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The Weather Outside…

Jan 7

Posted by admin in cooking, dining out

January has started with a Brisk Chill. Make that freezin’ cold misery.

Not to worry, it’s National Soup Month and plenty of restaurants are celebrating. Mon Ami Gabi, the French bistro with locations in hometown Chicago and on the East Coast in Bethesda and Reston (VA) promises to warm up diners with flights of winter soup including the popular French onion cheese extravaganza!

Speaking of Chicago, that warm, make that windy, city, you can take a soup cooking class at the trendy WAVE restaurant in the W Chicago. “Winter Warmup with Hearty Soups” runs for consecutive Saturdays during the month. Reservations are necessary.

Legal Seafoods has a great offer: 60 cent cups of their famous Clam Chowder (with an entree) on January 20, their 60th birthday. Too cold to stand in line, but make your reservation now for a celebratory “Chowda Day” lunch or dinner on the 20th!

Not just restaurants but soupmakers wanna have fun. Look at the Campbell’s Soup website for an abundance of recipes and coupons. Maybe this is the month you should try the famous US Senate Bean Soup or make your own variation of a fiber-rich bean stew! So many recipes; so many warming concepts!beansoup2

The weather beckons. Stir up your favorite soup recipe or if you’re brave enough to venture outdoors, take advantage of a pipin’ hot bowl to celebrate an appropriately named food month!

Get on board, restaurants, as Soup can draw ‘em in, and you can chalk up the profits while warming the palates.

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What is a Recipe?

Jan 4

Posted by admin in cooking

With the popularity of cookbooks and the proliferation of food shows, it is no wonder that we have become obsessed with cooking as a means to elevate our dining-in nights. Long ago, several decades ago, in fact, people routinely cooked and invited others over for dinner. The idea of dinner clubs was common with households taking turns as hosts. Maybe we saw a little of that resurgence last year, and what may have started as an emerging trend has become reality for more diners.

Grocers have helped make the concept easier with their ability to do some of the heavy lifting. A great meal can be assembled by adding to our own efforts with a purchased, chef-driven grocery item. Together we can work to turn an ordinary meal into a more festive one.

When we do cook, how do we find the right recipe? Even with the continuing sales of cookbooks, we turn to the Internet with the simple question and the speedy Google response turns the query a quick step closer to reality. Do we accept every word from a printed recipe from a well-known chef, or from a recipe website? Or, do we read, interpret, and adjust? I think the latter is the more common method. We read the recipe, think about the ingredients, look into our cupboards, and create our own personal stamp on a recipe. After all what is a pinch of salt? What kind of salt?

I doubt when we follow a recipe word-for-word that it comes out identical each time. There are too many variants. Our mood plays a significant role as the hurried, harassed cook makes a different lasagna than the person who approaches the dish with time on his hands and love in his heart!

No matter how many recipe guides, cookbooks, we own or how easy it is to view a cooking show or access an online recipe, WE make the recipe. We input our cooking knowledge and our memories into the soul of the item. We have an image in mind of what it should look like and how it should taste.recipebox

Things don’t always work out the way we plan.

Happens in demo kitchens, too.

Keep on tweaking.

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The Year of the (Chef) Burger

Dec 31

Posted by admin in Economy, cooking, dining out

This year, the one we’re saying good bye to, has been a major gut check experience. We learned a lot about ourselves as we changed our spending patterns. We became savers! Unheard of!

In our saving mentality, we started to cook more, eat at home more, and dine out differently. No longer was every restaurant meal one that approached stratospheric prices. We welcomed new places that promised better buys, greater attention to our needs, not just THEIR bottom line. We patronized new burger spots and bistros, the types of restaurants that succeed during tough times.

Big-name chefs figured it out and rearranged menus and moved into this dining space. Why not? Customers were receptive. Tables were full. The price was right: A perfect solution to wanting to dine out but refusing to spend 4-star dollars.

If chefs like Daniel Boulud (Daniel and DBGB Kitchen & Bar), Laurent Tourondel (BLT Steak and BLT Burger), Danny Meyer (Union Square Hospitality and Shake Shack), and Michel Richard (Citronelle and Central Michel Richard) are flipping burgers; there’s a good reason for their aggressive moves: Dining Dollars talk. It’s not that their fancy restaurants sit empty; it’s just more likely that diners can opt for frequent USH_ShakeShackburger or bistro stops several times a month!

