russ parsons

jeez FG, you're making me blush! thanks a lot, though. At one point I feared that my headstone would read: "did not soak beans." i have refined the technique just a tad, after consultation with our own rancho gordo and several experiments. I now add the salt about halfway through the cooking time. I find this reduces the percentage of broken beans and still results in great flavor.

actually, not to name-drop or anything, but that's what i gave thomas keller for his 50th birthday. very nice edition with a kind of art nouveau gilding.

i have to really twist my wife's arm to go. just too much food for her (she thinks, until she's there). and we took my 24-year-old daughter to per se for my 50th dinner and thomas really laid it all out. the next mornign she said she'd had dreams all night of standing at a restaurant pass with plates of food coming at her, one after another.

it is truly an amazing and under-appreciated book. here's something to think about the next time you look at it: it was published BEFORE escoffier.

I didn't remember it being out as far as Juan Tabo. I seem to remember it being closer to Louisiana, but on a street like Menaul, or Montgomery, or Candelaria. Christine ←

for some reason, korin has two websites, this one called korin korin no. 1 and this one called japanese-knife korin no. 2 i'm sure there is a very good reason for this .... but i can't figure it out. the sites look different but are really quite similar and the prices are usually the same (i do remember when they had their christmas sale, the discount was shown on one site but not on the other ... again, i'm sure this is perfectly logical, somehow).

thanks hiroyuki! it was one of those puzzling labels: SPF Black Line and that was it. now i can track it down.

i like mac a lot.

if you like the feel of the globals, then i'd agree with the two experts. i've always found them kind of cold. i like a real wood handle (which is getting harder to find these days, i think). the advice to try before you buy goes double. maybe triple, quadruple, whatever, with kyoceras. they are very sharp. they are very brittle and they are very light--really, extremely, unpleasantly light to my touch. you don't really appreciate how much even a little heft in a knife means until you try to cut up some vegetables with a kyocera. it's like working with a feather--and not in a good way.

that was right around the corner from my house. if it's the one i'm thinking of, it was on like juan tabo and louisiana ... my directions are hazy after all this time. it was really something when it opened ... too much of a good thing, it turned out. the guy was a scam artist who'd opened a store front and got lots of produce on credit, attracted investors and then just didn't show up for work one day. no one saw him after that.

just got back from the japanese groceries. the kurobotu that they had was very well marbled, the meat somewhat darker than normal. a different store had something called "spf" pork that was advertised as being "black line", which i took to mean berkshire. this did not seem to be as well marbled as the kurobotu, but it was a little hard to say--all that pork was thinly sliced for sukiyaki, etc., but the spf i could get in a chop.

years ago (well, ok, decades ago), there was a really good produce store on north fourth, like maybe north of candelaria, if memory serves. i think it was a retail outlet for a wholesale distributor, but i remember finding shallots and sorrel--and this was in 1981 or so. i still remember how exciting that was. edit: late memory: every early fall i'd run down there and order a case of red peppers (bell, not chile). that was the only time we could get them way back then. made it a big event. i'd spend a saturday afternoon roasting and peeling them and freezing them in plastic bags.

yeah, i've got a venezia "zephyr", it's 715CFM, but i found it quieter than the vent-a-hoods and wolfs. i can't imagine what a 1200 would do. even at 715, it is fun to watch the grill smoke get sucked straight to the vent.

i've got a bunch of them: rose, nutmeg, something called attar of rose, and a few others. i like the rose geranium in a simple syrup over peaches and nectarines (blackberries are nice too). i also sometimes add a little of it to my peach jam.

project makes a lot of good points. but i'm not sure the "place smells bad/meat tastes bad" connection holds ... or maybe i've just got too sensitive of an urban smeller. because i've been to parma; i've seen the hogs that go into prosciutto on the farm. and they sure don't smell like parmigiano.

my dad and sister live in that area south of phoenix where there are subdivisions springing up every 2 seconds. it used to be all dairy/cattle. in my sister's neighborhood, there was an old family dairy operation that everyone figured was doomed. but they opened their doors, encouraged school tours, had community festivals, put a cute cow out front, started making some value-added products like cheese, etc., and now people are up in arms any time a new neighbor complains. this is not the same situation as the massive feedlot operations that you find other places, though. these are seriously nasty. the only problem is, any possible fix would raise the price of beef and bacon and you know consumers won't support that.

you can't judge a farm by its stink. this is in no way a defense of factory farming, but gentle sensibilities should not go where animals are raised. i was just at a live poultry shop and even though teh chickens are held there less than 24 hours, the odor was penetrating.

