Earlier this week, I had the great fortune to attend a food blogger tasting event at Uchi, and while I’d like to make a joke about how all the food bloggers tasted fine, I won’t. Instead of indulging my wrong, wrong, wrong sense of humor, I’ll take yet another opportunity to gush about my favorite restaurant in Austin, and the wonderful people with whom I continue to have the opportunity to interact.
My husband and I aren’t big event celebrators. However, we are always on the lookout for an occasion to justify a nice restaurant meal, and one such occasion presented itself recently – my birthday. So we celebrated the fact that I’ve managed to survive another year by having a four-course meal at Ventana, one of the two student-run restaurants at the Texas Culinary Academy here in Austin.
This may come as a huge shock given that I’m firmly seated in central Texas, but I don’t much care for winter. While snow is beautiful and ice-coated tree limbs are ethereal, the chill that takes you when the bitter mid-west winds cut through your coat and gloves and scarf is something that I simply do not miss. On the other hand, winter does bring a few of my favorite things to eat. It is a happy day for me, when I realize that the market is again carrying blood oranges.
When you decide, as an appreciator of food and food-writing, that you’re going to read MFK Fisher, it can be very difficult to know where to start. She has a rather large body of worked scattered throughout various memoirs, anthologies, and publications. Fisher is infinitely quotable and (I’m sorry to say) until I had read this book, her quotes and a few articles about her were my only exposure. To help fill the void, I picked up what is considered by some to be her best book – The Gastronomical Me
Here in central Texas, salsa is the tortilla chip dipper of choice. Occasionally folks will trade up and purchase some chile con queso as well. Guacamole doesn’t generally make an appearance till your meal shows up (if at all), and in the company I keep, it gets scraped unceremoniously onto an unused plate and ignored. All to my good fortune though, because I love the stuff.
In any medium to large city, at least, here in the United States, you constantly hear about which restaurants are shutting down and which new ones are opening up. It’s a difficult business, to be sure. We are a fickle public, constantly interested in something new, and less than forgiving of an occasional bad experience. For that reason, I was fascinated to find that tucked away in Bessemer, Alabama (near Birmingham), is a restaurant that’s been around for more than a hundred years – The Bright Star.
I don’t know if the practice is now considered a tradition for us, or if our arrival in Missouri for the holidays simply provides a good excuse for the family to make the jaunt. But for the past several years (weather permitting), we’ve headed down Interstate 55 to Sikeston to eat at Lambert’s Cafe, where we happily duck the flying rolls and settle in to ingest ridiculous amounts of food.
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the same holds true of Chef Eric Ripert’s wonderful posted menus. For the past three months, it’s been fun to look forward to the menus coming online, hunting down the ingredients, and following the carefully constructed plan laid out for dinner party success. In November, we enjoyed kabocha soup and leg of lamb. December brought a wonderful cocktail party menu, resplendent in its easy-to-prepare finger-food glory. With the theoretical cold of winter upon us, January’s menu is filled with comfort-food delights to warm us up and bright flavors to remind us of warmer times.
It was recently suggested by my spouse that I should let everyone know why I haven’t been posting lately. Also, I’ve recently noticed that I’m woefully behind on my emails. Ordinarily, I’m a fairly considerate person. This time, I just didn’t handle things properly. For that, I apologize.
Food and science go hand in hand. Chemistry and physics help explain what happens when heat (or cold, or acid, etc.) is applied to food. Biology helps describe the ingredients we consume. Nutritional science helps us understand how to meet the body’s needs. Yet so many folks, when they hear something that sounds vaguely scientific or technical, immediately tune it out assuming they won’t be able to understand it. For those people (as well as us devout food-nerds) I present What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained