Home > Relish Austin > Archives > 2009 > August
August 2009
Sheila Lukins, ‘Silver Palate’ author, is dead at 66
Sheila Lukins, best known for her cookbook “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” has died after a short battle with brain cancer.
Eat Me Daily calls her “one of those rare cookbook authors who actually changed the way we eat,” and the New York Times has this obituary about the woman who helped “usher in the new American cooking of the 1980s.”
Former Statesman food editor Kitty Crider says her chicken marbella was the dinner party dish.
Do you have a favorite Lukins’ recipe?
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Proposed food panels for SXSW Interactive 2010
It takes the city — and me — a little while to recover from the influx of creative energy spurred by tens of thousands of people coming here to celebrate and share their love of music (and movies and the Interwebs).
But the SXSW Panel Picker voting ends next week, just within earshot of the three-day music festival at Zilker Park.
The food panels and parties at last year’s SXSW were so impressive that I wanted to give you an idea of the panels that are being proposed for next year’s Interactive Festival.
I spoke on a panel last year about food blogging, and this year I submitted this panel:
The Yelp Effect: When Everyone’s A Restaurant Critic: Nowadays, with restaurant blogs and sites like Yelp and Chowhound, everyone is a restaurant reviewer. Long gone are the days when professional critics had the final say. How are user-generated reviews changing how restaurants operate and how we eat? Is there still a role for the professional critic?
Here are some other food-related panels you can vote for (votes account for a third of decision-making process, SXSW organizers say):
Tasty Conversation: Social Media + Food Brands: David Berkowitz joins a lineup of top food and beverage brands that are harnessing social buzz to spice up their real world presence.
Blogs, Tweets & Movies: Fueling the Good Food Movement: The Good Food Movement is using twitter, blogging, newspapers, movies and other creative forms of media to fuel changes in the way we eat and produce our food.
Local Food: Creating an Online Community of Local Eaters: Finding local food is hard. The internet presents an amazing opportunity to simplify that experience.
E-Food Revolution: Interactive Tools to Feed the World: This panel explores how the web can coordinate information and facilitate a more transparent, inclusive, and sustainable food system.
Food Porn 101: Photos that Engage the Senses: This panel will take lessons from the food world to showcase how any site or blog can increase engagement and improve brand identity by using images that engage the senses.
Cultivating the Web: Netroots Action for Grassroots Food: This panel will explore various innovative and creative uses of social media and online technology to support the local food movement.
Virtual Brick and Mortar: (submitted by Winnie Hsia, who tweets for Whole Foods Market) For online brands and media companies, the move into social media has been a natural extension of what they already do, but what about brick and mortar stores?
Mac-n-Cheese: Learning About Product Design from Comfort Foods : Comfort foods are the epitome of success. Delicious, ubiquitous, and easy. This panel of chefs and designers will explore what food can teach about product design.
Vertical Communities: Helping Bloggers, Artists & Small Businesses Grow: (submitted by Ryan Stern of Foodbuzz) Joining a vertical community organized around niche content or products can provide a wealth of tools, resources, monetization options, content distribution and social networking components that all translate into better blogs, unique monetization solutions, stronger brand presence and product awareness.
Renegades in the Cafeteria: The Lunch Box Project is on a mission to change the way kids in the United States eat. The Project has broken down every door and glass ceiling to create an open source, collaborative set of interactive tools that give anyone invested in the health and well-being of kids exactly what they need to do it.
Cooking For Geeks: A Primer on Food Hacking: By bringing tools, techniques, and ingredients from the science bench to the kitchen counter, this panel will show how to create better food and new experiences at the dinner table.
Did I miss a panel? What food and technology topics would you like to see discussed at next year’s SXSW?
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First of five Austin Sprouts grocery stores to open Sept. 4
Austin is about to be inundated with natural foods.
I’m not talking about the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival this weekend (although I’m sure there will be plenty of organic and preservative-free options at the annual fiery fete at Waterloo Park), but a week from today, the first two Sprouts Farmers Market grocery stores in Austin will open, followed by two more in October. A fifth location should open in 2010.
Without mentioning Whole Foods Market, Central Market, Wheatsville Co-op, Sun Harvest or newcomers Newflower Farmers Market and Natural Grocers, the company called Austin “the pulse of the natural foods movement for nearly three decades.”
Around 7 a.m. on Sept. 4, first two stores will open at 5601 Brodie Lane and 110 N. Interstate 35 in Round Rock, followed by a grand opening breakfast buffet. Stores at 10225 Research Blvd. and 2805 Bee Cave Road will open in October.
The Arizona-based grocery chain offers all-natural meats, bulk food, a bakery, some locally sourced produce and vitamins and supplements, and it will be open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
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Lamberts chef/co-owner Larry McGuire: What’s in Your Fridge Friday?
