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» Food Media

Today’s Giada

First Rachael Ray gets her own talk show in September. Now we learn from Variety that Giada De Laurentiis, who hosts Everyday Italian and Behind the Bash on the must-eat TV channel, has inked a “continuing correspondent” deal with NBC’s Today.

Reactions to Giada’s cheflebrity states are wide and varying. Over at Television Without Pity, there’s a thread devoted to her called “Everyday Italian in Little Big Head’s Kitchen,” (a nod to her ginormous head), in which both fans and foes can post profane or drooling reactions to their snarky hearts’ content. Another television site, TVGasm, even has a “Giada Watch” where Giada’s head size is hysterically measured by a “Natalie Portman Index” or “NPI.”

The blog 15 Minute Lunch doesn’t mince words when reacting to the large-mouthed lass and even professes to have nightmares about Giada, adding, “I don’t know if it’s just her humongous insane-person grin that bugs me, or the fact that the cameraman sees fit to show us a close up of her uvula every time she speaks…”

If he can get the lambs to stop screaming, Giada could show him how to serve it with a little basil-mint pesto.

Posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 by Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic in Food Media | 1 Comment
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» Food Media

Eat this, nation!

Bruce Cole of Saute Wednesday launched a new blog this week called Edible Nation. The latest in the network of Edible Communities publications, which include various regional print quarterlies focusing on sustainable agriculture and the local food scene, EN looks so far like it’ll be both a fun read and a solid news source (though it has some kinks to work out in aligning itself with the overall mission of EC).

The bacon wallet is a great find, and I like Bruce’s personal notes about grass-fed beef. The graphics on “What the Duck?” and “Iowa to vote…” are also charming, and the latter post points to some really interesting articles and stats that I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

But Bruce could have given the link to the Kerrymaid “happy cows” ad a little more context: Some cursory googling reveals that the Kerrymaid brand is actually part of a huge convenience-foods company that doesn’t seem to adhere to any special animal-husbandry standards or doesn’t mention them if it does —which makes the “happy cows” claim look pretty wack. The Happy Cows TV ads for the California dairy industry have always annoyed me for similar reasons. Those cows masquerade as cuddly little California Raisins-style mascots, but secretly they’re on a mission to quash any consumer concerns about how dairy cows are treated and capitalize on the growing demand for natural products. Point being, I’d love to see EN (which is in position to become the authoritative blog on sustainable farming) get to the bottom of some of these PR campaigns.

And then there’s the slightly odd choice of partnering with Amazon.com. Given Edible Communities’ commitment to local, independent businesses (many of which despise the online giant), you’d think the EN blog would offer its users the choice of buying books from a different company. Why not use BookSense.com or Powells.com, like many other progressive and socially responsible sites?

These quibbles aside, I’m excited to keep reading Bruce’s new project. (Let’s just hope he doesn’t totally ditch out on the lovely Saute Wednesday!)

Posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 by Christy Harrison in Food Media | No Comments
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» Food Media

Trading places

In Los Angeles, gastronomes are gorging on glorious pig fat, while on New York’s Lower East Side, they’re dining on dainty amuse-bouches. Has some kind of coastal culinary transplant taken place?

Writing in The New York Times, Melissa Clark reports that the amuse-bouche has trickled down from the rarified world of haute dining to find its way into casual restaurants and dinner parties in New York City.

Meanwhile, back in health- and figure-conscious Los Angeles–that bastion of the small plate movement–all manner of cured pork delicacies from prosciutto to jamon and even all-fat lardo are the rage. “Who could have predicted it? Southern California, where even great restaurants need to have a big green salad on the menu, has suddenly gone crazy for pork fat,” writes Russ Parsons in his mouthwatering Los Angeles Times article on L.A.’s new craze for salumi.

Posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 by Josh Friedland in Food Media | No Comments
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» Food Media

A Trip to FHM’s Cathouse

Much to the relief of lazy food commentators everywhere, Iron Chef America gladiator and cookbook authoress Cat Cora made her softcore pictorial debut in September’s edition of FHM.

