It is Sunday late morning, the North wind is howling outside and the
rain has changed to half inch hail but the farmhouse walls are more than
two feet thick and we are very cozy. We hear nothing, just the sounds
of the wood fire crackling, a knife on the cutting board and two friends
engaged in a lively conversation catching up on many things since our
last visit. We are sitting at a 8 foot long chestnut kitchen table
boning out the leg of a wild boar, removing sinew, fat glands and
chipped bones from the bullet wound. Alain has told all his neighbors of
our visit and one has shot a wild boar for the occasion and foraged for
black truffles. It was long decided before the boar was cold that we
would make a daube just like his mother made for him in his child hood
home in Avignon and it will marinate today and simmer over a wood fire
all afternoon tomorrow. Tonight we are having raclette with charcuterie
for dinner that they brought home from their skiing vacation in the
Alps. Not a bad way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon!
A Celebration of Chefs and Others
A Celebration of Chefs
Behind the Scenes with a Real Iron Chef
From the Huffington Post
It is late Wednesday morning and Candy Sue Weaver is on the road again,
barreling through Arkansas. Her iPod is pumping Henry Gross, Eagles,
and Delbert McClinton through her radio and she is just as pumped. She
can taste victory up the road. Weaver is a sportswoman, and she is on a
700 mile drive in her pickup, trailer in tow, towards a baseball
diamond wedged between a cornfield and a soybean field in northwest
Illinois. But Weaver is not a baseball player. She is competition
barbecue cook.
Competitive barbecue may be the fastest growing sport in the nation
with more than 500 cookoffs across the country. Many of the cooks at
each event are locals, but a growing number are, like Weaver, part of a
band of roving gypsies who drive for days and get fired up to go for
gold and glory. Some hit the highway every weekend from May through
October.
In July, that baseball field in tiny Shannon, IL, population 900,
becomes the "Barbecue Field of Dreams" because Shannon is the home of
the Illinois State BBQ Championship
(ISBC) and the destination for a fleet of RVs and trailers loaded with
meat and steel and some of the best barbecue cooks in the world. These
are the real Iron Chefs towing torpedo shaped smokers the size of
sportscars on their way to a throwdown Bobby Flay wants no part of.
Man vs. Food: Watch It!
Once Anthony Bourdain left The Food Network in a trail of acrimonious dust, he started a second television career on The Travel Channel. The show (”No Reservations”) was better (because, among other things, they allowed Anthony to be his acerbic, outrageous self) but he was gone from my life because the Travel Channel was not available from our cable company. We ordered episodes from Netflix, took them out of the library, and once, in a media coup that rivalled the day when my brother and I tuned in what we believed to be “porn”on the TV in the living room by fiddling rabbit ears and vertical hold, we found one episode of “No Reservations” on “On Demand,” and watched it with the fervor and intensity appropriate for a bootleg copy of Tommy and Pamela.
Then, one day, the Travel Channel appeared as I was flipping up towards the Premiums, bearing the portentous channel assignment “123.” (It’s portentous because I can remember it). We fell, that evening, under the spell of a young man named Adam Richman, and a show called “Man v. Food.” We fell hard. It is fabulous beyond all reckoning that we can now see “No Reservations” before the episodes are two years old, and there are a couple of other shows on the channel that we’ve enjoyed, but Richman is a revelation of how a network can combine really smart and really commercially appealing and create something that appeals to a large and diverse audience.
Dione Lucas Redux
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I think there is a certain cautious thrill in serving dishes that are so out of style – so out of our contemporary taste aesthetic, that it may very well surprise and delight the senses. (On the other hand, it can also make for an early evening.)
This Dione Lucus recipe for Apple Soup with Camembert Cheese Balls offers such an opportunity. Taken from her The Cordon Bleu Cook Book, published 1947, it offers an excellent change of style and taste, and how can one go wrong with fruit and cheese – even as a soup!
Celebrating Anne
There are times when I scrutinize my outfit before I leave the
house, and find it absurdly, compulsively over-accessorized. It’s
then, as I grab my keys and prance out with red sneakers, mismatched
bracelets, and a brooch shaped like a turnip, that I’ll find myself
thinking of her. Subtlety, in many things, is often advised; but I,
heeding Anne of Green Gables, rarely listen. If at a dinner party,
after I’ve gone on and on to someone about a book they’ll probably
never read, ignoring every attempt they make to escape me, she’ll just
appear in my mind. And often, when faced with a moral dilemma, like
whether to leave the last bite of pie for the person I’m sharing it
with, or to request that my upstairs neighbors stop rollerblading on
the hardwood floor, I’ll ask myself:
“What would Anne of Green Gables do?”
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