McGuire, co-owner and chef of Lamberts Downtown Barbecue, is shaping the Austin restaurant scene one venue at a time. Just this year, he was part of the opening team for La Condesa and Malverde, across Second Street from Lamberts, and his newest baby is the seafood paradise Perla’s, in the old Mars location on South Congress Avenue.
The Austinite was working for Lou Lambert’s Liberty Catering by the time he graduated from Austin High School, and a few years ago he was working at the now-closed Starlite when he dreamed up an upscale barbecue joint that he named after his mentor.
At 27, he’s got a few cards up his sleeve, so keep your ear to the ground for McGuire’s next new thing, even if it’s a flavor of mayonnaise.
What three things are always in your fridge? Beer, Topo Chico, ice cream
What’s your favorite condiment? Homemade mayonnaise, you can make endless flavors of it, and its the best thing to dip fries in.
What’s your go-to late night snack? Cold cereal: Puffins, Cherrios or Kashi
Fridge photo by Larry McGuire, mug shot by Mike Sutter.
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In a cooking slump? Hit the library
641.
That’s the number you need to know if you find yourself in need of culinary inspiration and without the dollars to drop on a set of new cookbooks.
Sure, you can find just about any recipe you’d want online, but there’s nothing like flipping through a tangible book of recipes that can coax your hands into whipping up something special.
Libraries house a vast number of cookbooks, both classic and newly released, and they are all filed under 641 of the Dewey Decimal System. (The 600s, if you’ve forgotten since elementary school, is the technology section, and 640 is reserved for “home economics and family living.”)
Good luck finding a library copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by Julia Child these days, but why not explore other culinary riches, as Statesman social columnist Michael Barnes of Out and About is doing.
Barnes is taking a page from Austinite Julie Powell’s “Julie & Julia” to cook his way through classics including Marcella Hazan’s “The Classic Italian Cookbook.”
I’m eagerly awaiting the cooler weather to dive back in the kitchen. Like most of you I presume, I’ve been assembling food rather than cooking much of it in recent weeks, but don’t be surprised to find me tucked away in the nonfiction section of the library with my oven mitts planning what I’ll do when the kitchen itch strikes again.
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Austin’s ‘Kitchen Diva’ hits Hulu.com, ‘Today’ show
The author of “The New African-American Kitchen” said just before heading to the NBC studios for a rehearsal on Wednesday that the short cooking segments that air on KVUE on Saturday mornings at 8:15 will also start appearing on Hulu.com in October.
Medearis, who is a veteran of these morning show cooking segments and has appeared on shows such as Bobby Flay’s “Throwdown,” said she’ll be making Mozambique shrimp and a corn and shrimp salad with the hosts during the latter half of the show. The two recipes are from her next cookbook, “The Kitchen Diva Cooks,” which will come out next year.
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Tomatina: The world’s biggest food fight
Today, in Buñol, Spain, tens of thousands of people will engage in what is effectively the world’s biggest food fight.
Tomatina has been going on since the 1940s, and I was crazy enough to join in when I lived in Spain in college.
Not a tomato is thrown until some agile soul can climb to the top of a greased-up pole to cut down a leg of ham that is hung on the top. Then, trucks full of tomatoes drive slowly through the town center, delivering 15 tones of tomatoes to revelers, who then squish and throw tomatoes for exactly one hour. Before too long, you’re up to your knees in tomatoes, not a single spot on your body free from seeds, skin, juice or that smell.
Sixty gloriously disgusting and exhilarating minutes later, firetrucks return to wash down the streets, and everyone loads back up on the train back to Valencia (Buñol, pop. 9,000, only has so many rooms.) to wash off the day’s fun.
If you ever find yourself in that part of the world for the last Wednesday in August, I’d highly recommend participating. (Leave the kids with the au pair.)
My favorite part of the official Tomatina Web site are the tips translated to English, including this one:
Enjoy it the most. It is great to be able to do something as nonsense as throwing tomatos to anyone moving for an hour. You can relieve all your tightness. We should celebrate it more often.
In the Tomatina spirit, here’s an interesting work of food art featured this week on Eat Me Daily: Artist Martynka Wawrzyniak lets a bunch of kids spray her with ketchup.
Photos via aaroncorey on Flickr and artnet.com.
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Win tickets to see ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’
Most of the tickets are going to children in the nonprofit’s Kids Cafe program, but CAFB is also hosting a contest to give away two sets of five tickets. All you have to do it send a “photo, video, song, story, dance interpretation or whatever your creative heart desires involving you and a meatball” through the Web site. They’ll announced the semi-finalists on their blog on Sept. 3, where voting will take place until the winners are announced on Sept. 9.
Movie poster from Sony Pictures.
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(Insert cheery garden headline here)
UPDATE: It seems watering with a hose counts as hand-watering, but I don’t feel any less guilty about it.
Gardeners can water by hand all they want, but I suspect hosing the beds every evening like I have been doing would warrant a $400 fine.
Also part of the restrictions: Restaurants will not be allowed to serve water unless a customer requests it.
I’ve been struggling with both the heat and water guilt all summer, but now that we’re facing the end of August without cooler temperatures or water in sight, these water restrictions seem to be the death knell to my garden.
Slowly I’ve been pulling up plants and putting them in the compost pile, the one surefire aspect of backyard gardening I’ve found during this dry summer. The basil has bolted, above right, and the spider mites have officially take up residence in my two remaining tomato plants.
After just two days without water, the aphids attacked this pepper plant to the point that it had to go the way of the compost.
It’s sad to watch the chard and fellow struggling plants die a slow death, but I feel better knowing that I’m not dumping water into the ground without an eggplant or pepper to show for it.
I’ve been hearing that people are preparing for their fall beds, but I just can’t find the spark inside me to put in transplants and continue the fight with the heat anymore.
It’s a losing battle that I’m tired of losing.
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H-E-B takes HFCS out of kid products, adds label system
You might start seeing some new kid products and icons at H-E-B stores in coming weeks.
The grocery store chain, which started in Kerrville and now has more than 300 stores in Texas and Mexico, announced this week that it has relaunched H-E-Buddy, a line of foods and products aimed for kids, with new strict nutritional standards: no high fructose corn syrup or partially hydrogenated oils, and a restricted number of calories from fat, saturated fat and sugar.
Molly McAdams, H-E-B brand development expert who helped relaunch the product line, explained the changes at an event earlier this week at an H-E-B in North Austin. “It’s wasn’t just about wellness,” McAdams said, it was also about making products that kids will have fun eating.
Another change that’s sure to catch astute shoppers’ attention: icons on the front of packages designating which H-E-B brand products are designed for weight management or are vegetarian, gluten-free, lactose-free or “natural” (free from preservatives, flavorings, additives or colors).
“We’re trying to make it easier for people to find these products,” McAdams said.
You’ll also start seeing colored bars on the front of packages to help customers determine which products are low in sodium, high in Omega-3 fatty acids, reduced or fat free, low cholesterol or a good source of fiber, minerals or vitamins.
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AAS readers: What’s in Your Fridge Friday?
I’m always accepting reader fridges for Fridge Fridays, but after last week’s story in the food section, in which I asked folks to send me photos of their fridges, I got a good number of them all at once. (You can flip through all the fridges in this photo gallery.)
So this week, we get a look inside the fridges of people who still read the good old newspaper. You know, that one that stains your fingers and keeps kitty litter off the floor?
Thanks to the following readers for submitting theirs, and my e-mail is abroyles@statesman.com if you want to send me yours.
Flo MacNary and 11-year-old daughter, Lizzie
Flo: Hey Lizzie want to enter this contest?
Lizzie: Sure, Mom. (Lizzie can’t resist a contest even though this isn’t really a contest.)
Flo: What three things are always in your fridge?
Lizzie: Milk, no wait a minute. There’s not always milk. Hmm, yeast there’s always yeast and some kind of jelly either homemade (by grandma) or bought (by mom). (Presumably, someone will bake bread to go with the jelly) I don’t know what else.
Flo: What’s your favorite condiment?
Lizzie: What’s a condiment?
Flo: It’s something you add to your meal after you cook it.
Lizzie: Oh, honey ham. (Lizzie never likes the entrees my husband and I prepare so she eats the vegetable we cook or a salad and adds honey ham. The reality is she would just as well skip the honey ham. She’s more of a vegetarian. My husband and I are amazed and a little jealous.)
Flo: What’s your favorite go to breakfast?
Lizzie: Cereal unless there’s no milk then frozen waffle. It’s great! It pops up then I can eat it on the way.
Flo: OK, now we send in a picture of our fridge.
Lizzie: Oh, I don’t want to do that!
Judy Julian
“After reading your article in today’s paper, I was inspired to take photos of the contents of my refrigerator. My husband is hooked on Topo Chico, so we always have several on hand. The outside door is decorated with the usual family photos, etc. The comic book covers depict Batman in various strange costumes.”
Kim Usey
(Kim created what she calls the Type A Editor’s Annotated Version on Flickr with explanations of what’s inside.)
no name, sent from text
“Refrigerators. We all have them.” Wrong! Nonworking frig approx 1yr or more. Who needs a fridge?! Say about me? Not a couch potato, low maintenance, enjoy good restaurants, less time @ home, no moldy food, & MOST of all no secrets & life goes on!
Bonnie Mroz
Suzanne Newberg
“What a fun column! For the heck of it, I had taken some late night fridge photos at the end of June, while our boys were at camp. Here is what it looked like right before they returned.”
What 3 things are always in the fridge? Orange juice, yogurt, cheese sticks
What is our favorite condiment? Wheat free, low sodium tamari
What’s our go-to, late-night snack or breakfast? Cheese and eggs
Valerie Davis
What three things are always in your fridge? Mexican beer, Light beer, Strong beer for the brother-in-law.
