Rehovot
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Posts posted by Rehovot
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We outfitted one (tiny) kitchen in Prague entirely from Ikea: cabinets, range, oven, etc. Nearly everything is as solid as it was after installation, two years on. (We hired an Ikea subcontractor to install the cabinets, stove, etc.)
The only thing not entirely up to par has been the sink faucet, which leaked mightily until we replaced it--two weeks before the warranty was up.
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A lack of an index is a severe downside for me as I have already wanted to look up recipes that required me flipping through numerous pages. (Note: The publishers call the Table of Contents “The Index,” but there is no listing of subjects, recipes or ingredients at the end of the book which would have been extremely useful.)
Euro books (including cookbooks) usually have the TOC at the back, where we Americans would look for the Index. Hopefully the publisher, who posted above, will take your comments into account when preparing other books like this for the North American market.
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Looks nice and the price is great. Just curious, do you think nearly all their customers are going to be coming from outside Queens? I'm not too familiar with NYC demographics and such, but are there many cocktail aficionados in Queens?
Well, Astoria, just north of Long Island City, is one neighborhood with the demographics to support cocktail aficionados. If I had a job, I would probably be one myself.
But I am content to wander along 30th Avenue and eat and drink myself silly for significantly less than what it would cost in Manhattan. By request:
Percentage of population w/ household income <$50,000-$74,999
Long Island City, 11103: 20.7%
LIC/Astoria, 11106: 17.1%
Astoria, 11102: 17.1%
Astoria, 11105: 19.1%
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David Lebovitz's Twitter feed is entertaining--tongue-in-cheek, down to earth, and usually about Paris or baking, or both.
I only Twitter online (not from a phone), so I avoid any message-alert beeping...but not the procrastinating.
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Fictional food you'd like to sample:
I can't think of one single food, but writers like Roald Dahl have some incredible descriptions of food that have stayed with me for years. And Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a food enthusiast's dream.
Hamlet's line about the funeral-baked meats coldly furnishing forth the marriage table is also arresting...though I wouldn't have wanted to sample that.
A fictional meal you'd like to have attended:
The party scene in The Great Gatsby. Or an Austen banquet.
A memorable work of fiction set in a restaurant or a café:
The Czech novel Saturnin, by Zdenek Jirotka, has a marvelous doughnut-throwing scene set in the Imperial Cafe in Prague. (Until the cafe was refurbished and polished to within an inch of its life a couple of years ago, there was still a bowl of doughnuts sitting on the bar with a very small sign next to it noting that you could throw the doughnuts if you liked but it would cost you a thousand Czech crowns.)
Food you've tried that didn't live up to the expectations raised by a fictional account:
No madeleine is ever going to live up to its literary counterpart. But I'm still searching for my madeleine, a pull-apart coffee cake my family used to buy from a bakery in Orange County in the '80s. "Sublime" doesn't begin to do it justice. It was a magical concoction and had these veins of molten cinnamon-sugar streusel running through it.
Food from fiction that you couldn't help but want to try even though you knew you would hate it:
Oysters on the half shell have a decidedly glamorous reputation, but I can't get past the texture.
An unappetizing food description from fiction:
Writer's kid Sport, from Harriet the Spy, had some fairly dismal lunches, and Harriet remembers opening the fridge in Sport's family's apartment once only to find wilted celery. (But when Sport's father gets an advance check, he hollers that he's taking everyone out for steak.)
A recipe you've tried or a meal you've recreated from fiction:
Hmm. From fiction? I don't think I've ever done this.
Food you associate with reading:
Anything crunchy.
Your favorite food-focused book/writer:
Maybe not food-focused, but excellent writers who feature food: Dahl, Wharton, Proust (natch), Esquivel, Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Also, Diane Mott Davidson's food mysteries are enormous fun.
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Any eGers going to this panel discussion on NYC's Local Food Movement? Here's a description of the evening, from the Museum of the City of New York's site:
"'Eat locally'" has become the new byword of the sustainable food movement. Farmers markets, community gardens, urban farms, and innovative restaurants all play an integral role in promoting fresh, seasonal produce and in supporting local and regional economies. Join Dan Barber, Executive Chef/Co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Blue Hill; Michael Hurwitz, Director of Greenmarket; and Ian Marvy, Director and co-founder with Michael Hurwitz of Added Value and its Red Hook Community Farm, for a panel discussion on being a "locavore" in the country's largest metropolis. Gabrielle Langholtz, editor of Edible Manhattan and Edible Brooklyn, will moderate the conversation. Presented in conjunction with Growing and Greening New York: PlaNYC and the Future of the City."
