eGullet Staff

Robert "Bux" Buxbaum is temporarily on leave from Society staff.

Early Sunday morning, January 11, 2004 eGullet.com switched to its new server hosted by Invision Power Services at its new datacenter in Houston, Texas. The new enterprise-class RedHat Linux 9.0-based server, which has twin 2.2Ghz Intel Xeon processors, 2 Gigabytes of main system memory and a fast UltraSCSI RAID disk system, is over 10 times more powerful than our previous machine, and is designed to support the most serious system loads. As the switchover required transferring the eGullet.com Internet domain, the configuration necessitated that the old eGullet.com server in Colorado point its database queries to the new machine in Texas so that there would be no loss of service. Thus, untl the DNS propogation is complete, which can take up to 48 hours, some users may be using the old system and there may be some temporary database slowness. Some other eGullet functionality such as our image server and our recipe database may be offline for a day or two for some users until those system resources are fully moved over to the new system.

Folks, no posting of copyrighted images, please. Post a link instead. Thanks. (Several posts deleted.) eGullet.com Copyright & Images policy

eGullet.com is pleased to announce that acclaimed New York Times columnist Mark Bittman will be joining us for an Q&A on May 14th and 15th 2003. Best-selling cookbook author MARK BITTMAN is the creator and author of the popular New York Times weekly column, "The Minimalist," and one of the country's best-known and widely admired food writers. His flagship book, How to Cook Everything (Macmillan, 1998), is currently in its twelfth printing and has sold nearly 600,000 copies. How to Cook Everything won both the Julia Child general cookbook award and the James Beard general cookbook award for 1998; it was the only book to win both awards that year, and one of the few in history to accomplish that feat. It also won a Food & Wine "Best of the Best" award and an award from the International Culinary Review (presented at Versailles), and spent more than 130 weeks on the Los Angeles Times "Cookbook Hot List," a record. Mr. Bittman’s work has appeared in nearly every major American newspaper and food magazine, and in many general interest publications, and he has written a number of other books many of which have been award winners. Jean-Georges: Cooking at Home With a Four-Star Chef, written with Jean-Georges Vongerichten (Broadway, 1998), won a James Beard award, and is widely considered to be among the most accessible chef's cookbooks ever published. And Mr. Bittman's first book, Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking (Macmillan, 1994), currently in its eighth printing and the best-selling book on the subject, was the winner of a 1994 Julia Child award. In that same year, Mr. Bittman won the coveted IACP Bert Greene Memorial award for Best Food Journalism; he is the only journalist/cookbook author to win both of those awards. Mr. Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks At Home, based on his New York Times column, was published in 2000 by Broadway Books and won the Julia Child general cookbook award for that year; his next book, The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, was among the best-selling cookbooks of 2001 and received rave reviews and a Julia Child nomination. He has just published the third book in the series, The Minimalist Entertains, as well as How to Cook Everything: The Basics. Mr. Bittman, who lives in Connecticut, is a regular guest on the Today show; he has also appeared on countless national and local radio and television shows. He has been profiled in many of the country's leading newspapers, including the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. In addition to the New York Times, he is currently writing for Gourmet, Travel-Holiday, GQ, and several others. Please note this forum will be moderated and your questions will appear after approval. Mark Bittman and his publishers have graciously agreed to give away a couple of copies each of The Minimalist and How to Cook Everything to users who ask questions in the Q&A.

As noted in the announcement for this Q&A, we will not be using a moderated queue for this event. We ask, however, that you please recognize the special Q&A format and defer to our guest when you make posts here. Although follow-ups and comments are encouraged, we ask that you allow the guest to answer the questions before you offer your own answers. At the end of the Q&A, you should of course feel free to start new topics on the regular food boards if you'd like to have an extended discussion of any issue that comes up here. Thanks.