What’s your favorite condiment? Lime.
What’s your go-to late-night snack or breakfast? Micheladas.
Sibylle Rhein-Hibler and sons
“If there is such a thing as a check-list before marriage, a close look into your future’s spouse’s fridge would certainly give you a good idea about what he/she is all about at the culinary end of the deal. As my dear mother used to say: “Liebe geht durch den Magen” which means, Love has a strong relationship with the stomach and a well planned and executed meal can save a lot.”
What three things are always in your fridge? eggs, butter, and milk;
What is your favorite condiment? my homemade garlic oil, minced sundried tomatoes.
What is your go-to late night snack/breakfast? dark chocolate when I can’t resist. Before run: banana
All photos shot by readers.
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Celebrate Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop’s first birthday
O’Neal had a wee one herself when she opened the cupcake shop last year, and Sugar Mama’s has quickly risen to the top of many cupcake lovers’ lists. Now both her little boy and the bakeshop are entering toddlerhood, and you can celebrate with free cake and ice cream and a mini-pie-eating contest from 3 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 29.
Enjoy drinks courtesy of Tito’s Vodka and music from Team Fabrication DJs, while your four-legged friends eat Sugar Mama’s pupcakes.
The mini-pie-eating contest will start at 5 p.m., with a $10 entrance fee, which will all go to charity. O’Neal says she is still looking for people who want to enter the pie-eating contest. (Interested eaters should e-mail Steve here.)
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A cinematic treat at South First trailer park
Want to watch a film on the side of a trailer?
Treat and Torchy’s Taco, along with Vulcan Video, are hosting outdoor movies at the Austin Trailer Park and Eatery at 1311 S. First St.
Back to school is the theme of the movies this week, followed by time travel next week. Tonight, catch “Back to School,” and tomorrow “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” The free movies continue every night for the next few weeks and they start at 8:30 p.m.
As always at the Trailer Park and Eatery, it’s BYOB and food will be available from Treat and Torchy’s. Check out the full schedule here.
Photo from Austin Treat.
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What’s your tale of two milks?
I can’t be the only person in Austin who happily buys — and drinks — both soy and cow’s milk.
My kid has taken to soy milk “cocktails,” which is basically milk and chocolate syrup or powder that he gets to shake. We haven’t always been a two-milk family, but after the snot started running his first winter, we try to keep some around, especially during the fall and winter months, to keep dairy consumption — and therefore mucus — down along with the mucus it can make worse.
But even in hot weather months, it’s nice to have both in the fridge in case we want a slightly sweeter creamy fix from soy.
So, two milks, not for allergies or taste. Just because. The same reason you’d have both orange and apple juice in your fridge.
Anyone else find themselves with multiple kinds of milk after a big trip to the grocery store?
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Zen from the still-under-construction Snack Bar
The Snack Bar, the diner-by-day, lounge-by-night on South Congress Avenue that is still under construction, has had blue tarps up since spring. The owners were hoping to open months ago, but anyone who has opened a restaurant know that things rarely go as planned. (Looks like you can buy a “Keep the Faith” gift card through their Web site to help them get there.)
They must know we are eagerly awaiting the opening, because this one word appeared on the marquee earlier this week.
It’s a good reminder for more than just the opening of a new restaurant.
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It’s Hatch time of year again…
What’s with the fascination? Well, like many chiles, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatch,_New_Mexico">Hatch peppers can be used for everything from pies to pork chops, but when they are roasted, they have a rich, fragrant flavor that drives Austin chile lovers wild.
The little guys come from Hatch, New Mexico (pop. 1,600), which also hosts the Hatch Chile Festival (Sept. 5-6 this year).
If you can’t make it to Hatch, here are two green chile festivals in Austin you’ll want to know about:
- Central Market’s 14th annual Hatch Chile Festival is taking place this weekend and next at both Austin stores. Sample Hatch-inspired creations throughout the store and pick up a pound or two to experiment with at home. The grocery store also puts home cooks to the test with its annual recipe contest, the winner of which will be picked by judges at an event at each store Aug. 30. (Entries will be accepted online through Thursday.)
- Starting next week, Chuy’s 21nd annual Green Chile Festival begins at all 13 locations around the state. The event, which runs through Sept. 13, features five new green chile menu items, including green chile barbecue chicken, and the New Mexican martini, which contains chile-infused tequila.
Food bloggers are having a heyday with Hatch peppers, hopefully in preparation for a Hatch-themed food blogger potluck we’re having at the end of the month.
Fete & Feast made squash stuffed with corn, tomatoes and Hatch chiles.
Whole Foods suggests using Hatch chiles in a pesto.
Julie of Destroying My Apartment One Recipe at a Time created a Hatch hummus.