well, just for the record, pepin is not a chef, he's a writer, consultant and teacher, albeit a brilliant one. and i think he pretty much has laid out his ouvre in several books already. and i hardly see folks clamoring for a soltner book. i would add charlie trotter to that list, mainly because he's already done those books, a whole series of them that if you added it up would probably come to more than $200.

just out of curiosity: what proof is there that wine sold at auction actually has the provenance it claims. i mean, beyond coming "from the impeccable cellar of a private collector" ... what does that mean? i'm sure they're not asking for original sales receipts, and neither are they asking for proof the wine has constantly been cellared in appropriate conditions (what kind of proof would that be?).

it's not black-and-white. the chefs do not front the cash for the book, as in a straight vanity publication. but neither do they always expect the advance for the book to cover all of the costs of production (and by production here, i mean creative production--writing, testing, photography--not physical production). look--one of those color plates costs about $1,000 to $1,500 (low end for a bunch of photos, possibly lower depending on how many and how prestigious the project). A book like TFLC or Michel Richard's wonderful new "happy in the kitchen" will have 200 plates. That's $200,000 in photography right there. Even if you can somehow cut that in half, you've still got to pay the ghost and the recipe developer/tester (you do test the recipes, right?). even an extremely generous advance of $200,000 will not go far. And there are only a handful of chefs who can command anything approaching that. typical cookbook advances are in the low- to mid-five figures, not six. edit: i just remembered a piece i did when the first el bulli cookbook came out. i interviewed an american cookbook editor who said that based just on looking at the package, her company would have to charge $200 and then sell about 50,000 copies to recoup costs. (I should state clearly that these figures are not based on any specific book, but on general conversations with chefs, editors and cookbook authors.) but they, these guys want something that reflects what they're creating and that won't end up scraped into the busboys cart.

i've been once and it's just about what you'd expect--very simple food done perfectly. great pizzas, of course, terrific apps, particularly the fried squash blossoms. the menu and vibe reminds me a lot of otto, but the wine pricing is less confiscatory. warning: it is a really small space and it is incredibly hot at the moment. nancy told me they have people lining up at 11 for walk-in spots. ive heard the bar is easily managed, though.

my guess is it's mainly economics. are there 10,000 people in the US who would buy such a book? In truth, most home-cooking books probably sell between 10,000 and 15,000 copies--and that's the reasonably popular ones. a book that sells 50,000 copies qualifies as mid-list and 100,000 is a smash. so, then, the question becomes: is the european market that different than the american, or is there something else at work? My guess is the latter. My guess--unsubstantiated by anything other than conversation--is that these books are looked at by the chefs as concrete examples of what they are doing in this most transient of arts. and as such, they're willing to "eat" the greater part of the production costs. Even in the US, this happens to a certain extent. A book like TFLC could never be produced on what publishers pay in advance. Typically, after paying for photography, writing and recipe testing, the chef is happy to break even, at best, or be out of pocket only $10,000 to $20,000. The interesting thing is that the TFLC, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, was not supposed to do well at all. I think its publisher suspected a vanity deal and the original print run was quite small (i'm guessing 25,000 to 35,000). The general belief in publishing at that time was that chef books were over (think of all those books with chefs discovering home cooking). In fact, I know that the first printing was sold out well in advance of the holidays. And because Mr. Keller, being Mr. Keller, insisted on having a high-quality book produced in Hong Kong, the second run could not be re-stocked in time for that year's Christmas sales, causing much gnashing of teeth (and, I suspect, editors' ears).

i think it has more to do with the fact that some people think "food" only means fancy restaurants.

yeah, that's a problem with papillote. so much of it depends on the quality of the fish, which is highly variable. i remember cooking a dinner party for some friends and i did a bunch of sole en papillote. thought i'd really lucked out when i found dover sole at the fish market at a pretty good price. when i opened the packets (at the table, of course), the fish had melted to a kind of fish goo. welcome to slime sole (the alternative name for the fish called dover sole on the west coast). sounds to me like maybe your fish had at one time been frozen and then badly defrosted.

not to belabor the point, but i've spent a lot of time with radicchio and i do believe that it is. there is a lot of variation within a varietal depending upon how it's grown and what the specific strain is. i could be wrong of course, but check out the american grown radicchio di treviso on this page: european vegetable specialties by the way, the guy who runs this outfit, lucio gomiero, is the biggest grower of radicchio in the world. fascinating guy. he farms out of salinas most of the time (though they have leased fields all over), but he also runs two tre bicchieri wineries in italy.