, though). The contrast between sweet fruit and cool/creamy/fatty/lightly sour crème fraîche is epic. Not blogged about, but the 4th night of my brother being here just now, after plowing through all of the baja flour tortillas, we did those dried ravioli from TJs (which are remarkably good when you are camping, and still pretty good if you are not) with garlic/olive oil/1c red sauce and 1c crème fraîche. Good.

Anyway, here's a partial list of recipes from cookbooks I have. You'll notice some recipe trends. This list is by no means complete as some authors do their index based on ingredients (Jamie O, yeah!) but some base them only on the name of the dish (most others, boo!). Lots of stuff to try out....

-vanilla bean crème fraiche ice cream ; Patricia Wells at Home in Provence p. 289
-apple tart w/ dollop of crème fraiche on side ; MtAoFC p. 637
-noodles a la crème ; la Bonne Cuisine p. 570
-dollops; Jamie's Kitchen p.183, 148
-smoked salmon, lemon, and crème fraiche sandwich; Jamie's Dinners p. 92
-baked potato w/ crab, crème fraiche, spring onion, chili, and mint; JD p.12
-baked trout and potatoes with a crème fraiche, walnut, and horseradish sauce; Naked Chef Takes Off p. 163
-cilantro and crème fraiche salad dressing; NCTO p.80
-crème fraiche and grilled lemon salad dressing; Happy Days w/ the Naked chef p.114
-marinated mozzarella in crème fraiche with lemon and marjoram; HDwtNC p. 93
-medallions of beef w/ morels and marsala w/ crème fraiche sauce; HDwtNC p. 196
-potato salad w/ smoked salmon and horseradish crème fraiche; Jamie at Home p. 186
-mussels steamed w/ fennel and crème fraiche; Cook w/ Jamie p. 254
-pan-fried scallops w/ lentils, crispy pancetta, and lemon crème fraiche; CwJ p.250
-calabacitos con crema; Essential Cuisines of Mexico p. 228
-chiles rellenos de elote con crema; ECoM p. 213
-elote con crema; ECoM p. 225
-tostadas de crema y guacamole; ECoM p. 90
-maroilles cheese tart; Food Lover's Guide to France p. 93
-salmon w/ lentils, bacon, and horseradish cream; FLGtF p. 120
-thin crusted cream, onion, and bacon tart; FLGtF p. 123
-pumpkin tart from millancay; FLGtF p. 153
-graten dauphinois chez lily et gaby; FLGtF p. 217
-gallette bressane; FLGtF p. 245
-onion tart from catton-grammont; FLGtF p. 247
-marjolaine pere bise (chocolate cake); FLGtF p.258
-lamb charlotte with red pepper sauce; FLGtF p. 304
-mouclade; FLGtF p. 501
-pile ou face's rabbit with rosemary; Food Lover's Guide to Paris p. 24
-morels and comte cheese on grilled toast; FLGtP p. 40
-rabbit with mustard; FLGtP p.59
-broiled gratineed chicken; FLGtP p. 64
-fricassee of chicken with morels; FLGtP p.113
-verlet's apricot tart; FLGtP p. 113

Jimmy Cliff on NPR

Great interview with Jimmy Cliff, he's in the spotlight cause he just got inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame.

As an aside, here's a good illustrated article about the Harder they Come from a blog called Criterion C0ntraption -- the dude is going to watch/review all of the criterion discs.

the Battle Over Bottled Water

groovy NYT article

THE Way to Cook Artichokes

Artichokes. The first time I had a fresh one was on a SDSU baja trip, we picked some out of a field near Ejido Erindira that had been inefficiently harvested. My friend Clay boiled them up for an hour; we did the scraping the bottom of the leaves thing, I don't remember how we ate the hearts. I picked one a couple of days ago off of the plant we have at the community garden, and suspected there might be a better way to cook them.