Mando of Taco Journalism has been testing out a chile relleno recipe using Hatch peppers that, I can say having tried them last night, are freaking awesome. No recipe posted yet.
Hatch chile photo by Tom Lankes for the Austin American-Statesman.
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Tipsy Texans: What’s in Your Fridge Friday?
David Alan and Joe Eifler are so passionate about cocktails they named their rescue dog Jigger.
This week, they moved Jigger, a dozen or so jiggers — the silver measuring devices used to make drinks — and other cocktail paraphernalia, as well as their refrigerator, to a new house, leaving behind the kitchen where they first fell in love with the art of cocktails.
A few years ago, they came across Dale DeGroff’s “The Craft of the Cocktail,” which inspired them to become students of mixology and start a blog, TipsyTexan.com, to chronicle their adventures in drink-making.
Now, David is the bar manager at Annie’s Cafe and Bar downtown, where he’s serving old-school classics like Sazeracs, Monkey Glands and something called a Blood and Sand. He and Joe shake drinks at events all over town, even at the Sunset Valley Farmers’ Market, where they make a frothy, cold coffee and lemon cocktail called a cappucello.
This weekend, David and company are hosting Houston mixologist Bobby Heugel for a guest appearance at Annie’s on Saturday night from 10 p.m. to 2 p.m. He’ll be shaking some specialty cocktails from Anvil, the cocktail bar he opened earlier this year in Houston.
David shared a few of the cocktail recipes Bobby will be making on Saturday:
The Brave
1 oz. Del Maguey Chichicapa Mezcal (or any decent mezcal)
1 oz. Hacienda del Sotol (tequila will do)
1/2 oz. Averna Amaro
1 barspoon orange Curacao
3 mists Angostura bitters
flamed orange zest, for garnish
Last Word
3/4 oz. gin
3/4 oz. green chartreuse
3/4 oz. maraschino
3/4 oz. lime juice
lime wedge, for garnish
What three things are always in your fridge? 1) Real Ale and whatever other fun beers we find. Right now it’s Avery Karma, suggested to me by Dipak at the Whip In, which we now live dangerously close to! 2) Cold-brewed coffee from Co-Op Coffee, another David and Joe project. 3) Farmer’s market produce — a ton of mushrooms and a basket of figs right now, as well as meat from Loncito’s Lamb, and Thunderheart Bison.
(Contrary to what you’d expect, he and Joe don’t keep much citrus in their fridge because you get 20 percent less juice from a cold fruit than a warm one, he says, but you will find vermouths and fortified wines like Lillet and Dubonnet. David says that they stay fresher in the fridge and part of the reason why people think they hate vermouth is because they’ve only ever had stale vermouth.)
What’s your favorite condiment? Joe loves condiments and insists on several kinds of mustard, at least half a dozen kinds of pickles and as many jams and jellies.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever put in a cocktail? For last fall’s Edible Austin, they made a butternut milk punch made out of butternut squash ice cream.
A special thanks to everyone who sent me photos of their fridge after the refrigerator feature in this week’s food section! I hope to feature them over the next few weeks.
I’m always on the hunt for interesting refrigerators. If you want to show off yours, take a photo of it (please resist the urge to clean or rearrange) and send it to abroyles@statesman.com.
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A traveling restaurant passes through Austin
Diego Felix and Sanra Ritten are Casa Felix.
Sure, their house-turned-restaurant in Buenos Aires is also called Casa Felix, but for the past three months, they’ve taken their restaurant on the road through North America.
“The restaurant is the two of us,” Felix told me over coffee at Jo’s on S. Congress earlier this week. Felix and Ritten had hosted one of their supper club dinners at Clayton Morgan’s house on Saturday and were en route to the airport, where they were starting the last leg of their cooking tour in California. They were with Austinite Michael Dyer, who helped them host the dinner last week.
Nearly two years ago, Dyer and partner Lesley Boucher ate at Ritten and Felix’s speakeasy-style restaurant when they were on a trip to Argentina. Dyer says they loved the food and even more, the gracious hosts who were doing interesting things with food. “Whenever you come to Austin,” he told them, “give us a call.”
Sure enough, when the chef and his fiancee were setting up this summer’s trip, they planned a stop in Austin.
In May, Felix and Ritten started in Toronto and by the time they were in the Big Apple in June, the New York Times had picked up on their journey and wrote about a dinner they hosted in TriBeCa.
At each stop, including Saturday night’s dinner at Morgan’s penthouse home in downtown Austin, Felix cooks in someone else’s kitchen, using his hosts’ pots, pans, dishes and silverware to create a South American meal with a local twist. His eco-gastronomic philosophy is this: use seasonal, indigenous ingredients to produce dishes with South American cooking methods, techniques and recipes. “There’s nothing better than experiencing people from other places in the world, and in this case, their food styles,” Dyer says.
