Cutting the salt in Indian cuisine

Last week I got a Chanukah package in the mail from my sister. In it was India with Passion: Modern Regional Home Food by Manju Malhi, a British food writer with a popular UK cooking show, Simply Indian, on home-style cooking. One of my sister’s food-savvy friends had tried out the recipes and raved about [...]

A Bowl of Dough in a Book

“Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day”, developed by an avid home baker and a professional pastry chef, uses the same basic strategy I do–a bowl of dough in the fridge–but with lots of variations off a couple of basic master recipes. They don’t call for kneading at all–just mix, rise and chill. That’s solid enough for the chewy hard-crusted no-knead bread style of bread, but will it work for challah, which usually calls for extensive kneading to develop the classic long feathery crumb? Inquiring minds want to know.

Fruit + Herbs = ?

I wanted to share a couple of fruit-and-herb combinations I’ve come up with over the years. I hesitate to call them recipes, but they’re good, fast, and unusual. They make refreshing side dishes, especially for a light meal, because they’re not too sweet and they play the sweetness and sometimes tartness of the fruit against something woody, green, spicy or aromatic.

The Meaning of “Tasty”

Everyone from food industry veteran Hank Cardello (see the Stuffed book review) to NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle in What to Eat talks about fast food and junk food as “tasty”. Either they mean they find processed food tasty or they mean they think everyone else finds it tasty and irresistible–even if there’s something better to eat. That’s kind of defeatist, isn’t it? If everyone “knows” fast food is tastier than fresh produce, what hope is there for mainstream Americans to eat healthier than they do today? The ugly assumption they’ve bought into is that people who eat mostly processed food can’t change, won’t change, and most importantly, wouldn’t like fresh food if they tasted it. But no matter what you normally get to eat or what neighborhood you come from, if you can get out to an open air market, or grow something with your neighbors in a community garden, you’ll want to taste the produce. The fast-food version of “tasty” gets knocked aside in an instant for the real thing.

Stuffed: A Food Industry Insider Attempts Moderation

Stuffed is neither a counterattack from the food industry nor the next go-green manifesto. It’s Cardello’s attempt to mediate between restaurant chains, supermarkets, Big Food manufacturers, Big Agro, the government, public schools, and pretty much every other player in food politics. It does pack some original insights about the interlock between food industry, government, and consumer behavior and a few genuine surprises among his recommendations—some reasonable, some so strange it’s worth reading just to find out how Big Food envisions its future.

How to Eat Vegetables and Lose Weight and Save the Planet (Without Really Trying)

One of my favorite stops at the New York Times online is Mark Bittman’s “The Minimalist” column, a series of 5-minute videos in which he demonstrates simple but pretty good cooking with clear and manageable directions and an easy close-up view of the pots and pans in action.
I’d say he takes a no-nonsense approach to [...]

Uneasy fusion: cooking, then and now

I don’t know if I’m looking forward to this Friday’s release of the movie Julie & Julia or not. I’ve read both of the books it’s based on and liked them both, and I’ve been an avid fan of Julia Child as a person if not as a chef since I was four years old [...]

What’s in YOUR restaurant’s dumpster? David Kessler uncovers the addictive side of chain restaurant eating

David Kessler, the FDA commissioner who fought to bring the cigarette and tobacco companies to heel in the 1990s–has taken on the next big fight by doing something you wouldn’t think a man that eminent needs to do: he’s gone dumpster diving in the parking lots behind the fast-food chain restaurants in California. In a [...]