my yellow Nishiki, and the huge artichoke plant

An aside. Someone put 7 of the first 8 Sookie Stackhouse (vampire) books in the freebin recently. I've been mainlining them for the past couple of weeks. Great fun, but it really set me back with cookbook reading, I'm currently reading "I'm Just Here for the Food" by Alton Brown, "How to Eat" by Nigella Lawson, and "Cooking by Hand" by Paul Bertolli. I'll likely do separate reviews of all 3 as they are great. Anyway, I hadn't read the Bertolli book in a while, but I seemed to remember it had a discourse on artichokes, and man, did it ever. His book is awesome, it would seem that we have a similar cooking philosophy. As for artichokes, he doesn't like boiling them cause all the flavour ends up in the water, so he has you save the leaves for soup, and then you cover the hearts in olive oil and simmer slowly. It uses a ton of olive oil, but you can use it later for salad dressing or whatever. I used some to fry up some red sauce. My house smelled unbelievable. The aftertaste in my mouth was so good I didn't brush my teeth last night! Best meal in a long time, which is saying something since we just went through 54 flour tortillas from Baja.... If you score some fresh artichokes any time soon, I implore you to try this. Recipe in pics:

Pull off the green leaves till you reach the softer yellow ones, trim the sides a little, trim the green off of the stem. I was operating on 1st principles, but was saving all the trimmings for soup, so wasn't that concerned about over-trimming.

Cut in half, notice the choke

Use the side of a spoon to scoop out the choke

Bag of green leaves

The original recipe called for 6 artichokes, submerging them in 6c of extra virgin olive oil. I sliced up mine so they would sit lower in the pan so I could use less oil. Also, I re-read the end of the recipe a little late in the process, you are supposed to cook them on uber-low heat, no bubbles. Didn't seem to hinder the love too much. Cook in oil for 20 min, then let them cool in the oil.
Rice, artichokes, red sauce warmed up in a little bit of the oil. Heaven.

Orange Buttermilk Sherbet

Orange Buttermilk Sherbet:
1Q buttermilk
10oz powdered sugar
1c not very sweet OJ
zest from 3 oranges
pinch salt

Stir it all together. Freeze, stickblend, freeze.

Chocolate Sorbet

This is straight out of the David Lebovitz ice cream book, the Perfect Scoop, except I added 2 eggwhites as it was too dense making it using my technique (stickblender instead of ice cream maker). Also converted to weights rather than measures -- so much easier that way.

Chocolate Sorbet:
2 1/4 vanilla water
8oz vanilla sugar
2.5 oz cocoa powder
salt
6 oz bittersweet chocolate
2 egg whites
vanilla extract

whisk 1 1/2 c of the water with sugar/cocoa/salt. Boil for 3 min. Take off of heat, add chocolate, water. Stickblend it to insure it is well mixed. Add rest of the water. Freeze. Beat the eggwhites till stiff, fold in to partially frozen sorbet. Add vanilla extract. Freeze.

Orange Frozen Yogurt

I've made 3 sherbets/sorbets recently, so 3 posts back to back here. I liked the combo of the orange frozen yogurt and the chocolate sorbet alot. I don't think the orange buttermilk is as good as the lime buttermilk sherbet, but it's still alright. {the Sorbet chronicles}. On with the recipes.

Orange Frozen Yogurt:
12 oz vanilla sugar
1c vanilla water
2c not very sweet OJ
1Q whole milk yogurt

'Vanilla water' is water I boiled/steeped vanilla beans in. Make a syrup with the water and the sugar. Cool. Add OJ and yogurt. Freeze, stickblend, freeze, blahblahblah.

Tortillas de Harina de Baja California II

My brother got back from Baja on Friday. He crossed the border at 10pm Thursday, got to my place around 3am, drank beer in my front yard till I woke up. Very considerate of him! This year he brought back tortillas from the market in El Rosario, which isn't ideal, but they are still pretty good. The best tortillas are from farther down in central Baja, Villa Jesus Maria or Guerrero Negro; they make them with manteca (lard) down there, the ones this time were with manteca vegetal -- vegetable shortening. It's funny, he had stocked up on tortillas from G.N., but the wind/weather went bad, so he stayed down a little longer and had to eat them and buy more on the drive out.