After a few dinners in California, they will head back to Argentina to host more supper clubs in their home and plan next year’s May to August supper club adventure in the U.S.
First stop? Austin.
Stay tuned to their Web site for details on how you can get a seat.
Photos by Lesley Boucher, George O. Jackson and Addie Broyles.
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Wheatsville throws party to celebrate renovation
Two upcoming events from today’s Food Matters:
- Wheatsville Co-op’s yearlong renovation is nearly finished, and although the official grand opening won’t happen until Oct. 10, the store is hosting a party from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday to celebrate. In addition to samples from Austin producers, employees will be giving tours of the new space at 3101 Guadalupe St., which has nearly doubled in size. Enjoy live music, as well as a kids’ show and craft area.
- Faraday’s Kitchen Store, 1501 RM 620 in Lakeway, is hosting its fourth annual Foodie-Palooza on Saturday and Sunday with door prizes, special discounts and for the first time, a salsa contest. On Saturday, brush up on your kitchen skills with free demonstrations throughout the day, and on Sunday, help pick the winner of the salsa contest. If you want to submit a salsa, register online by Friday and drop off your salsa between noon and 2 p.m. on Sunday.
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Coupon Queen reduces grocery bill from $239 to $34
Coupons can be a hassle, but not for Susan Samtur, author of “Cashing in at the Checkout,” who has made a career out of showing people how to cut their grocery bills by more than half. Last week, Samtur was in Austin, where she used coupons and store discounts to reduce a Randalls grocery bill from $239 to $34.
Samtur says the key is buying only what you have a coupon for or what the store has on sale. “It’s so easy; you just have to look,” she says as she spies a buy-one-get-one (“bogo” in coupon lingo) offer for cake mix. Every week, she scans newspaper inserts, or circulars, to see what each store has on sale and clips every coupon she can find, including from Sunday papers, in bins at the fronts of grocery stores and online at sites such as coupons.com, redplum.com, smartsource.com and Samtur’s site, selectcouponprogram.com, which costs $4.99 a month.
She files them by category in a small accordion file and makes a list of what items to buy based on what coupons she has. “You have to be brand flexible,” she says, and make dishes based on what products, including meat and produce, are on sale.
Make sure you are getting the most out of coupons by shopping at stores that double or triple their value, she says, but don’t expect jaw-dropping savings like hers unless you can get coupons for free products, which you can often get by signing up for mailing lists on manufacturers’ Web sites and sending off for rebates and coupons advertised on the fronts of packages.
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With Betty Crocker’s help, gluten-free goes mainstream
You know awareness about gluten allergies has hit mainstream when Betty Crocker launches a line of gluten-free dessert mixes.
Betty Crocker, one of General Mills most ubiquitous grocery store brands, now offers mixes ($4.49) for yellow cake, devil’s food cake, brownies and chocolate chip cookies that are all made in a gluten-free processing facility.
I haven’t had a chance to bake the brownie sample I got in the mail this week, but I’m going to bake them this week to see if my coworkers can tell what’s missing.
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Cantaloupe farewell and a new life for tomatoes
Gardeners spend August in Central Texas looking for the bright side.
I found out last week that the city needed to do some work on a water line near the watermelon and cantaloupe plants, the later of which finally popped out a handful of softball-sized fruit.
After the first day of work, city workers told us that they were going to have to dig where the plants were.
That weekend, I pulled up the spider mite-infested watermelon and stopped watering the cantaloupe. I couldn’t do much about the excavator, but Renee Studebaker had mentioned that the cantaloupes would be sweeter if I stopped watering a few days before I picked them.
And by god, I was going to eat a homegrown melon, and no city project was going to stop me.
They were as sweet and luscious as I could have ever hoped for, even if I didn’t have the melon bounty I dreamed of. (Even my kid’s dump truck man got in on the good stuff.)
Besides the melons, I threw in the towel and pulled up the green beans, zucchini and cucumber over the past few weeks.
Renee came over for a little garden diagnostic just after we returned from California and convinced me not to pull up the tomatoes. Instead, she suggested I cut off all the leaves that the spider mites had taken over and “plant” some of the low-hanging stems by covering them with dirt and compost to encourage new roots to form. Eventually, if they take hold, I’ll be able to cut them off from the mother plant and they will grow on their own.
The pepper plants are still healthy but completely barren. I’m hoping that cooler nights will return this month and prompt them to reward me for all these months of TLC.
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Forget box office, Julia No. 1 on Amazon; plus East Side gems
No one expected “Julie & Julia” to top the box office this weekend (it was only $36 million behind “G.I. Joe”), but Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” is No. 1 at Amazon.com, Eat Me Daily reveals. Not No. 1 in cookbooks, but No. 1 overall. A pretty impressive trickle-down effect of a “stunt,” wouldn’t you say?
Julie Powell is in Austin early this week for several sold-out screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse. Anyone get a ticket? I’d love to hear about (and see photos!) from her appearance.