It's tomorrow, 4/21, at 6:30, at the museum: 1220 Fifth Avenue (b/w E. 103rd and 104th).
More valuable info:
"Reservations required.
$12 Non-Members
$8 Seniors and Students
$6 Museum Members
*A two dollar surcharge applies for unreserved, walk-in participants. [You can purchase tickets online, though.]
For more information, please call 212.534.1672, ext. 3395."
I'm not affiliated with it; it just sounded like something up the collective eG alley.
I plan to go, provided I can get up there in time to buy tickets. -
eG baking heroine Dorie Greenspan is there, too: @doriegreenspan. Actually, you can find quite a few food Twitter-folk (or however you say it) by having a look at each chef's connections.
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While I don't care all that much about the loss of precision in making a mechanical (as opposed to kitchen) conversion from grams to cups for the US market, I'd really really hate to pay for a book that someone had "converted" from cups to grams in that fashion.
If you take a look at that website, you'll see that the conversions can be done from volume to weight, via an extensive database of ingredient weights, and weight to volume, etc...which, as someone who likes both precision and cooking, is what I did. No complaints so far.
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"Repackage" just means translate (in the case of the French stuff) and edit for content. Truly, though, we were working with recipes that have been making the publishing rounds for years, and are simply redone every few years with new photos and graphics. Clever, no?
The conversions were done with gourmetsleuth.com (by which I mean me running every ingredient and amount through it), which someone mentioned upthread.
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Why can't book publishers offer mixed format:
Chicken, cooked and diced .........X Cups...............OR........Y Grams
Onion, minced.............................X Tbsp +Z Tsp....OR........Y Grams
Chix stock...................................X Pints................OR........Y ccs
At a publisher I worked for, we did exactly this, at my urging, since we sold to two major distributors: one British, and one American. We'd buy the cookbooks from French and Australian publishers and repackage them for both the British and American markets.
So, if you're really unhappy with the format of a cookbook, write the publishers and tell them.
The fringe benefits of working somewhere where everyone took home the recipes, tried them, and gleefully brought in the results, were pretty good. After the cupcake book, though, I had to quit.
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Can we learn from the Westerners and twirl the chopsticks?
I consider myself to have pretty good coordination, but have no idea how you twirl chopsticks... How does that work?
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My first two thoughts on the kids' menu are:
1. That's comfort food--a good idea after a morning of (to kids) baffling informalities, runny noses, and frozen extremities.
2. For the really young ones, it doesn't require knife-and-fork assistance from the parents, who were lunching in a different room.
At least, that's my Devil's-Advocate way of looking at it. It's not like there won't be other (smaller and less public) opportunities for the younger crowd to tackle adult fare. But on the first day, I'd say...cut the kids some slack.
Here is an account of the inauguration menu. What the children (Obama children and Biden grandchildren) got is described:http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01...in-the-capitol/
"Taking into account Mr. Obama’s young children, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, and the many Biden grandchildren who were in attendance, there was a children’s menu, served in the nearby Rayburn Room.
Hot dogs
Cheeseburgers
Macaroni and cheese
French fries
Grilled cheese sandwiches
Cheese pizza
Chocolate chip cookies
Apple and orange juices and soft drinks"
Can you imagine anything more generic or dreadful (in terms of taste and health)? Not one single fruit or vegetable in there. In this day and age? With this crowd?
The catering company is called "Design Cuisine". They seem to have taken all the trouble with the adults' menu, and ignored the kids (and insulted their tastebuds).
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Maybe I don't have it quite as bad as I thought. I can't imagine a whole country with nothing but supermarkets as bad or worse than mine.
Don't go grocery shopping anywhere in Europe east of Munich, then.