Flour tortillas are considered 'yuppie food' in Baja. Corn tortillas are more proletarian (Amy has a great post on this). My dad had a grad student from Mexico City via La Paz, Baja, who explained this to me. I like corn tortillas for tacos, but do prefer flour for enchiladas and quesadillas. He brought back 3 18 packs. We had quesadillas our way Friday night, quesadillas with buffalo on Saturday, and quesadillas + tacos with beans/creme fraiche/chanterelles on Sunday. Quesadillas 'our way' is a recipe we perfected in Baja over many trips. Alas, I haven't taken a picture of them since I began the blog, so no specific post on them -- My brother, Sara and I wolfed down roughly 25 of them in those 3 nights, ate too fast to take a pic.... Quasi-recipe: use a cast iron comal/skillet, medium low heat, lay down a tortilla, add some sliced cheese (queso mennonita is the best), add another tortilla, cover with a lid, flip once after a couple of minutes. Eat by putting a stripe of beans down the center and fold over. Beans this time were adzuki + indian split yellow peas, cooked with epazote, bay leaf, dried chilies. Toasted some cumin and ancho chile powder, olive oil, asafoetida. An onion, didn't have garlic. Deglazed with white wine. Oregano from Baja, a couple of chipotles. Awfully good. Had a couple of hot sauces from Baja, but also a couple of my homemade ones, only one of which has been blogged about. Avocado is great, too, no surprise....

Mmm, onions and ancho chile powder make me happy

Ok, still sitting on the creme fraiche post. One of these days. Me and Paul had a couple of soft tacos with beans, chanterelle, a couple of dollops of creme fraiche -- analogous to crema in Mexico. Pretty good, though S Bee was not impressed, the creme fraiche was fermented a little too much towards cheese for her dainty stomach....

Photo credit S Bee

Caguama of Tecate. The returnable 1Q bottles. Sweet.

Zero Effect / AV Club Cult Canon

The article appeared quite a while ago, but I only netflixed it fairly recently. I think I'd seen it awhile ago at my folks' place on the Sundance Channel. Re-watching it was great. It was filmed in Portland, OR. The 3 main characters were great (the guy, the girl, the assistant). Blahblahblah. The Onion article does a really good job of explaining the charm of the movie. Highly recommended.

Mose Allison / NPR

great interview with a musician I wasn't familiar with

Luddites on NPR

nice

Outside Magazine 13 Great Photos

Pretty cool article. Really like this pic of Lance Armstrong. Crazy eyes.

Outside Magazine Editor's Choice 2010

I enjoyed this list muchly. Growing a winter beard was in the top 5.

Greek Yogurt

I recently posted about Mark Bittman, a NYT food writer. I've liked everything he wrote, until today. Grrrr. In a post about making greek yogurt, he notes about the liquid that drains out, which he called 'water': I suppose you could save and drink the yogurt-water, or cook with it, but I don’t. So annoying. Why is he being so cavalier about wasting food? Also, it's whey.

I make a gallon of yogurt a week, blahblahblah. I take yogurt from the same place in the pot, then drink the whey that collects in the 'well.' As the week goes on the remaining yogurt becomes more and more like greek yogurt. It is epic.

Ricky Gervais / Fresh Air

This is awfully funny.

Mike Dangeli, Nisga'a Artist

I'm getting a bunch of prints in the mail soon from Pacific Editions. One of them is by an artist named Mike Dangeli. I like the look of his work, so googled him, and found this great article.
Another, by the same blogger

Most of the drums on AlaskaNativeArtists are by him. He has quite a bit of work on that site, actually. The paintings are great.

Eagles in the City

awesome website, scroll through the whole thing

Sponging

Surfed today for the first time in over a month, swell direction has been off for my spot + rain. There is also a nice article about bodyboarding on ESPN today. enjoy

Bob Edwards Weekend - good music

This is a little old, but a show a couple of weeks ago included an interview with the guy who owns Preservation Hall in New Orleans, and an interview with Justin Townes Earle. Both interviews are great.

Cursing on Wait Wait

I don't work blue on the blog, but y'all know me. This is hilarious, and is based on this story.

the Golden Palominos on NPR

The Golden Palominos are a NYC band of revolving members. The 1994 incarnation of them included the singer Lori Carson, and the heavy bass of that album ('Pure') vibrated through my parents house circa 2000 when it still had just plywood walls. 'Twas a great album to play loud. Anyway, a song from that album was used in an NPR story 2 sundays ago.

Food on TV

Not about Julia. An OnionAV column on "film and tv-induced food cravings." The two main tenets of the blog (food and pop-culture) unite!!!!!!!

Werner Herzog / AV Club Primer

There's a bit of a backlog of posts, I wanted the Julia/Jacques posts to be back-to-back, but had a hard time writing the Julia one. OnionAV had a great writeup of Werner Herzog movies last week. I've talked about him on the blog before (here and here), but they do a better job, with embedded links to trailers and such.

