Websites
Lately I have been going through the last year’s worth of archives for some of the food blogs that I like. I must admit that I find the world of food blogs a bit overwhelming at times. There are just so many, and keeping up can be difficult, but every now and then I just relax and focus on a couple of blogs and start reading.
One of the things I love most about good food bloggers is that they can inspire cooking a lot more than a simple cookbook. Their dish is a story, and it’s fun to tell stories about food. I also like the bloggers that are good photographers, and some of the food photography out there is simply amazing these days.
So with that said, one of the blogs that I do like to read is Eat Make Read written by Kelly Carámbula out of Brooklyn, NY. She started her blog in 2008 and also publishes with some friends a food magazine called Remedy Quarterly. I’ll do another post on this publication once I start my subscription, which will probably be in a month or so.
But what I really like about this blog is that it mixes in both beverages and food. A lot of blogs can get heavy on the baking and desserts, and while Eat Make Read has its share of sweets, it breaks it up nicely with a lot of classic cocktails and seasonal food dishes. Here are some of my favorite recipes from the the site.
Fried Polenta Wedges with Thyme
Spicy Corn Cakes with Fresh Salsa
Haricot Verts with Cinnamon, Yogurt, and Shallots
Grilled Cheese and Apple Sandwich
Candied Sweet Potatoes with Bourbon
Granted, Kelly’s dishes can be on the simpler side, but I also like that. She is a professed picky eater who is now branching out, so simple, good flavors are a great way to break out of old eating habits. I think the two recipes I am going to try first are the apple grilled cheese and the rhubarb johnny. You can’t go wrong with hot cheese and rhubarb dessert.
I found this recipe for roasted pears on the popular blog La Tartine Gourmande. I fell in love with roasted pears while living in France, but it took this French blogger to give the dessert some flair and really make it amazing. Just look at those pears. The photo is great, and the pears taste even better.
I especially like how the lemon grass, ginger, and vanilla bean seeds give the dish an exotic touch. Then the ground pistachios add a delicate crunchy texture. It was tart, yet smooth, and was almost like a tropical custard.
If I ever wanted to impress anyone with a dessert — and I mean anyone — I would probably make this dish. It is really tasty and I recommend it highly.
Via Lifehacker comes this post about Microsoft’s advanced recipe search on Bing. I’ve never used Bing before and only tried it out yesterday to see how the recipe search function worked, but here are my initial impressions of the recipe feature.
First of all, I must say that it is pretty impressive at first glance with all the features to refine your search. There are categories to sort by ratings (stars), convenience (time), cuisine (French, Italian etc.), main ingredient, course, cooking method, and occasion (season and holidays). They even include health facts for each recipe. The best part, however, is its ease of use. There is no going to a separate advanced search page; instead you just filter the recipes using the sidebar tools. It is very intuitive and easy to use.
With that said, it appears that most of the recipes come from delish.com and myrecipes.com. Delish is associated with Microsoft, so there is no surprise there, but at least myrecipes.com pulls their content from cooking magazines — albeit not from most of the big guns like Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Saveur, and Fine Cooking. Ultimately, I think the success of this recipe search engine will depend upon how they populate it with content. At this point, other recipe sites such as cooks.com, allrecipes, and Epicurious are still better and Epicurious even has a good advanced search function already — though not as slick as the one on Bing.
The Bing recipe search is still a long way from becoming the go-to site for recipes, but the easy-to-use advanced sorting features give it promise. I wish other sites would take a queue from Bing and improve their search functions, and it would also be great if these sites started tapping the world of food blogs.
I am finally trolling the internet and going through my old bookmark folders to find my favorite food-related blogs. It has been on my to-do list for some time, and now I am finally getting to it.
As I add to my links (sidebar to the right), I will also be giving special attention to websites that truly amaze me. I am always impressed with bloggers who dedicate so much time to their passion, and food bloggers impress me even more. They cook, photograph, write and put it all in a neat little package for the rest of the world to salivate over. I love that.
Today the site that amazed me is Tartelette. As a person who loves good food and photography, this site is amazing. Just browse her blog entries and you will be impressed. The creator is Helen Dujardin who is French but living in South Carolina. She used to be a professional pastry chef at a restaurant, but now she describes herself as a recipe developer, food writer, food stylist, and food photographer. She also gives private pastry classes.
If browsing through her blog isn’t enough, you can also see her wonderful photos at her photography site: helenedujardin.com. I am definitely going to look into buying some of her photographs for my kitchen.
I have been seeing in cooking magazines recently an advertisement for the Top Chef Quickfire Challenge Game
Of course, out of the 750 questions there are general food-related ones that have nothing to do with the show or contestants, but I still think the game is a bad idea. Why not just make a game about cooking in general and leave out the reality TV element? I would imagine that this product will get mediocre-at-best reviews as people leave more feedback, but at the time of writing there is only one review at Amazon. We’ll see.