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Thanks for all the advice. Most of it is really good. Just one thing--Cassonade doesn't come close to the brown sugar I'm after. Cassonade is raw cane sugar, and it has the texture of regular sugar and tastes completely different. American brown sugar packs like wet sand and tastes oh so good...
If you're looking for the taste and texture of brown sugar, try the sugar + molasses trick. I used to eyeball it and add a bit of warm water while stirring. For a sharp molasses-y flavor, you really don't need that much, unless you're making gingersnaps.
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It looks idyllic, Lior.
Are those dates hanging from the sukkah? -
I need a flame in a dish I'm preparing, but I don't want smoke. The flame needs to be intense enough for me to put some pepper skin on it and not douse the flame. Yesterday someone said that they had seen a technique where a sugar cube was soaked in alcohol and lit. Has anyone heard of this? Or is there a better way of doing this. The flame will be put on the diner's plate so safety is a key factor.
Yes, this is one way* to drink absinthe. And you get an abalone-shell-colored flame for, oh, about a nanosecond. But the flame isn't much, and the effect is anticlimactic if there's anything more than candlelight.
*Please note that I did not say the "right way," etc.
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The particular wine garden we went to was located in Grinzing. Yes, Grinzing is uber-touristy, but my friend really wanted to go to this particular town. What can you do? It was still quite yummy. The wine, however, was terrible. We tried both the local white an the local red. Unlike the local wines of Spain, France, and Italy, these were rough.
The Wachau Valley, an hour east of Vienna, is Austria's Napa. That's where the good wine is.
Gritsch Mauritiushof wines are very good, as are Kalmuck.Yay, Demel!
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Maybe these Raspberry Mazurkas (or these, referred to in the first link) are similar?
What did the bakery tell you when you asked for background on the cookie?
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Hmm... Pivovarsky Klub is not technically a club in the sense that Akropolis and Blind Eye are; that is, Pivovarsky Klub doesn't offer live music...and is known for the food and vast beer selection.
If you can't find a table at Pivovarsky Klub, head over to their parent restaurant, Pivovarsky Dum, on Ječná.
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Thanks to many trips to cafes and restaurants without menus in English, plus a religious devotion to a Czech cooking show ("Kluci v akci"/"Boys in Action") in the first year I lived here, plus an unhealthy attachment to Czech culinary blogs, I can speak about food in Czech much better than I can, for example, discuss politics.
As Slkinsey and nakji noted, being kitchen fluent and being literate are two different things. For kitchen fluency (although I don't work in a kitchen), you need a good memory for new vocabulary, basic adjectives, a basic grammar understanding, and the numbers. (And a few profanities.)
Years and years of Spanish and French were not fantastically helpful, for me, in learning a Slavic language *except* that I did know how I best learned a language and could figure out how to advance to the next level, once I realized that I'd hit a plateau. Some things that helped me were carrying around a notebook for words/phrases; forcing myself to speak bad Czech, that first year, in restaurants, cafes, and shops; talking to shopkeepers; and making sure I got in some reading and writing (in addition to listening and speaking), each day. This last is particularly important if you're foregoing formal training/classes, as I have (though not by choice).
As far as dialects go, I think understanding those just comes with time and exposure to different parts of the country/region...
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I could be very happy living in your fridge. Everything is so fresh and vibrant.
The market pics were a treat! Thanks for taking us around, this week. And for the asparagus-peels stock tip. -
As a big fan of pistachios, I'm sure it would be great in a sandwich cookie or macaron, too.
Or dotted on ice cream... Or as a tuile filling... I could go on.
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Look at your publisher's track record with the kind of book you're writing, and determine how much of your own publicity you'll need to do.
Look at retaining the foreign rights, if you can.
As far as I understand, there are three parts to the standard contract: signing, delivery, publication. Get a lawyer to read through them. Look at how much goes to your agent.
Are you expected to arrange the photography?
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I certainly hope the gifts on that table in the photo are for you!
Great meal; I look forward to making the salad.
Cilantro and chilies and lime, oh my!
in Cooking
Posted
Maybe you need to redefine your "we."
At the risk of sounding obvious... Bittman's not the only show in town, or in American cuisine. I would no more regard him as the voice of American cooking than I would any other New York Times columnist.
Tired of the combo? The patronize/visit/buy from/talk to other sources.