Julia Child -- My Life in France

This was a hard book to write about. Logistically, I read it before the Apprentice, so the facts were a little hazy, but also Julia is a bit of an odd bird; it feels a little sacrilegious to critique her. I mean, she was very much on the forefront of changing how americans eat, but she also comes across as being petty and carrying grudges. Anyway, on with the show.

The book is a love story. She was clearly madly in love with her husband, Paul Child. They were madly in love with la belle France, and french food.

She married in 1946 at the age of 34. Prior to the marriage she took a cooking class in LA with two british ladies in preperation for living with a new husband on a limited government income.

Paul was in the diplomatic service, which involved putting on exhibitions about America (often about american artists). In 1948 they were sent to Paris, France via Le Havre: I was a six-foot-two-inch thirty-six-year-old rather loud and unserious californian. He was an accomplished photographer, and his great images are scattered throughout the book.

They stopped in a restaurant pretty much right off of the boat: our first lunch together in France had been absolute perfection. It was the most exciting meal of my life. Frankly, this type of comment becomes a running theme through out the book and that got a little old... Conflict makes for more interesting reading than love.

Learning to cook, cooking, and teaching cooking are the tenets of her life. How this happened is what makes the book a darn good read. I like how she combines the beginning of that journey with a snarky comment: To my great surprise I'd discovered that many Frenchwomen didn't know how to cook any better than I did; quite alot of them had no interest in the subject at all, though most were experts at eating in restaurants. Tons of snark in the book. But she's really endearing and sentimental at times, too: I had never taken anything so seriously in my life - husband and cat excepted - and I could hardly bear to be away from the kitchen. That she is a cat person makes me happy. Cats are all over the book.

Two great lines: I knew I didn't want to be a standard housewife, but I didn't know what I did want to be. & I had become a knife freak, a frying-pan freak, a gadget freak-and, especially, a copper freak.

She met Simca and Louisette (the future co-authors of MtAoFC) in November 1951. They had been working on a french cookbook for americans, by August 1952 they agreed that Julia would be part of that project. I thought it was funny that she noted that she and Simca tended to have a scientific approach to cooking whereas Louisette had a more romantic approach. Later on she would bemoan that she and Simca were so different.

On Curnonsky, the legendary author of a 28 volume encyclopedia of french regional foods: his ego was enormous, but so were his charm and the depth of his knowledge.

Pulia (Paul & Julia) were transferred to Marseille, France on 2 March 1953. She had lots of colorful things to say about the people in Marseille.

She has lots of colorful things to say about the McCarthy witchhunt, too.

In October of 1954 they were transferred to Bonn, Germany. There's a pretty darn un-PC thing about how she was so surprised the german people were so nice considering not too many years ago they were running concentration camps. She loved the meats in Germany, the veggies not so much.

Love was a big part of their lives, and Paul was very artistically inclined, so they made Valentine's Day cards for their friends. Quite a few are pictured in the book. She notes, Valentine cards had become a tradition of ours, born of the fact that we could never get ourselves organized in time to send out Christmas cards.

She also mentioned that she really liked rubber stamps...

A typical comment about a restaurant meal: we began with trout stuffed with minnows...

She grew up in California, can you tell? Germany was a frigid, wet 52 degrees when I returned... it was hard to avoid the conclusion that Plittersdorf was a miserable dump.

They returned to Washington DC in November 1956. We felt the tingle of excited apprehension about returning to our native soil - now the land of "Elvis the Pelvis," Nixon-lovers, and other strange phenomena. and, more importantly Would there be a place in the USA for a book like ours? and, even more importantly (on trying to shoe horn ingredients available in america into french recipes) WHY DID WE EVER DECIDE TO DO THIS ANYWAY? I wailed to Simca, after discovering that my beloved creme fraiche was nearly impossible to find in America. Creme fraiche is the bomb. I still have to do a post on it...

They moved to Oslo, Norway in May 1959, and by 1 September 1959 the 1st draft of what would be MtAoFC was done.

A continuing theme is her talking smack about her associates, it really galled her that Louisette didn't do much on the project once Julia joined. She wanted to demote her to an associate rather than a co-author on the title page. This was really important to her for some reason. Simca and I agreed on the importance of keeping Louisette "on the team," both in deference to the work she'd done, and because of a more practical matter that she was better socially connected than either of us, both in France and the USA. This kind of comment was quite surprising to me.

