How do I love Nigella? Let me count the ways. Sometimes she’s bigger, and some times she’s smaller, but she’s always incredibly beautiful. She is incredible intelligent and well-educated, and has had some incredibly hard knocks (including the death of her first husband) and survived with consummate grace. She is a mother over 40 who oozes sex appeal, admits to cooking pasta for herself to eat in bed while watching television, and deep fries candy bars in batter. Most important, in an age of molecular gastronomy and foodie preciousness, she cooks food that is simple, sensuous and exactly what you were yearning for but couldn’t name until you saw the recipe.
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.
Cheese Wiz
When you enter the door at the Beverly Hills Cheese Store - the greatest cheese store in the U.S. of A. (419 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, California 90210), the first friendly face and voice you see and hear on your left will always be that of Cheese Wiz Sebastian Robin Craig working behind the counter like a whirling dervish - unless he is jetting off to the cheese caves of Roquefort, France for a tasting; or Stockholm, Sweden to compose more jazz (go to iTunes for his latest CD “Volition”); or just kicking back and learning Russian.
The Wagon Train
Francois Truffaut has been famously quoted about the process of making a movie being similar to a wagon train crossing the country. You start out the journey with high hopes and the spirit of adventure and halfway through, you just want to get there alive.
That’s pretty much what my journey with cooking has been like. I seduced my husband with duck breast and wild rice pancakes with apricot sauce. That was nothin’. I really loved to cook. People were always surprised by that and I was always surprised they were surprised. What? Women in comedy can’t cook? Every Hungarian Jewish woman has to be a good cook. It’s biological destiny.
A Is For Dining Alone
Eating alone is a trying thing for some people, writing cooking and eating off
as products of a banal bodily necessity. I love to eat and cook alone,
using the kitchen as an improvisational laboratory to experiment with
recipe ideas, flavor combinations, and cooking techniques. MFK Fisher,
a witty food writer with a fluid, deeply expressive writing style
bursting with gastronomic knowledge, shared my passion. She was one of
the best food writers out there, blurring the lines between the genres
of food anthropology, ecology, travel literature, and cooking.
Simply put, she made being a foodie cool long before it was fashionable. Her
great strength as a writer is her ability to drag you into her prose to
taste, smell, and feel your way through her experiences in and around
the kitchen. Mary Frances was not afraid to dine alone, in fact she
loved it, and one short and sweet chapter of her An Alphabet for Gourmets sums up her point of view. “It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at
table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I
wished to be fed. I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I
could muster.” In regards to eating alone, I have taken a page from her
book, and as a result treat myself to lavish meals regularly.
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