Links

Have I mentioned? Book publishing is impossibly slow. It makes my life as a guidebook writer infuriating, knowing that the book I worked so hard on is deteriorating as it sits at the printing press, and then bobs its way back here, on the slow boat from China. And yes, publishers are now actively [...]

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That’s what Tamara called her old galley kitchen. I had one too for a while. It turns out Mark Bittman also has an awful tiny kitchen. Living proof that you don’t need fabulous stuff in order to cook well.

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Excellent online travel mag Perceptive Travel has a new issue (and it’s going bimonthly now, up from quarterly). I’ve been so buried in food talk right now that tales of exotic travel seem like a mental stretch.

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Tal forwarded me this Straight Dope column about circus peanuts. I do not like them. They are a disturbing texture and just plain taste bad.
Buried in the middle of the column is this:
“Over the years the best-selling item has been orange in color, banana in flavor, and peanut in shape.”
Banana flavor? I never would’ve [...]

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Yesterday’s New York Times had a good long story about the in-house butchering at a group of Brooklyn restaurants.
I got to see the group’s butcher, Tom Mylan, hack up half a pig at The Brooklyn Kitchen a couple of weeks ago. It was illuminating, and I came home with many pounds of meat.
I knew [...]

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Not that you were missing my Sisyphean Thai-dining adventures, probably.
I know I wasn’t–I’d totally forgotten about it in the whole server-move shenanigans, and it wasn’t till I went to write a new post that I realized it had been abandoned, like a 3-year-old accidentally left behind in the mall during the Christmas-shopping chaos.
So it’s [...]

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I’m at a job in an office, waiting for work to come my way, so I’ll actually do one of those things that office-job people do: a clever meme post!
From the British Very Good Taste blog, here’s a list of 100 things any good omnivore should’ve tried. A few years ago, I thought I’d aspire [...]

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RR gets interviewed for a NY Times’ blog on the subject of teaching kids to cook, and I actually found myself agreeing with it. (Not that I have kids, but I sure have plenty of advice, especially on how not to raise them.)
I’ve long said that knowing how to cook is the next most important [...]

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Driven by financial hardship, a friend of mine has been forced to work for a living. The divine Parsley Cresswell is penning a handy tome called the Upper East Side Cookbook, to share all the knowledge she has gained while foraging for food in Central Park and Dumpster-diving behind the finest gourmet purveyors.
You’re laughing [...]

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The New York Times ran a nice little piece on a live-poultry-and-more joint in the Bronx. I’m a big fan of these operations, so it’s nice to see some positive coverage about them, and with a ‘here’s a normal part of the neighborhood’ tone, instead of the ‘what is that mysterious place at the end [...]

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I recently came across (OK, no, Peter forwarded me the links) two blogs doing reviews of Astoria restaurants.
Every Restaurant in Astoria seems like the more promising, if only because its authors recognize the sheer foolishness of their endeavor: “like Sisyphus, but with gyros,” as they put it. I like their moxie, and their attitude comes [...]

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Spotted this video on deboning a pig’s head on Gourmet.com, but was too distracted to watch it. Handily, one of my informants passed me the link yesterday. I’m glad I didn’t miss it.
Oddly, the only thing I found heebie-jeebie-inducing was the part where he cleaned out the ears. Ew.
Good prep for the pig-butchering class [...]

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Since last week was Blog Black Hole Week, I’m only now catching up….
There was an article, “The Anti-Restaurants,” on bad-ass supper clubs in the New York Times last week.
Initially I was miffed that Tamara and I didn’t get our due for five long years of culinary cool (we were roasting whole lambs on spits when [...]

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