Cora’s ever-so-slightly cheesecake photo series recalls Rachel Ray’s infamous appearance in the same magazine. (You can view Ray’s slightly racier pictorial, lovingly preserved in all its spoon-licking glory, right over here.)

The brief but frantic firestorm of comment we can expect these pictures to stir up hasn’t yet descended upon the Web, but we can probably expect it to break down into the following schools of thought:

Women’s Lib (Old-School): This photo spread is degrading to Cat Cora and career women everywhere. By displaying a generous helping of her tater-tots, she has cheapened her otherwise formidable professional achievements.

Women’s Lib (New-School): This photo spread is empowering to Cat Cora and career women everywhere. By displaying a generous helping of her tater-tots, she has enhanced her otherwise formidable professional achievements with grrrl power.

Judgmental male, positive: Wow, she is hawt. And a lesbian! Damn…I’ll be in my trailer. [Actual quote]

Judgmental male, negative: Cat Cora is really forcing it in her FHM pictorial; does not compare with the original Rachel Ray photo shoot…. [Another actual quote]

In the eyes of this humble commentator, the photos (which are no steamier than a typical visit to southern California) aren’t the concern here. The problem is the recipes. They’re too sophisticated for the mouth-breathing frat rats they’re clearly concocted for, yet too horrible seeming for anyone over the age of 20 to consider interacting with.

Bacon-wrapped grilled spam fillet? Why not just skip the Spam entirely? And did you seriously put a twist of orange on top of that thing?

Good lord, woman; have you no sense of decency?

Posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 by James Norton in Food Media | 2 Comments
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» CHOW Tour: North America

Atlantic City Means “Coors”

I stayed at an Atlantic City casino, and the experience was pretty repulsive. I’m too traumatized to even rant about it. Just avoid the experience if you can. (One interesting note: I spotted “single-deck blackjack” tables. How on earth do they manage that without being beset by card counters?)

Nice nighttime view from the marina, though:

Aversa’s Italian Bakery (3101 Brigantine Boulevard, Brigantine, New Jersey; 609-264-8880) has real good sticky buns. Thanks to Peter Genovese (of the Newark Star-Ledger) for the tip.

MP3 file Listen to the first podcast.


At Tony’s Baltimore Grill (2800 Atlantic Avenue, Atlantic City, New Jersey; 609-345-5766), the sausage pizza slayed me. Sobs of grateful
appreciation to Peter Genovese for the tip.

I asked the rough-looking, pot-bellied bartender, “Is your sausage pizza as good as I’ve heard?” His reply: “When I took this gig, I weighed 150 pounds!” Another customer piped up and said he’d been coming here for 30 years and it still tastes precisely the same now as it did then. The bartender added, “Yup, that’s because we’re still working off the same hunk of dough …”

The bar has lots of gritty 1950s Atlantic City charm, and the only beer on tap is Coors Light. I was resigned to poor-quality suds but nonetheless asked the bartender what he had in bottles. He told me he had “everything.” I asked if he carried Westmalle Trappist Tripel, and he said, “No, but I do have Hoegaarden.” Touché! He even pronounced it the correct way (“HOO-harten”), which almost nobody this side of Belgium does. This touch (along with the excellent Belgian white beer) was the capper on a lunch of intense, memorable pleasure.

MP3 file Hear podcast 2 (and note that I misspoke: Mack & Manco Pizza is in Ocean City, not Atlantic City).





Then on to Ocean City, New Jersey, a totally pleasant place. It’s as if a genie conjured up the summer of your false nostalgia.

There’s a nice boardwalk, surprisingly well stocked with decent-looking food choices.

Best option on the section of boardwalk I scoped out is Mack & Manco Pizza (758 Boardwalk, Ocean City, New Jersey; 609-399-2783). It’s no artisanal pizza, but the buttery cheese is irresistible, and balances have been beautifully worked out over the decades. Time-machine pizza, indeed.

In the case of Kohr Bros. Frozen Custard (Seventh & Boardwalk, Ocean City, New Jersey; 609-399-6327), the years seem to have brought more corner-cutting than refinement. It’s OK, mindless custard, nothing more. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you …

Posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 by Jim Leff in CHOW Tour: North America | 5 Comments

» Food Media

What makes it weird?