So much of the year was spent saying, “Don’t worry, it’s almost over.” The elusive elephant has never really left the room. The economy has improved but more people are on the breadline. We want everything to be better; we want to return to the more carefree universe that gave us tacit permission to eat out and carry in without as much anxiety about our decisions.

We welcome the Burger and Bistro approach.

The lines are long.

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What I Learned This Year

Dec 29

Posted by admin in beverages, cooking, dining out, lifestyle, news

As with every year when we talk about food and the hospitality industry, there’s lots of news. This year was no exception, but it was a challenge for many businesses to stay above water. Some didn’t make it. Money was tight and customers were careful. It was certainly not a year where everyone stood and waited for the world to change. It was a year of action, invention, and reinvention.

–Coupon use was way up–grocery stores doubled and tripled the value of coupons in response to consumer belt-tightening and renewed interest in home cooking. No longer did grocers rely solely on newspaper coupons, but they expanded their online coupon promotions. Who would have expected Whole Foods to aggressively participate in this type of endeavor? Not me. They did and became as serious about coupons and sales as any of their competitors.

–Grocers worked on their house brands and made them palatable and popular. The price differentiation between the big brands and the new house brands became a deciding factor for many shoppers. House brands scored well in this contest.

–Restaurants increased promotions such as half-priced wine nights and 3-course prix fixe menus. They strived to emphasize how they have changed and how they could respond to the new, emerging diner. The strategy continues with greater emphasis on value dining.

–Restaurants revamped their menus and placed a greater emphasis on small, shared plates. Restaurant Weeks, with their specialty menus for lunch and dinner, were expanded to become multi-week experiences and commonly became a fixture both in winter and summer.

–Food recalls became more frequent as we became more diligent in monitoring the possible health risks of numerous foods. It was a bad year for packaged ground beef and a bad year for government watchdogs who had not tightened the rules enough to stop a problem at the source. “Voluntary recalls” became popular responses to early questions.

–Value became an important focus whether we were talking about new-found wines, sparkling beverages that tasted like Champagne, or a regular cup of coffee. All food-related businesses and others in the hospitality industry understood the importance of repeat business and strived to wow consumers with their own loyalty programs.

It was a good year to write about COFFEE as so many health research studies confirmed my basic mantra: Another Espresso, please (Sure, there are numerous studies that question that wisdom).krups-fast-touch-203x180x180_0

I learned a lot. Way more than this mini list details, but the search function should give you an opportunity to refresh your tastebuds.

I hope you had an opportunity to enjoy the life and times of an opinionated food and beverage blogger.

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Hold the Wheat; Eat the Popcorn

Dec 28

Posted by admin in cooking, food

Popcorn_Bowl-thumbThe “other” flours are finding new-found popularity in this heightened allergy world that quickly points the finger at wheat products, especially whole wheat. Not just obvious, allergic reactions, but there’s plenty of medical discussions and research about behavior-altering reactions from the wheats. Did you know you could buy rice flour, potato starch flour, or tapioca flour? Pay attention, these products, and other similar non-wheat flours, are not that difficult to find anymore; they are gaining greater visibility on grocery shelves.

If you want to make a traditional bread or pancake recipe, you need to approximate all-purpose flour (primarily, regular wheat) with the above ingredients or a combination of them. For instance, if you are using rice, potato starch, and tapioca flours, you achieve the accustomed flour milled consistency by following a 6:1:1 ratio or 2 C rice flour, 1/3 C potato starch flour, and 1/3 C tapioca flour. Sure there are lots of recipes that call for extra thickeners, but the most basic simulation uses the flours in and of themselves.

We bash corn products continually as the villain in high fructose corn syrup and its alter-ego, obesity, but wheat has clearly achieved its own villainous persona. As more people experience allergic responses to certain foods, nutritionists frequently recommend eliminating wheat products all together. When you go on a wheat-free diet, where do you get the all-important fiber?

Figure out the foods you can handle and consider the obvious ways to get fiber into your wheat-free diet. If other factors are not interfering, then fresh fruits, vegetables, and nuts should do the trick.

You can easily tolerate the wheat-free lifestyle, if you plan ahead and think about how much fresh popcorn you want daily!

That just might do the trick.

