It happened again. I'm just minding my own business, slowing making my way through Bill Buford's book Heat , and I get to passage where Alex, a former chef at Babbo, describes how Frankie, his screaming superior, had taught him how to make pasta Carbonara:
You render your guanciale, and make a sauce with and the egg whites, and then, after you've plated it, you add your yolks, uncook...
I'm not sure why, but it wasn't until last week when my mom handed me a fresh copy of Heat , that I realized I had forgotten to read it. I'd read another Bill Buford book, his manic and terribly disturbing Among the Thugs , along with his New Yorker profile on Batali and a narrative on his experience slaughtering animals in Tuscany, the latter two of which are included in some form in...
Someone is really concerned about us. We eat a lot of meat and not enough vegetables. Nick spent a week devouring ham and now his face is the color of plain file folders . (I'm in the office--this is the only simile available to me.) We're facing vitamin deficiencies, colon problems. We're afraid to go outside. Because if we just ate a bunch of raw vegetables, we'd have nothing...
I remember vividly the first time I thumbed through a cookbook with a sense of purpose. I was home on a break during my freshman year of college, and my mom had been relating to me her excitement about a book my sister sent from London. She excitedly exclaimed that “it had even been autographed.” I smiled and nodded approvingly, unaffected. It was a cookbook, after all. My sister w...
One thing I’ve found difficult about cooking is that it’s really hard to start when you’re hungry--you have to plan ahead. Once you get started you get your momentum going, and there’s always ingredients to snack on, but it’s the getting started that proves difficult. The inertia works against you at first. Since I get lazy when I get hungry, I end up heating canned soup.
This evening, with...