If you didn’t pick up “The Green Kitchen,” which came out last year and is dedicated to reducing waste in your cocina, Serious Eats has a nice round-up of the top 10 ways you can save energy when you cook: fill up your oven, use a power strip instead of outlets and — my favorite — buy used.
Serious Eats wins again with a post about “The Un-Constipated Gourmet: Secrets to a Moveable Feast,” a self-explanatory cookbook that came out this summer. (You’ve got to catch Sarah Haskins’ video on codeword fiber.)
Chef author Michael Ruhlman is hosting a BLT-from-scratch challenge, where he’s asking folks not only to grow the tomatoes and lettuce, but cure their own bacon, make their own mayo and bread, etc. Too bad it’s tough to grow tomatoes and lettuce at the same time in this part of the world.
Speaking of tomato growing, in addition to Renee’s Roots column this month about drying heat-loving Juliet tomatoes, Zanthan Gardens has a wonderful post on this frustrating tomato season. (I love the burying-a-water-bottle technique.)
And lastly, I usually leave the restaurant reporting up to the Statesman restaurant critic Mike Sutter, but I’ve got to share two new restaurants that have already won the hearts of local food bloggers: East Side Show Room and Shuck Shack. (Which gives me a change to point you all to the recently updated blogroll at left, where last week I added a handful of new blogs, which puts the Central Texas food blog total to almost 110. We’ve got a Hatch-themed potluck planned at the end of the month. Join the Austin food bloggers group on Facebook for details.)
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Hudson’s chef Jeff Blank: Julia Child kissed me
I got an e-mail this weekend from Hudson’s on the Bend chef Jeff Blank with a sweet story about Julia Child:
I got a kiss on the cheek from the real Julia.
It was at the Fancy food show about 1994. We had a booth selling our sauces. To entice the passers-by I was serving wild boar tamales with our Mango Jalapeno sauce. She liked the flavor so much I got a “great flavor Chef” and “kiss on the cheek” from her. I was surprised she stopped…so down to earth. Her handler/protector was her Grand Niece. She was there to promote a new book and do a book signing.
It didn’t seem like a big deal then, but after watching the movie it did.
At a dinner last night, Paula Lambert, owner of the Mozzarella Company in Dallas was telling me about a time when she stayed with Julia at her Cambridge house, and en route somewhere, they were stuck in traffic near the Big Dig construction site. A construction worker saw Julia sitting in the passenger seat (“Julia always sat in the front seat,” Lambert says.), went back down in the manhole, then a few minutes later, a group of workers popped their heads out to wave at the chef.
Seems as though the Julia — and because author of the book on which the movie is based has deep roots in Austin — and Julie stories are swirling this weekend.
Please share your Julie or Julia story in the comments below…
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Free family movie night at the Hyatt
The folks over at the Hyatt know what it’s like to have kids. Or at least Mark Bedford, the executive director of food and beverage and father of two young boys, does. The hotel has been hosting free kids’ movies this summer and will continue to do so for the next few weeks.
Bedford says they’ve turned part of the restaurant into a mini theater, where kids can watch movies so the parents grab a bite to eat or have a drink at Marker 10. The movies start at 6:30 p.m. on Friday nights.
Tonight, they are showing Wall-E, followed by Ratatouille (August 14), Bee Movie (August 21), Surf’s Up (August 28), Hannah Montana: The Movie (September 4) and Open Season 2 (September 11).
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Julie Powell’s parents: What’s in Your Fridge Friday?
Kay and John Foster have had a whirlwind summer.
They went to Africa. Their son, Jordan, took the bar exam. And today, a movie based on a book their daughter wrote opens nationwide.
“Julie and Julia” stars Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as John and Kay’s daughter, Julie Powell, a 1991 graduate of Austin High School.
Seven years ago, Julie started a food blog to chronicled her attempt to cook every recipe from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” At first, her mother and just a few friends were her only readers, but by the time she finished in August of 2003, she’d been profiled in the New York Times and was on her way to signing her first book deal.
Last week, the Fosters were in New York City for the premiere of the movie, rubbing elbows with the stars of the movie, celebrities who turned out for the lavish event and Nora Ephron, who directed the film, which gave Kay Foster a chance to tell her that not all Texas accents are the same. (In the film, Julie’s character calls her mom, whose generic “Texas” drawl isn’t anything like Kay’s subtle accent.)
This week, they are back to work, waiting eagerly for Julie to come home this weekend for several sold-out shows at the Alamo Drafthouse.
In this story in Saturday’s paper, Foster told me that Julie never returned her mother’s copy of Child’s landmark cookbook that she took to New York for the project.
She doesn’t mind; she’s already bought a replacement.