With that said, I did find one website/blog for Top Chef enthusiasts that did play the game and liked it. You can read the post at All Top Chef, and I guess if you really love the show in a cultish way, the game may be more accessible. So even though I won’t be buying the game, maybe these sample questions will help make up your mind. Just ask yourself if this type of game would be fun to play with friends or family.
- Which Season 1 contestant was a part-time model at the time of the show?
- Which Top Chef judge earned three Michelin stars by the age of 26?
- In Season 4’s Restaurant Wars challenge, what dish of Lisa’s did Anthony Bourdain call, “baby vomit with wood chips?
- Who was the youngest competitor in Season 3 – Casey, Lia or Sara N.?
- What are the two ingredients in a roux?
- True or false: Adding sugar to water raises its freezing point.
- What are the two integral ingredients in ganache?
If this sounds fun to you, then you can purchase the game at Amazon
The Saveur 100 came out recently and I am just now going through it. The Jan/Feb issue consists of 100 tips, ingredients, food, restaurants, cooking tools, books and other related food insight.
From this issue, I am going to cull some of my favorites from the top 100, and the first one is The Fresh Loaf bread making website. I’ve never seen this site before, but it looks amazing and certainly deserves attention if want to make your own bread or already bake your own loaves.
According to the website The Fresh Loaf describes itself as providing “news and information for amateur bakers and artisan bread enthusiasts” and the site “contains featured recipes, lessons, book reviews, a community forum and recipe exchange, and baker blogs.”
The Fresh Loaf certainly does all of that, but the description also doesn’t do the site justice. Simply browse the baker blogs to get an idea of what you can do with the help of this site. In the blogs you will be lavished with picture after picture of fabulous looking bread with very detailed instructions on how it was created. Just looking at the pictures is inspiring (see above). So while the site does offer a lot of resources for the bread baker, even more importantly it offers inspiration.
The backbone of the site, however, is instruction. There is a bread baking handbook with useful information, and specifically I found the baker’s math section of interest as it gives you the basic proportions for ingredients and the math to adjust your recipes. There is also a lessons section that offers five instructionals such as “Your First Loaf,” “Glazing” and “Time and Temperature.” And if you ever have questions about baking a particular loaf or want to know what went wrong if you have less-than-satisfying results, there are plenty of places to post questions for individualized guidance.
This is a great site all around if you love bread.
Photo by Michael Kraus
The November issue of Saveur featured an article on the tableware store out of North Carolina called Replacements. This store started out as a flea market passion of owner Bob Page, who enjoyed finding hard-to-find missing dishes and flatware pieces for sets, and it now serves as a clearing house for replacement dishes of every variety and brand. So if you are looking to find a broken glass or plate from your Grandmother’s heirloom china or crystal set, then this is the place to go. I just did a search on a set I have at home and found replacement pieces available at very reasonable prices. At least now I know where to go if something breaks.
The store has over 300,000 patterns available, but even if what you are looking for isn’t in stock, you can request that they find it and you will receive a notification when it comes in. The website is basic and functional but not that great for browsing. I did go through the ’specials’ section and found the ‘Unique Tableware Sets to Go‘ to be useful to browse. You can essentially buy entire 40+ piece settings of fine tableware from $200 to $2400. A good number of the sets are already sold, but I am sure there are some good deals to be found.
The downside of the website is that it can be rather overwhelming. The sheer number of brands, styles, and patterns — while impressive — is daunting to say the least. I would love for them to have different search capabilities for retro, solid colors, modern, floral and other style preferences. Another good search option would be to only search dinnerware that is in stock. There are no doubt thousands of hidden gems in their inventory, but it is like finding a needle in a haystack with the current website design.
With that said, if you are looking to create an eclectic, out-of-the-ordinary table setting or want to find some retro dinnerware, then with a bit of effort you will be able to achieve this through Replacements. And when you need something specific or hard to find, this should be the first place to look. I also decided to test out the e-mail request service and put in some orders to find Lobmeyr crystal wine and water glasses. These items cost around $140 a piece, so it will be interesting to see if they find them and at what price they will be marked. None were currently in stock, so I’ll let you know what comes of it.
I was trolling through The Kitchen blog which I highly recommend. It is part of the Apartment Therapy website and has a nice mix of kitchen equipment finds, store reviews, and food and recipe advice.
One store that The Kitchn wrote about back in 2007 is Fante’s Kitchen Wares Shop out of Philadelphia, PA. The physical store is over 100 years old, and there is also an online shop, but what sets this kitchen store apart from others is its bewildering amount of kitchen items. Just look at the rolling pin page as an example.