The original publishing house rejected the book on 6 November 1959 because it was too detailed and would be too expensive to publish (too many pages). Her friend Avis then sent the manuscript to Knopf, where Judith Jones, the woman who published the Diary of Anne Frank, became a champion of it, and agreed to publish it mid-May 1960.

The period working on the final touches and the galleys of the book was very trying, on Simca: she was a dear friend, but horribly disorganized and rather full of herself.

The book was published 16 October 1961 and got a ton of good press and TV appearances soon followed. Americans were introduced to the Julia Child that we came to know and love. Her first appearance was cooking an omelette on the Today Show with Simca. In January 1962 she appeared on the 'egghead' show "I've Been Reading" on WGBH in Boston. It was a tremendous success and she taped 3 pilots for The French Chef on 18 & 25 June 1962. WGBH then ordered 26 shows.

In November 1963 they visited Simca in Provence, she and her husband had a farmhouse named (somewhat unimaginatively) Le Mas Vieux, Julia and Paul had a small cottage built on the property: it would be a house built on friendship - named La Pitchoune (the little one).

On Mastering I & II: in retrospect we had taken a rather holy and Victorian approach to the virtues of elbow grease in Mastering I - implying that "only paths of thorns lead to glory," etc.

On the bread chapter in Mastering II: It would eventually takes us 2 years and something like 284 pounds of flour...

15 March 1970, Julia and Simca turned in the manuscript of Mastering II, it was published 22 October 1970. One hiccup in the book, she advocated an Asbestos cement tile for bread baking, in order to make a home oven more closely mimic a professional oven. Around the time the book was published is when asbestos was found to be a carcinogen....

This is an interesting book. Learning the history surrounding MtAoFC was fun. Learning the gossip/snarkiness perhaps moreso... I didn't love this as much as the Apprentice, but it's a fine read.

Jacques Pépin -- the Apprentice

I've just finished reading two food memoirs, 'the Apprentice' by Jacques Pépin and 'My Life in France' by Julia Child. The confluences are interesting: a frenchman who came here, an american who went there. They went through the same port, Le Havre in Normandy, though Julia went in '48, he in '59. I'll write up Julia's book in a day or 2; today Jacques' book as I just finished it, so it's fresh. He is a wonderful writer, especially when you consider that english isn't his first language. But he's been in the States since '59; went to Columbia University to learn english, and got a BA and MA there, too; and has an american wife... Some highlights, I'll try not to give too much away, cause there are some surprises and some really funny anecdotes/jokes:

He was born in '35, near Lyon. WW2 had a huge affect on his life. His father was part of the french resistance, so was away. His mom sounds pretty amazing. They were poor, but got by. The kids were outsourced to local farms during the summer so they could get better/more food; writing about his first drink of milk from the milking pail he says he realized that "food could be much more than mere sustenance." Some of his other food memories from the war years: cow lungs were a delicacy, boiling up beets for a sweet syrup, their community garden, and bread making. The bread story was cool. The woman he was staying with took 3 days to make bread, making a sour-ish dough.

His family had a tradition of gathering food, there's a great story about mushroom hunting in a pasture with cows and 1 bull. The money bit: "papa ran toward the fence. he got there just ahead of the bull, threw his basket over ahead of him - there was no question of abandoning the mushrooms - and, without slowing, dove over the fence, following the trajectory of the muchrooms, barely clearing the barbed wire."

He didn't enjoy school that much, and tested out at the age of 13 1/2. He had worked at his mother's restaurants all through his early youth, and started working as an apprentice, on a 3 year contract. It was totally hands on learning, "recipes were immaterial and in any case nonexistant." He had to cook a meal solo one night for late arrival's at the hotel. He was 14. He moved to Paris at the age of 17.

He bounced around initially, then worked steadily at Le Plaza Athénée, which was a very high end classical french restaurant. He got drafted, and was the personal chef for the secretary of the treasury and then the president of France. The stories in this section of the book are all amazing. "it was the longest night of my life, a night when no one knew who would be the leader of france when the sun rose. as french democracy hung in the balance, I did what I had been trained to do. I cooked."

