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Let's talk food, from restaurants and recipes to farmers markets, food issues and wine. Lee Svitak Dean, Rick Nelson, Kim Ode and Bill Ward will start the conversation.
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Posts about Chefs
For last-minute shoppers of hard-to-please cooks
Posted by: Lee Svitak Dean Updated: December 24, 2012 - 11:16 AM
You've only got hours to shop if you're still hunting for a Christmas gift. (Really, you still have shopping left?)
If you've got a cook with an attitude (think "more naughty than nice") -- or at least one that doesn't mind crude and rude in a sense of humor -- any of three new books may strike a fancy. Two of them are by anonymous writers.
A reprint of Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" -- what's billed as an "Insider's Edition" -- is out with Bourdain's handwritten comments, though the notes are few, far between and generally not very insightful. A press release says that 50 pages are annotated. (That includes many lightweight comments such as the one at left.) The handwritten intro -- three pages of scrawl, would have filled less than a single page of type, so "annotation" is a bit of a misnomer. Still, his story of what he calls the "culinary underbelly" holds up amazingly well after 12 years, though a few historical references may be obscure to up-and-coming cooks who are unfamiliar to such references as Hunt and Liddy or Patty Hearst.
Bourdain's memoir of his time in the restaurant biz is always blunt, often crude and definitely opinionated. He set the tone for many other food memoirists that followed.
Tired of Anthony Bourdain? Then perhaps Ruth Bourdain may be to your liking. The anonymous Twitterer, a parody mashup of Anthony Bourdain and Ruth Reichl, has come out with a book, "Comfort Me with Offal: Ruth Bourdain's Guide to Gastronomy." The title is a takeoff of Reichl's memoir "Comfort Me with Apples." The book is as irreverant and crude in its humor as Ruth Bourdain's 140-character (or less) thoughts found daily on Twitter. Let's just say that there's very little I could quote from the book for a newspaper blog. Who is Ruth Bourdain? Well, New York magazine and I (as reported a year ago) think it's Robert Sietsema, restaurant critic of the Village Voice.
Have a "Fifty Shades of Grey" fan on your list? "Fifty Shades of Chicken: a parody in a cookbook," may be the gift for you to present. This, too, has a pseudonym for an author, FL Fowler (who else?). The book offers vignettes of Miss Hen, a young "unexplored" chicken, at the mercy of Mr. Blades, the cook, who teaches her the pleasures of being whipped up for dinner. It is a one-note joke carried through 50 recipes, which include Mustard-Spanked Chicken, Hot Rubbed Hen, Extra-Virgin Breasts, Spatchcocked Chicken and many more that will make the occasional cook blush, with food porn pictures of the recipes, plus the occasional Chippendale shot of the cook.
Buyer beware: Choose carefully if you're gifting any of these books.
Best-of-the-best holiday cookies
Posted by: Lee Svitak Dean Updated: November 20, 2012 - 12:39 PM
Photos by Lee Svitak Dean
The Taste section of the Star Tribune has held its annual holiday cookie contest for the past decade, resulting in 10 winning recipes that have pleased bakers and appeared on holiday cookie platters for years.
In celebration of our 10th contest, we thought it would be fun to put the top 10 recipes to the test by having four local experts -- pastry chefs -- offer their thoughts on the recipes.
Steve Horton of Rustica bakery, Adrienne Odom of Parasole Restaurants, Diane Yang of La Belle Vie and Stephanie Schwandt of D'Amico Kitchen, pictured above, did just that as staff photographer Tom Wallace, also pictured, recorded the occasion. Find out which were the top three cookies next week (Nov. 29) in the Taste section, along with the winning recipes from this year's contest.
All the winners and finalists from the past decade will be available in the NEW e-book from the Star Tribune. "The Cookie Book" will be available on amazon.com and iTunes (and more) on Nov. 29 for $2.99.
The most brutal restaurant review ever
Posted by: Lee Svitak Dean Updated: November 15, 2012 - 10:58 AM
Photo from Food Network
Look out, Marilyn Hagerty. (You remember her, surely, the restaurant reviewer from the Grand Forks Herald who attracted national attention with her review of the Olive Garden?)
Her review is likely to be overtaken by another talker for best-read, this from Pete Wells, restaurant reviewer for the New York Times, who wrote a blistering commentary of Guy Fieri's Times Square eatery, Guy's American Kitchen & Bar -- and did so entirely in the form of questions.
"Has anyone ever told you that your high-wattage passion for no-collar American food makes you television's answer to Calvin Trillin, if Mr. Trillin bleached his hair, drove a Camaro and drank Boozy Creamsicles? When you cruise around the country for your show 'Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,' rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places where Americans like to get down and greasy, do you really mean it? Or is it all an act? Is that why the kind of cooking you celebrate on television is treated with so little respect at Guy's American Kitchen & Bar?" Wells wrote.
Later, Wells asked, "Is this how you roll in Flavor Town?"
We will see. Will the tourists in Times Square notice?