But Fante’s goes even further. On the product category pages, they also put helpful kitchen tips and information on how to make better shopping choices and even go so far as to put recipes and public service announcements. For instance, the ‘honey’ page warns that honey should not be fed to infants under one year of age. They even have pages dedicated to informing about plastics, coffee beans, how to choose cookware and many other topics. This kitchen store has truly gone the extra mile, and after seeing how many pages there are with unique content, I can truly appreciate the effort that went into this online store.
With that said, even though Fante’s offers a wide range of products, the site is pretty basic and cluttered. It is not so much navigation as it is exploration, and their store directions, privacy policy and contact pages are buried along with all the kitchen products. However, there is some charm to the simple chaos too, and browsing through Fante’s is akin to rummaging through an antique store or used-book shop. Just reading through the categories will beg you to click and see what is offered: ‘patriotic cookie cutters’ and ‘Mongolian fire pot’ were two that piqued my curiosity. Then again, some categories are so basic that they make one curious for other reasons such as ‘banana‘. What I found was a selection of amusing and probably not-so-useful banana gadgets such as the slicer pictured above.
Regardless of the site’s shortcomings, Fante’s Kitchen Wares Shop is a useful resource. It might not be the site where you end up purchasing an item online, but it could very well be that place where you start looking for something that is hard to find. And even if you don’t find it, chances are you will see something else of interest.
In the quest to tackle my top-10 cooking goals for the year, I decided to lead off with making cheese. I recently found a home delivery dairy service from a nearby town in Minnesota that will give me fresh local milk. The dairy is called Stoney Creek Dairy, and they currently offer non-homogenized milk, but they they will be discontinuing the product line in November. Too bad.
So I put in my first (and last) order for my non-homogenized whole milk and just ordered a cheesemaking kit online for making ricotta and mozzarella. In the future I will just have to use regular milk instead of non-homogenized, but I thought I’d try it while supplies last. Getting milk delivered at home is also going to be interesting in an old-school sort of way. They deliver to small towns in the area, and I love the fact they offer to personally put it in your fridge if you are not at home. Now that is small-town service. I just hope the kit and the milk get here about the same time.
I decided to go with a kit instead of buying the supplies locally as I wasn’t sure I could find all of the ingredients on short notice. For instance, I need rennet and I had no clue what that was. After a quick wiki search, I learned that it was a complex of enzymes produced in a mammalian stomach to help digest mother’s milk. You can also get vegetable rennet if you are a vegetarian. At grocery stores you can find a brand of rennet called Junket usually near the Jello, but some say that it isn’t strong enough as it is used in making ice creams and custards instead. And to top it all off, a lot of recipes call for special cheese salt, citric acid, lipase powder and calcium chloride. So it was an easy choice: I bought the kit and now I wait for everything to arrive.
If you wish to purchase cheesemaking supplies you can shop online at cheesemaking.com, leeners.com or thecheesemaker.com. All three have a large selection of products, kits, ingredients and offer help for the novice cheesemaker.
After making making ricotta and mozzarella, I am going to move on to chèvre as there are two goat dairies near to where I live. I will just have to call them up to see if I can buy some milk off of them. I also want to make goat-milk butter, but that is down the road and for now I need to focus on my intro cheeses. Just reading through the eGullet forum gives me an indication that these cheese making kits aren’t quite as easy as they seem, so this should be interesting.
Via the Food Wishes blog comes this video on how to eat chicken wings. Usually people struggle with eating a chicken wing and it turns into a battle of human versus tiny chicken bones — with the chicken bones often winning. And in the end our fingers end up all messy, and we have probably looked a bit ridiculous too.
Maybe it is just me, but whenever I am eating a chicken wing, I feel as if people are watching me and probably passing judgement with appropriate Midwestern shock, uttering things like ‘gosh’ and ‘oh my’ as I try to eat that itty bitty wing.
Anyhow, no longer will that happen. This presentation by Chef John is delightfully simple, and it is one of those videos that makes you question why it has taken so long to do it the right way. It is similar to when I learned 15 years ago how to open a banana correctly. (Look it up on YouTube; you may be doing it incorrectly.)
Aside from this video, the Food Wishes blog is an extremely good food site. Chef John presents a lot of fine recipes, and the videos are very well done. Where most food blogs hover at the amateur level, this one takes food blogging to the next step. The content and instructions are professional, and this site definitely deserves some props for that.
As for recipes, I thought the seared scallops with orange and jalapeno dressing and cauliflower soup with blue cheese fritters looked great. Chef John also has a post on how to make your own fromage blanc, which I think I am going to try.