At the age of 23, in August of 1959 he took the boat to NYC. He worked in a number of solid french restaurants, then had to decide between being the White House chef for the Kennedy's or working for Howard Johnson. He went with HoJo! There were Howard Johnson's on Long Island when I was growing up. They were a joke. This section of the book was crazy! But apparently when he was working for them the father still owned the company and was committed to high quality convenience food. When he died his sons took over and cut quality, and that's the HoJo's that I knew about. So he went to work trying to figure out how to make good food that could be successfully frozen and defrosted. He was there all through the 60s.

Some anecdotes from that time period:
"you're fired" the twerp said.
I suggested he do something anatomically impossible.

Occasionally, a food snob took a cheap shot at what we did for a living. For that reason, Pierre and I always got a kick out of serving our creations, most of them reheated from the frozen state, at home to other famous french chefs.

So instead of enjoying a taste of home, Pierre and I were stuck with the problem of how to dispose of a dozen rapidly decaying calves' heads in the Hamptons.

A friend of his in publishing let him see the manuscript of MtAoFC to check out: Someone had taken the training and knowledge that Jean-Claude and I had acquired as apprentices and commis and codified it... I was a little jealous, this was the type of book I should have written.

The story of his bungling efforts in meeting his wife are great. This is about their first Valentine's day: I didn't think it necessary to ruin the ambiance of the evening by telling her that the entire production had come packaged and frozen... from HoJo's.

When they got married they bought a house in Woodstock in upstate NY, and he commuted to the city. Lots of hunting of fowl & deer, fishing, frogging, mushrooms. Hunting and gathering is a big theme in the book.

I found discussion of how he and his wife got along in the kitchen fascinating. It's something I think I've written about in the blog, certainly it's something I think about. I don't share kitchen space/kitchen knowledge well in person. Hence the blog. I'm trying. there were inherent difficulties in learning how to share a kitchen with a professional chef. perhaps because of the scarcity of food during the war years, or perhaps because i grew up in a series of small restaurants where recycled scraps and leftovers were often the source of our slim profits, I was obsessive about not wasting a morsel of food. Sometimes when his wife was cooking it was
don't touch anything, sometimes how long do you think that roast needs?

On meeting Julia Child in person: even though i'd read her book, i wasn't in any way prepared for the woman I met that night. with Julia, who could be? and her french was more fluent than my english

They stopped at a 'farm' that advertised ducks for sale, the woman there thought she was selling pets, Jacques' daughter and her friend knew they were getting dinner: are these for you? both nodded eagerly, all but licking their lips.

His daughter at her first sleepover: As everyone else began to eat, Claudine sat immobile before her asparagus. In a gentle voice, the friend's mother said, Claudine, these are asparagus, you don't like asparagus? With an earnest, serious look, Claudine replied, I'm waiting for the hollandaise. It wasn't snobbery. The few times she had tasted asparagus in her short life, it had been served that way.

The story behind "Jacques, what in the hell are you putting in your paté?" is awesome. I won't spoil it.

In the 70s he started a restaurant in NYC, and later started teaching alot of cooking classes all over America. There are some awfully funny stories about snails and stock making.

On the food revolution started by Alice Waters: the philosophy she was promulgating with such zeal was so commonplace in France that I took it for granted. On the food itself: the quality and simplicity of all the food at Chez Panisse impressed me.

He was part of the French Culinary Institute from the beginning. My friend Chris learned his chops there, he is pretty high up in the pecking order at Tabla in NYC, now.

On the aftermath of cooking with Julia Child on live tv, where she cut herself: that was the inspiration for Dan Akroyd's famous spoof on SNL, dressed as Julia he merrily cuts up a chicken, with blood spurting all over the place. As he collapses, he screams heroically, Save the liver!

I loved this book.

Mine Guder Taller Dansk

The title is from a t-shirt I found recently in the freebin. It means "my gods speak Danish." It has nothing to do with the post, I just like it...

It's 11:30 and the wind is blowing straight offshore, very unusual for here. There's a sweet tablecloth of clouds over the front range, I meant to take a pic, but forgot, so here's a visible satellite image of right here, right now; notice the line of clouds in back of Goleta.
In Capetown, Table Mountain is a super famous landmark that has a tablecloth quite often due to the prevailing SE wind. (The water vapor in the warm air blowing over False Boy condenses as it rises, forming a cloud that hugs the mountain top, a process called orographic uplift).

Photo by Gordon Richardson