What turns one diner’s stomach may be dinner to another. Chris Cosentino, chef at San Francisco’s Incanto restaurant, food blogger, and enthusiast of all the nasty bits, worries that he might not “have enough offal on the menu.” He solves the problem with a dish of grilled lamb liver, heart, and kidneys, dressed with salsa picante. A photo is posted to his blog, with a warning for viewers not to drool on their keyboard.

Food blogger Mary Ladd recently attended one of Cosentino’s “Whole Beast Dinners” at Incanto, and reported her experience eating an entire pig-pointy ears to curly tail-on SFist. She admits, “some of our pregnant friends cringed and kept their backs turned,” when the pig came out, but says, “the heart was petite, very tender and tasted and felt clean.”

No newcomer to adventurous eating is Eddie Lin, one of the authors of Deep End Dining, a blog devoted to consuming the unusual, odd, and sometimes illegal (a recent “outlaw dinner” featured foods that are banned or forbidden, or will be soon). Though being a devotee of the nasty bits can have its drawbacks. Eddie recently suggested a dinner out to his wife who replied, “Honey, I’m six months pregnant. I really can’t handle eating fetus or baby anything, not even veal. Nothing weird at all. Please tell me we’re going to a normal restaurant.”

Perhaps the larger question is, what really makes food “weird?” In response to her recent Chez Pim post about cooking with horse fat, Pim readily admits, “My weird meter is probably calibrated quite differently from other people’s.” She says that growing up in Thailand exposed her to “all kinds of stuff that people here or in Europe might find weird.”

Numerous and interesting comments on her post continue the conversation. “I’m still amazed at what the average American will/will not eat,” writes reader Linette. “They turn up their noses at things like tripe, calf brains, fish-head curry, and sea-urchin, then they go eat processed, packaged crap from the supermarket. Please! Who’s the crazy one here?”

In the end, is eating molded green jello salad with cubes of canned fruit floating in it any stranger than tripe?

Posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 by Tea Austen Weaver in Food Media | 1 Comment
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» Food Media

Gastro-gawking

The food bloggers sure have gotten buddy-buddy lately. A bunch of them got together in the Bay Area Sunday to eat a reportedly crazy-delicious meal, and now they can’t stop talking about it. Amy (of Cooking with Amy) not only got to attend that event, but she also hooked up with more food bloggers in Seattle and had some yummy meals there, too.

So maybe I’m a teensy bit jealous that I wasn’t on the guest list for these get-togethers (Okay, of course I’m jealous —so much deliciousness! Warm fuzzies flowing like wine!), but these posts got me thinking about a criticism of the food-writing community that I came across recently. Journalist and former New York Times food columnist Molly O’Neill chides contemporary writers for engaging in food porn, creating “a world that exists almost exclusively in the imagination, the ambitions, and the nostalgic underpinnings of American culture.” She doesn’t let the readers who buy her books off the hook, either: they’re the ones who demand this porn-y writing, and she says it’s up to the journalists not to pander to them and do some real “reportage” instead, a la James Beard or M.F.K. Fisher.

Of course a ton of wonderful blogs dabble (or revel) in food porn, and there are some great sites and meta-sites dedicated entirely to the genre, but this passel of posts about the bloggers’ potluck really seemed to hammer home the point: Food porn at its most stripped-down is really not about learning or doing, it’s about imagining (and of course wanting what the other guy has).

Is that really a problem, though? I generally agree with O’Neill that today’s food writing could use a little “more authority and less autobiography,” but nostalgia and fantasy are such important parts of any culinary experience that it seems odd to criticize their prevalence in gastro-journalism. Then again, maybe food porn only appeals to relatively well-off folks, as O’Neill suggests, and excludes the rest of the population. What’s your take?

Posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 by Christy Harrison in Food Media | 4 Comments
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» Food Media

Heirloom Holiday

Want to squeeze a nice pair of big, juicy tomatoes? Well, now’s your chance, as the bursting-ripe orbs are starring in last gasp of summer’s sweetness before the squash and apples start muscling in. China Daily is running fabulous red-on-red shots of La Tomatina, the tomato-hurling Spanish festival that left the streets of Buñol awash in human gazpacho on Wednesday.