UPDATE: Poynter (the journalism think-tank in Florida) interviews Pete Wells about the review.
Charlie Awards winners announced
Posted by: Rick Nelson Updated: November 11, 2012 - 9:49 PM
The second-annual Charlie Awards, which recognize exceptional contributions of Twin Cities restaurants, chefs, bartenders, community leaders and other practitioners, was held at the Pantages Theatre in downtown Minneapolis on Sunday afternoon.
Congratulations to the winners, including:
Outstanding Restaurant: Tilia (pictured, above)
Outstanding Chef: Doug Flicker of Piccolo
Outstanding Pastry Chef: Michelle Gayer of the Salty Tart
Lifetime Achievement: Lenny Russo, chef/co-owner of Heartland Restaurant & Farm Direct Market
Community Hero: Brenda Langton, owner of Spoonriver
Emerging Food Professional: Birk Gruden and Christina Nguyen of Hola Arepa
Outstanding Bartender: Johnny Michaels of La Belle Vie
Outstanding Restaurant Service: Meritage
Outstanding Restaurant Design: The Bachelor Farmer (designed by Janet Gridley)
Local Do-Gooder: Randy Stanley of the Uptown Restaurant Taskforce
Outstanding Cup of Coffee: Moroccan Mocha from Cahoots Coffee Bar in St. Paul
Outstanding Local Craft Brew: Summit Saga IPA from Summit Brewing Co.
Outstanding Food Truck Item: Slow-roasted pork arepa from Hola Arepa
Outstanding Restaurant Item: Masu Roll from Masu Sushi & Robata
Winners in the individual and business categories are selected by a vote among participating restaurants, and winners in the food categories are selected by an online open-to-the-public vote and a panel of experts.
Find the 2011 winners here.
The awards are named after the Charlie’s Café Exceptionale. The landmark downtown Minneapolis restaurant closed in 1982 after a 49-year run.
Papaya tree mystery at the White House
Posted by: Lee Svitak Dean Updated: October 24, 2012 - 12:25 PM
At far right, the papaya tree in a pot. Photos by Lee Svitak Dean
As I was weaving in and out of the vegetables in the White House garden in September, on a tour with the Association of Food Journalists, a small tree planted in a pot caught my eye.
Like everything else in the garden, it was labeled for easy identification: "Papaya."
"How odd," I thought at the time. "A papaya tree in D.C.? Must ask why it's here."
Cris Comerford and Bill Yosses, White House chefs
Then the tour, led by White House executive chefs Cris Comerford and Bill Yosses, moved on to look at the corn and squash off in the corner. I turned my attention to a bird house on the perimeter of the garden. Could it be a bluebird house? (It was actually a security camera disguised as a bird house.) Trailing behind the chefs, distracted by the occasional bee from the nearby White House hive, I continued to snap photos and took notes and, before long, the tour was over.
Not until I was tweeting about the garden later in the day did I remember the tree. (No live tweeting is allowed on the White House grounds for security reasons.) One of my photos showed the tree in the distance. "WH garden found in corner of South Lawn, includes seeds from Thomas Jefferson plants. Papaya tree at right," I noted on Twitter.
Then a direct message on Twitter stopped me: "It's a fig tree in the WH garden BTW."
Oh no. How could I make such a mistake?
When I returned to Minneapolis, I frantically read through the "American Garden," the new book by Michelle Obama on the White House garden and the nation's community gardens, searching for a mention of papayas. There was nothing, though there's a description of a fig tree now in the White House garden that came from the seeds of a tree Thomas Jefferson planted at his home at Monticello. I searched my photographs for any other shots that could verify what I thought was the papaya tree. Again, nothing. Doubt lingered. Perhaps I did confuse a label for a fig tree with that for a papaya, though even on a distracted day that sounded uncharacteristically careless of me.
Way too out of character, in fact. I called my buddy who had accompanied me on the trip, Nancy Stohs, food editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, to see if she had, by chance, photographed the tree.
Photo by Nancy Stohs.
She had. The proof was in the photo. The papaya tree was not only in the garden, but it was full of fruit.
Still, why would there be a papaya tree in the garden, which otherwise featured fruits and vegetables found in nontropical gardens: pumpkins and chiles, kale, tomatoes and blueberries.There had to be a story behind the papaya.
I sent emails to Washington, D.C., where I was eventually directed to the appropriate -- but anonymous -- administrative source.
The papaya tree, in fact, has been in the White House garden since summer 2011. It was placed there in a pot -- presumably because D.C. is not a tropical climate -- because the National Park Service thought it would be "interesting to have in the garden." The park service cares for the grounds of the White House, which includes the garden. The tree is brought inside the White House during the winter.
Photo by Nancy Stohs.
In the summer of 2011, the papaya tree had many flowers but no fruit. In 2012, there was plenty of fruit, as the photograph shows.
Case closed. Life can go on. There are home-grown papayas at the White House. My reporting skills are intact.
For more on the White House garden (and the bee hive, security camera and executive chefs), read this earlier story.
The security camera is inside the birdhouse.
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