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The Decade of Food and Wine

Dec 22

Posted by admin in cooking, dining out

We’ve made lists and talked trends of what 2010 will look like, but what about a look at the decade we’re getting ready to close? It’s been an interesting 10!

We’ve gone from being super flush to barely scraping by. Restaurants that once announced no reservations with the egregious term “fully committed” are now more than eager to assist with alternate dates and suggested times. Wine lists got a big workout in the middle of the decade as many top labels, aka big prices, were happily consumed. Consumers were making money; restaurants were thriving, and then BOOM. Life as we know it changed.

This was also the decade that:

–The farmer became a major player in dining out and shopping at markets. We threw the words “locavore,” food miles,” “farm fresh,” and “CSA” around as important, everyday expressions. They became part of the food vocabulary; they became used and overused.

–The term “foodie” became the preferred nomenclature for someone who was interested in all food talk all the time. It became as overused and redundant as locavore.

–The chef became a rock star. We became familiar with them and knew them by their 1st names like Tom, Mario, and Bobby. Sure Bravo’s ”Top Chef “and the proliferation of shows on gourmetThe Food Network did not hurt the trend, but chefs started to spread their wings and strut the full peacock walk of master authoritarian. Guests liked dining at chef’s tables, taking cooking lessons from chefs, and just chatting away with the guy, or occasional gal, walking the room and beaming with the guests.

–Restaurant rents forced many old standbys to give it up and new restaurants opened out of food carts and food trucks. What was once a phenomena limited in its universality spawned concepts throughout the country for food on the go.

–As for foods, this was the cupcake, frozen yogurt, and burger decade.

–We devoured cookbooks and brought Julia Child back into our homes about the same time as we started stockpiling old issues of Gourmet Magazine which didn’t finish the decade as a magazine but added a hefty weight to the cookbook aisles with its latest 1,000 recipe tome.

-Grocers were no longer hiding behind a few private labels but rushing to show us they could compete with well-known national brands and wow us with better pricing from their much-improved house brands.

–Grocers were fighting over terms to indicate how low their prices had gone. We had deals and super deals, coupons that were doubled and eventually tripled, and benefited from a much improved, warmer, hospitable shopping environment.

–Wine merchants took consumers from Pauillac to Mendoza. We started drinking our cellars and started paying attention to the many good buys under $10 and under $20. The fancy wine world shifted continents and diners and shoppers were paying attention to smart buys from countries that seldom made wine magazine discussion groups years ago. Wine bars became commonplace.

–Coffee became an even bigger buzz than that from its mere caffeine potential. Neighborhood shops faced stiff competition from national players that proliferated multiple corners in major cities. We learned terms like grande and venti and started to request our own specialty lattes. Price was no object; it was a treat, and then…boom. We started to favor a tall fresh-brewed.

It was a decade that stamped its mark in the food world as food became elevated into more than just a meal.

Now we are older and wiser and ready to return to the basics that many say will signify the year ahead.

Time to reflect and watch.

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Reinventing Tapioca: A Trend with Stickiness

Dec 17

Posted by admin in cooking, food universe, gluten-free

Let me begin with the ultimate disclaimer: I doubt if I’ve ever made tapioca pudding or given much thought to tapioca. Now it is the darling of the industry as it serves as a base and a major ingredient for the growing gluten-free marketplace. Tapioca products have literally found a new life and gained a cult following as the secret ingredient in oh so many products that can now boast of their gluten-free status.

I had to take a giant step backwards to learn exactly what tapioca is. I was reminded about the beginning days of Atkins type products which were miraculously sweetened with pear juice. Who knew then and who knows now? What is this thing called manioc? We are familiar with the cassava plant and its root so we actually know the origins of manioc and tapioca. Not that hard. Tapioca historically has been considered a major thickening agent or the fun part of trendy bubble tea.

Its continual rise to the top tier of popularity is due to its special place in the gluten-free universe. In striving to locate products that are wheat-free, you’ll likely see tapioca as a primary ingredient, especially in gluten-free breads. Tapioca achieves rock star status as a saving grace of this wheatless universe.tapiocabread

Many will shrug. Others will acknowledge that in the efforts to lessen the ingredients, we are reintroducing old flavors and products that have been given a new life.

Perfect: Less is more.

