Category: Cooking

…is not learning to follow recipes, I now realize. Yes, one can lead to the other. I learned a little about how to cook via my Italian family. By “learning to cook” I mean how to physically prepare foods, how to heat them, how to flavor them i.e. techniques. With that knowledge I could easily prepare new recipes, and then informally learned more techniques in the context of learning more recipes.

But it seems that in the usual parlance that “learning to cook” means learning to prepare recipes, and people start there. It’s not easy or obvious that certain food can be heated in certain ways and flavored in certain ways, and how to mix things in proportion, etc. So without a recipe they are clueless.

Therefore, in my ideal world all cooking classes would start with a piece of food and why you cut it a certain way and why you heat it a certain way and how you flavor it a certain way, and then repeat with other, complimentary foods, combining foods into meals, and so on. And somewhere at an advanced stage cover, btw, how to document all this in the form of a recipe.

It is, incidentally, how I would teach music as well.

Surrounded by the twin mystiques of brunch and Hollandaise, Elaine Corn offers a better, simpler cooking method (boil water in a shallow skillet, add vinegar and salt, slide the eggs in and turn the heat off, let cook in covered skillet for three minutes). I can tear that page out of my Betty Crocker cookbook now.

New Scandinavian Cooking is just so wonderful. I love when someone takes a format that is already popular and full of variation and just takes it in a whole other direction.

In the episode I saw, host Andreas Viestad skied through a sunny day over to a man pulling three char out of a fishing hole. Andreas immediately pan fried them and served them with an orange-curry filling. And then, on top of the mountain, orange chicken and for dessert ice cream and meringue served in an orange. All done outside, cooling ingredients in the snow, with the mountain range in the background. This has spoiled me for all other cooking shows.

The beer wars are cracking me up, as product design meets marketing, awkwardly. Bud light, feeling out-marketed in a category they already designed for, runs ads that remind us ‘All light beers are low in carbs.’ Miller Light responds, ‘That’s right, so choose on taste.’ Here’s the beer carb chart if you’re curious. Interesting that the beer designed to be low in carbs — Michelob Ultra — is described as watery. I guess Michelob discovered water is low in carbs.

Like the author, if I’m in the mood for a beer I’ll drink a beer, even a Guinness that has twice the carbs of anything else. If I want something lighter, my Summer choice is gin and tonic (0 carbs) and in the Winter it’s red wine (lower in carbs than light beer).

Quite possibly the most delicious way to prepare asparagus. Easy too.