Having roasted many, many chickens in my cooking life, I've come to the opinion that there is no way to roast a chicken without some kind of opinion. You may get away with tossing an untrussed chicken into the oven with a shower of salt, maybe a lemon in the cavity, and calling it dinner, pretending to be as careless as possible. But that's still an opinion. So is planning days ahead of ti...
Welcome to Wednesday Links. This is our weekly collection of four of the most interesting food links we've discovered in the past week. Enjoy!
Straining Valentine's Day with Thomas Keller
Are Thomas Keller's damned recipes worth it, or just overcomplicated? Sky Full of Bacon's Michael Gebert attaches his erudite crankiness to Chicken and Dumplings and inquires....
The chicken oyster. It sounds strange. But also intriguing enough to suggest deliciousness. I've heard other people talk about this elusive piece of meat hidden somewhere on the chicken. Only smart cooks know about it, like Thomas Keller, who mentions it in his recipe for " My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken " in the Bouchon cookbook. When the chicken is done roasting, the skin golde...
I've been thinking about salad a lot lately, which is strange, because how inspiring can a salad really be? The salads I grew up with were made of lettuce with a bunch of chopped vegetables--carrots, mushrooms, peppers, whatever--doused with a dressing from the fridge door. Everyone put their favorite dressing on, and that worked pretty well. It was the typical "your-choice-of-dressing" side s...
I was cleaning out my fridge, throwing away plastic bags full of blackened herbs and limp celery and muttering about how I felt wasteful, of course, but also uncreative. Why does the ability to look into the fridge and dream up recipes with what’s there elude me? I'm a failure and a hack. Why even cook anymore? I should just order takeout and go to sleep.
But in the midst of this crisis...
I’ve already done my public fawning over Thomas Keller’s cookbooks. The absurd attention to details, the flowery short essays about “the importance of onion soup” in the philosophy of bistro cooking, the potential of preparing-ahead the “building blocks” of cooking (like soffrito and aioli ) that allow you to continue preparing uncomplicated dishes with simple, inspired combin...
I'm no stranger to clams. I'm no stranger to the whole bivalve genus. I think that we've cooked mussels more than any other dish for this website, even going so far as titling a post " Because You Can Throw Just About Anything In the Pot with Mussels and It Will Taste Glorious ." Clams are cooked much the same way: you make a simple broth with herbs and usually a little butter...
I've been reading Thomas Keller's two cookbooks lately, one for each of his Napa Valley restaurants--Bouchon and The French Laundry--and I've doing a lot of drooling. First off, they are probably the most gorgeous cookbooks I've ever seen, physically. From the text design to the layout, paper quality, printing colors, it's all overwhelming. Then, of course, there is the matter of Keller's r...