What three things are always in your fridge? New Mexico chiles, grapefruits and vodka (stored in the freezer)
What’s your favorite condiment? Emeril’s piri-piri sauce, a combination of jalapenos, poblanos, crushed red pepper and garlic. I give away half of the batch. I use it to saute shrimp, put on top of vegetables or eggs.
What things to you keep in your fridge when Julie and Jordan are around? Diet Pepsi (for Julie) and Fat Tire (one of Jordan’s favorite beers)
Portrait of the Fosters by Cody Duty/Austin American-Statesman.
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Submit a recipe for chance to win Express tickets
UPDATE: And the tickets go to … Stephanie Hardy and Amanda Moralez! I wish I had more tickets to give away, especially to Hardy, who submitted more than 10 recipes for dishes including Sopapilla Cheesecake and Skillet Lasagna. Stephanie and Amanda, pick up your tickets from the front desk of the Statesman, 305 S. Congress Ave. (enter on Riverside).
I never know when the baseball ticket fairy will drop off tickets on my desk, so keep submitting recipes! We’re also considering creating a reader-submitted cookbook later this year…
Recipes.
I know you’ve got them: your favorite tailgating dip, your mom’s berry pie, a funky dish your kids ask for again and again. I have two pairs of tickets to next Wednesday’s (8/12) Round Rock Express game against the Portland Beavers to give away to two people who submit recipes to the Statesman’s ever-growing recipe database, a searchable set of reader recipes and those that appear in the Statesman.
All you have to do is submit your recipes here (submit as many as you’d like), and I’ll pick two winners on Thursdays. If you want to share your recipe and any story that goes along with it, feel free to do so in the comments of this post.
Photo by Laura Skelding.
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You make the best burger in Central Texas? Prove it
Burgers can be a touchy topic (just look at the responses to Texas Monthly’s Top 50 burger list), but we want to know which home chef in Central Texas makes the best burger.
We’ve been accepting recipes all summer, and the deadline to submit is August 12. Send your favorite grilled burger recipe to pbeach@statesman.com. We’ll take the most promising recipes and grill them up (on a gas grill) and announce the winner in time for Labor Day. The winner will receive a set of grilling cookbooks and a $100 gift certificate. Only amateurs allowed; no pro chefs. Burgers must be beef, and ingredients must be readily available at area markets.
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Highway 1, the road to good food
It’s been so much fun chronicling our trip down the coast through Twitter and Relish Austin, but I still had a handful of food photos I wanted to share. (Last vacation post, I promise.)
We packed a cooler just south of Portland and kept refilling it with goodies bought from farmstands along the way. These sandwiches were just two of the dozen or so we ate as the mighty Pacific rolled by. Roast beef, ham and even some high end pastrami, with Tillamook cheese, based in Oregon, thin slices of onions and — a shock to those who know about my complicated relationship with whipped oil and egg yolks — mayonnaise.
Lush produce overflowed from the roadside farmstands all along the coast. The strawberries exploded with flavor, and I swear that grapefruit was the biggest I’ve ever seen.
Garlic waffles fries and a pint of Old Rasputin Imperial Stout at the North Coast Brewing Company in Fort Bragg. If you ever make this drive, you absolutely must stop at the home of Red Seal Ale and one of the most interesting, complex stouts I’ve ever tasted.
At Bridge Street Inn, a hostel in Cambria, Calif., the owner, Anne Wyatt, makes a homemade jam from the blackberries that grow in the side yard to serve at breakfast.
And last but not least, a sidecar from a burger bar called 8 oz. on Melrose Avenue in L.A. A perfect drink to watch the Melrose crowd stroll by.
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California tacos: The fish, the plane and the ugly
California just doesn’t do tacos like we do.
Well, California north of Los Angeles doesn’t do tacos like we do. As we drove from Portland, Ore., to San Diego last month, we couldn’t find a decent taco stand or restaurant until we hit Los Angeles, and even then, we ended up eating pretty mediocre tacos. (In fact, $8 breakfast burritos near Big Sur were the only tortilla-wrapped foods we stumbled upon along Highway 1.)
On the way back from our West Coast adventure last week, we enjoyed, yes enjoyed, a meal on a Continental flight to Houston. I can’t remember the last time I was served hot food on a plane, especially a domestic flight over just three states. They served an iceberg lettuce salad and chicken enchilada, a dangerous choice for a flight headed to one of the capitals of Tex-Mex cuisine. Nothing about the tortilla-wrapped chicken, rice, cheese and corn resembled anything close to an enchilada, but it was actually pretty good.
In a lucha libre match between Continental’s chicken enchilada and the tacos we’d eaten in Los Angeles just a few days before, the airline would have emerged as the masked hero, kicking the three taco plate (above) from El Paseo on the historic Olvera Street back to the tourist trap, where it belongs.
But it was a fish taco from the original Rubio’s in Mission Beach that was worth writing home about, which in 2009 terms means recording a video to send back to your taco-loving peeps from Taco Journalism at home.
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