Marina Chang is the author of Tastes of the Pyrenees, Classic and Modern. In writing her first book, Marina drew upon her background as a world traveler and passionate cook, as well as her experience in biology and natural resources. The dishes in Marina's book include ancestral and contemporary ones from what today is Catalonia in both Spain and France (Roussillon), Languedoc, Andorra, the Midi Pyrenees, Aquitaine, the Basque country (Euskal Herria) in both France and Spain, Asturias, Navarra, and Aragón. Through her narratives, she demonstrates that the political border between Spain and France, divided the Catalan and Basque peoples, but could not change the fact that the foods and culinary traditions of this region acknowledge no such boundaries, and are derived from a cross-fertilization of many cultures whose men and women crisscrossed the region over dozens of centuries. Each of the recipes opens with a short narrative introduction that discusses its origins or highlights the differences and similarities in the various cooking styles of this complex culinary region. Additional chapters summarize the natural and human history of the region to provide a background for today's Pyrenean cuisines, and a separate chapter on regional wines summarizes traditions that date back to the time of the Greeks and Romans and were kept alive in monasteries during the Middle Ages. With an interest in wildlife and natural history, Marina also highlights the hunting and gathering traditions of the region, with a section and recipes on wild game and narratives on mushroom gathering. She also attempts to illustrate how the native cuisine is ultimately a product of the natural foods that can be grown, gathered, or hunted in their immediate environs, and the collective experience and wisdom of their ancestors as to how to prepare these products. In recent years, there has been an explosion of creativity in the kitchens of this region, which makes an exciting culinary journey for the traveler to this area. Chefs such as Ferran Adrià, Santi Santamaria, and Joan Roca, in Catalonia, Juan Mari Arzak, Martin Berasategui, Pedro Subijana, and Hilario Arbelaitz in the Basque country are among the most creative and wonderful chefs in the world today. Marina Chang visited these restaurants and adapted some of the chefs' recipes in this cookbook. Marina Chang majored in fisheries and natural resources management at Cornell University, where classes in wine, food, and their origins served as a springboard for her lifelong interest in the world's cuisines. The many years spent in multi-cultural areas, growing up in New York City, and living and working in Hawaii for eight years, sparked Marina's curiosity about the amalgamation of cultures and evolution of regional cuisines. Marina has traveled extensively with her husband, Craig S. Harrison, in Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and North America, focusing on the native wildlife, investigating local markets, and learning about the foods characteristic to each region. During her years on Capitol Hill working on legislative matters for a member of Congress, she dined at some of the finest food establishments in Washington, D.C. and attended numerous receptions and special events, catered by the area's top kitchens. The creative artistry of top chefs motivated her to pursue the world of gastronomic possibilities, and Marina began taking an active role in seeking out fine food, expanding her culinary knowledge, and to cook. After she assisted a college friend cook a celebratory Russian Easter feast, the parents of her friend were impressed enough to ask her to write a cookbook. During the creation of this book, Marina simultaneously managed the building of their new house in California. After having lived and worked in Washington, D.C. for 13 years, the author and her husband recently moved to Sonoma County, California, where they currently reside. ------- This Q&A will not be MQed. Copies of of Tastes of the Pyrenees, Classic and Modern will be given sent to five participants in the Q&A. Winners will selected by a random drawing.

You should post it on the eGullet Recipe Archive.

Mr. Bourdain, regardless of anything else, all of us at eGullet.com would like to thank you for taking the time to participate in this thread.

Steve & Yvonne: This question of "Room for Dessert" as Steve Klc introduced it probably deserves to be its own topic. Might one of you want to pose his question to the group on a new thread?

Please see the essential traveling items thread in Cooking for further discussion of, well, essential traveling items. Straight knife travel talk can stay here. Thanks! :)

Great idea! Would you be so kind as to start that thread?

Thanks! :)

Please also note the thread, "What defines a foodie, in the "General" board: LINK

Please post your bio! We're trying hard to get people to do that, but a few brave souls must blaze the trail.