Rather eat ‘em than wear ‘em? Gothamist and The Food Section get right to the plate, praising the delights of, respectively, the the heirloom-’mater salad at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn and a DIY tumble of tomatoes, watermelon, and feta, inspired by a similar dish on the menu at The Hungry Cat in Los Angeles.

Ready to get a little dirty? Head up to Stone Barns’ upcoming tomato fest in the Hudson Valley, or get on down to Mariquita Farms’ organic tomato u-pick and potluck in sunny Cali. Or just pick up some drippy-fresh mozzarella, a handful of basil, and a heap of local beauties, and have yourself a big ol’ Caprese party in your lap.

Posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 by Stephanie Rosenbaum in Food Media | No Comments
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» CHOW Tour: North America

New Jersey Shows Its Cards

The motto at Chef Charles is “Gotta Put LOVE In Your Cookin’!” (It’s at 6774 Washington Avenue, Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey; 609-641-7338. Ignore the address given on his own website.) I thought his barbecue was just dandy—authentic and very, very good (perhaps not the very peak of deliciousness). The ribs were slightly tough, but I attribute that to my early arrival on a Sunday, shortly after opening. Chef Charles’s soul food is also quite good (especially his slamming candy sweet potatoes and excellent cornbread). For dessert, he had no sweet potato pie, alas. But the lemon pound cake slayed me. It’s unrepentantly greasy, a dessert that says, “Hey, you’ve just been scarfing all those ribs: Drop all pretensions of being fat averse.”

MP3 file Listen to the first podcast.



Kelsey & Kim’s Soul Food (52 North Main Street, Pleasantville, New Jersey; 609-484-8448) is a nice place run by a sincere chef. It’s not set up to do ambitious Southern pit barbecue à la Chef Charles, but it’s one of those places that make up in deliciousness what they lack in authenticity and ambition. The ribs reminded me of Chinese restaurant ribs, because the meat has a penetrating sweetness that’s more addictive than annoying. Great tender texture. Their chicken wings are expertly fried; I’d order anything fried here (I bet the catfish is great).

The Clam Bar (910 Bay Avenue, Somers Point, New Jersey; 609-927-8783) is a lovely rustic seaside haunt. It’s spotlessly clean and run with friendly, expert efficiency. Nice place. Too bad I was too full to really try it.


Crabby Jack’s (on the dock behind the restaurant the Crab Trap, 2 Broadway, Somers Point, New Jersey; 609-927-7377) is a totally fun dockside summertime bar.

While sucking down drinks at Crabby Jack’s, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Peter Genovese and I recorded a manic double interview. (Note: The audio was not speeded up; we really talk like that. Bear in mind I was sucking down sugary rum drinks at a dizzying rate.) We covered the origins of Chowhound, the mission of Munchmobile, the pitfalls of restaurant reviewing, the appallingness of Jet Skis, and my big new discovery (suggested by the dude at a neighboring bar stool): Power Straws.


MP3 file Part One
MP3 file Part Two

Posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 by Jim Leff in CHOW Tour: North America | 2 Comments

» Food Media

Anti-gravity alimentation

If your idea of space food is that funky dehydrated ice cream your parents bought you at the gift shop at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, you might be surprised interstellar cuisine has matured.

In The New York Times, Dining In/Dining Out staff writer Kim Severson updates us on the latest developments in anti-gravity gastronomy, from the new menu being developed by the European Union to jambalaya created by celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse.

While today’s astronauts welcome the new changes in flavor and variety, Severson notes that the makers of space foods still have to contend with fundamental limitations on what can be served atop the atmosphere. Nothing that crumbles is allowed (“No one wants to chase a crumb around a space station”), and salt and pepper must be liquefied, for runaway grains could float away and “clog equipment or become lodged in an astronaut’s nose or eyes.” Ouch!

For space chefs, the final frontier, of course, is devising a menu for dining on the way to Mars. To boldly go where no meal has gone before, food will require new methods of preservation and packaging that can sustain a five-year shelf life.

Posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 by Josh Friedland in Food Media | No Comments
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