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Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Hot Links: Eating up the iPad, sustainable hot shots, national champion cheesecake
iPad Mania: BlendTec put the iPad to its “Will It Blend?” test.The Kitchn was as blown away by the iPad app from Epicurious as I was. I gave it a spin on tech reporter Omar Gallaga’s iPad, and it’s even sexier than the Epicurious iPhone app I’ve been obsessed with. (I wrote about a slew of food apps for your iPhone in today’s paper.)
Food Revolution, part 3: In episode three of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” he gets a crew of high school kids on his side, just as the school lunch official yells at him for not serving enough vegetables in his pasta dish. Add some French fries and you’ll have enough vegetables, she tells him with a straight face. (The Atlantic now has a school lunch expert chiming in on the episodes.) If that’s not depressing enough, maybe this survey taken after the show stopped filming will help: 8 in 10 kids were “very unhappy” about his changes.
In other school lunch news, the anonymous Fed Up With School Lunch blogger keeps getting more and more media attention, appearing last week on “Good Morning America,” while another passionate teacher who wasn’t anonymous nearly got fired for trying to start a food revolution in her school. The good news? A new magazine called ChopChop that aims to help young kids get into cooking healthy food.
A National Championship for Cheesecake: A surprise winner in the pie versus cake bracket on Jezebel.
‘Fast’ Food: Fast Company names the 10 most inspiring people in sustainable food, including Blue Hill chef Dan Barber and our boy Jamie Oliver. (Of note, only two women on the list.)
Tony Loves Austin: Bourdain fever swept Austin last week as the TV host hit hot spots like Perla’s ahead of his appearance at the Paramount. Girl Eats World has a recap of his talk.
Top Chef Masters: Cheer on Houston chef Monica Pope tonight in the premiere of “Top Chef Masters,” plus a guide to the other cheftestants.
‘Nobody is going to buy wine out of a cardboard box and a plastic bag’: The inventor of boxed wine dies at age 92.
Best of the Blogs: Saveur gave out its first-ever food blog awards, honoring favorites such as Homesick Texan, David Lebovitz and Smitten Kitchen.
Old Meat: From a butcher’s perspective, the fine line between aging and rotting meat and the difference between dry and wet aging.
Framed Food: Fine Cooking has a cool audio slideshow with artist Carl Warner, who creates beautiful landscapes out of food.
No More Bacon: Thirteen things that should never be made with bacon.
Foodie Backlash: Tired of this national food craze? (After all, the New York Times just wrote about how obsessed we are with taking pictures of our food.) You might like the new blog Shut Up, Foodies, whose authors are fed up with bacon.
Embarrassing Cookbooks: Seattle Weekly lists seven cookbooks you wouldn’t want your friends to find on your bookshelf. I have one from their list and a few others I’d add, all of them very sweet gifts from friends that I feel obliged to keep, just in case they come over and look closely at the shelf.
Photos from Fast Company, Fine Cooking video and morberg via Creative Commons on Flickr.
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Learn how to preserve your family’s food history
Family food traditions are as embedded in family trees as our genetic code.
Don’t believe me? Thanksgiving might seem like an eternity from now, but imagine your family’s Thanksgiving dinner with roasted parsnips instead of mashed potatoes, Brussels sprout salad instead of green bean casserole, a grilled pork tenderloin instead of turkey and cookies instead of pie. Think you could pull that off without protests from nearly everyone at the table?
Holiday food rituals are the biggies, but the everyday traditions — moosebread, applesauce muffins, Mexican casserole and chicken and dumplings are just a few examples in my family — are just as rich with meaning.
Dawn Orsak, culinary guru and past executive director of the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival, is getting ready to teach a two week informal class at the University of Texas about capturing family history through food.
The Recipes for Family History class costs $38 ($44 for non-residents — people who are not faculty, students or staff; members of Texas Exes, Wildflower Center or the Littlefield Society, or 65 or older) and will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on April 14 and 21 at UT. Register online or by calling 232-5277 (class ID number is 7630.601).
For Christmas presents a few years back, my mom collected family recipes in a three-ring binder to create a cookbook that is as rich in memories as it kooky dishes like Trees and Raisins and Champagne Salad. She included at least one recipe connected to each of us, and she shared a story to go with each one of them: My grandmother’s coffeecake and chicken noodles, my mom’s turkey manicotti and my dad’s gumbo.
I look forward to putting something like this together for my family members, but I’m also really looking forward to Dawn’s class to learn some other ways to capture my family’s unique past through the food traditions it has passed down from generation to generation.
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