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Coupon Universe

Dec 7

Posted by admin in cooking, dining out

With the economic rebound still at slo-mo, coupon usage continues to rise. Sometimes the Sunday newspaper inserts are actually lacking in the coupon department. Maybe manufacturers have figured out that another tree does not have to be cut down to meet the print requirements. Let the consumer find the coupon he wants!CartLL

That’s the world of coupons and the Internet. There are no shortage of approaches to ease the shopping burden. Name a category and there’s a site or a way to access a coupon. Look at a few examples. Google an item and follow the item with the word coupon, and you are in business. Let’s play the game: Look what happens, for example, when you type Cuisinart coupon. It’s that simple. The onus is on you to check out the validity of all sources and always look at the expiration date.

If it’s a food product, then the exercise is identical as there are no shortage of options. Companies want you to buy the cereal, the yogurt, the whatever and if it’s coupon enticement you need; no problem.

As for dining out, there are numerous opportunities to reduce the overall tab. Restaurants do not want to be ignored and are willing to help get you in the door.

It’s crazy to think you have been shopping without the deductions that are so readily available. Easier than clipping; figure out what you want and google the coupon possibilities.

Live a little; save a lot.

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Good Enough to Eat: There’s A Book for That

Dec 6

Posted by admin in cooking, news

In this gift-giving period of the year, finding the right present to match the recipient is always a challenge. When it comes to books, some titles sound seductively appetizing, and others makes us question whether we are up to the task. Look at theses two extremes: Eating by Jason Epstein recounts his life as a diner, cook, and critic. That works.

On the other end of the scale, you have a masterwork from the 1800s that promises to teach you a trick or two about the whole category of food: The Physiology of Taste, Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, by Brillat Savarin, (translated by food master, M.F.K. Fisher). That’s a true title mouthful; two different recipients for sure!

In between those extremes there are some wonderful food books for great present-giving.

For those mourning the loss of their favorite food magazine, then the new Gourmet cookbook should keep them busy for a while (Gourmet Today: More than a 1000 New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen, by Ruth Reichl). If they are Food Network fans, then Rachael Ray, the darling of the Network has the solution: Her Top 10 list of 30-minute meals. (Rachael Ray’s Top 10:  More than 300 Recipes to Cook Every Day). OK, maybe not everyday!

If you are thinking about the local food movement, then you can start with a book credited for beginning much of the dialogue: Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. The more problematic discussion in graphic prose is the recent book by the vegetarian Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals. (Not quite Upton Sinclair’s take (The Jungle), but squeamishly close, especially for a meat-eater!). The moral dilemma of our chosen foods sits restlessly in our decision-making.

If you’ve always dreamed of sharing your food expertise then Frank Bruni, former restaurant critic of the New York Times, has a book (Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater) that puts life and food into perspective. If you’d rather read a book by a woman who is responsible for an almost endless list of famous cookbook authors, then cookbook editor Judith Jones has the answer. Her new book provides a solution to a new life stage question: The Pleasures of Cooking for One.cookingone

If it’s cake you fancy, there’s a book (Rose’s Heavenly Cakes by Rose Levy Beranbaum) for that indulgence. The same for any aspect of a food, an ingredient, or a cooking style: There’s a book for that!

What delicious choices!

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We’re Talkin’ Hash

Nov 27

Posted by admin in cooking, food universe

It seems no matter the size of the bird, there are leftovers. Same is true with stuffing and the bounty of veggies. What do you do with each of the items? So many people swear by the big sandwich: Turkey, stuffing, cranberries, and gravy. Not bad.

Then there’s the hash theory. Get some eggs, cube the turkey, add the stuffing, and chop up some other vegetables like peppers and mushrooms and turkey hash is a pleaser.

The goal is the same: Turkey sandwiches lose their appeal quickly and inventiveness or incorporating multiple ingredients seems the easiest, best route.

It’s funny: We eat turkey sandwiches all year round, but the days following Thanksgiving, they seem to be a redundant statement to the overall feast of folly.

Don’t forget a turkey salad with a side of cranberries. We seem to remember to make chicken salad, but with the leftover fixings, we should not ignore the obvious!  turkeysalad

No matter the direction you take, remember the food safety rules: You only have a few days to finish the turkey so enjoy the wonderful memories, but finish it off by the end of the weekend. The sooner the better. As for other parts of the Thanksgiving meal, refrigerated storage for gravy is much shorter. To preserve the meal, especially if there are large quantities left, then the freezer route buys you some time.

Enjoy the continued bounty.

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