Alton Brown
Now the semester's over, I get to cook!
Over the last year, there's been a lot of frozen food around here; I've been working late and coming home late and in general not in the kitchen as much as I like. This is not good for any of us around here, so it's a lovely thing to have been cooking all this week. We're all happier for it. Last night we were having chicken scallopini (had a little moment of panic, when I couldn't find the capers -- how could I be out of capers? how could I possibly have sunk so low as to have no capers! -- but then I found them, thank God) and Sam said, how could I forget about this dish? I love this!
Yes. Now that's my idea of a cooking audience.
Sam and the child are excellent cooking audiences. They like flavor, they like new things, they appreciate even my experiments (with the exception of the Roquefort Jello, but let us move on).
And now the whole family's become addicted to Alton Brown.
For those of you who don't know about Alton Brown -- especially if you're not where you have access to the Food Network in the States -- let me explain that Brown has a show which is sort of a cooking show, but not entirely. There's cooking on it, and there are even recipes, but the cooking isn't the point. The explanation of the cooking is the point.
After dinner, at our house, the child does his homework and has his bath, and Sam does the dishes, and then we go downstairs and watch "Good Eats." It's perfect for us. Food, humor, history, and science. That's what we love around here. (The child was excited to learn that some of the episodes can be bought on DVD. Hmmm. His birthday's coming up...)
With all this working late business going on, I end up missing "Good Eats," sometimes, but I hear about it anyway. Sam told me the other day that Alton Brown says I can wash the mushrooms, instead of laboriously wiping them down, if I just do it quickly and don't leave them sitting in the water. Excellent! Done.
What I love about Alton Brown is that he doesn't just tell you what to do; he tells you why. In great detail. So one can cook more intelligently. What Sam and the child love about him is that he does all this with humor, so one can remember it better. His show uses Barbie and Ken dolls to great effect, along with some recurring sock puppets that represent yeast. Oh, and the child is especially fond of the people in the cow costume, with meat cuts labeled on the side.
We love him so much we bought his cookbooks. Those are nice, cause for one thing you can read them at any time, and for another thing they have actual recipes. When we're watching the show, we never write anything down. We just watch.
I love food. I love to cook it. I love to think about it and plan it and put it all together and serve it to people I love even more than the food, and then get to eat it myself.
And I'm happy happy happy to have run across a writer who sounds like this:
By and large most home cooks don't do sauce...and that's too bad. Traditional sauces are indeed scary -- as all dinosaurs (even the cute ones) are. They're scary because they are not of our time. They are of a time when toqued Frenchmen walked the earth, backed by armies of apprentices who probably didn't live to see 40 because the air in the kitchens, with their wood-burning stoves, would rot their lungs. The kitchens these culinary T-Rexes occupied bear no resemblance to the rooms we cook in, nor did the groceries that filled them. These guys worked with whole everything: they didn't buy a steak, they bought a side of beef. They didn't buy a fish filet, they bought the fish. They purchased cartloads of produce and had that army of apprentices at the ready to clean it all. This meant a lot of leftovers: meat scraps and bones and fish heads, carrot tops, mushroom stems -- that sort of thing. Being clever and innovative, the ancient chefs didn't want to waste these items. They made sauces and everyone was happy.
Fast-forward a couple hundred years and people are still buying books packed with recipes for the mother sauces and their archaic offspring. This makes about as much sense as going to the barber to have leeches slapped on a wart.
That's the intro to the "Sauce" chapter from I'm Just Here for the Food, after which he goes on to explain how to make sauces without an army of apprentices.
When we were living in England for a bit we were all addicted to Delia Smith, to whom we are still true, in our fashion. She explained things, too. Also, her recipe for Toad-in-the-Hole kicks butt. The child was three at the time, and he was allowed to stay up late to watch Delia.
But she had no sock puppets representing yeast, alas, whereas Brown's discussion of yeast, and his amusing sock puppets, have caused me to start planning artisan bread.
And to be truthful, she never talked us into actually changing things in the kitchen. But now, as of this morning, we own a mandoline, cause Alton Brown convinced us we need one. And he doesn't think you need a lot of gadgets in the kitchen.
Although I will admit that I also believe that I need the most brilliant volume-measuring device I've ever seen, the "Alton Brown Plunger."
Cause Alton Brown said so.
See you later -- I'm going to go try out the "waffle cut" feature on the mandoline.
Over the last year, there's been a lot of frozen food around here; I've been working late and coming home late and in general not in the kitchen as much as I like. This is not good for any of us around here, so it's a lovely thing to have been cooking all this week. We're all happier for it. Last night we were having chicken scallopini (had a little moment of panic, when I couldn't find the capers -- how could I be out of capers? how could I possibly have sunk so low as to have no capers! -- but then I found them, thank God) and Sam said, how could I forget about this dish? I love this!
Yes. Now that's my idea of a cooking audience.
Sam and the child are excellent cooking audiences. They like flavor, they like new things, they appreciate even my experiments (with the exception of the Roquefort Jello, but let us move on).
And now the whole family's become addicted to Alton Brown.
For those of you who don't know about Alton Brown -- especially if you're not where you have access to the Food Network in the States -- let me explain that Brown has a show which is sort of a cooking show, but not entirely. There's cooking on it, and there are even recipes, but the cooking isn't the point. The explanation of the cooking is the point.
After dinner, at our house, the child does his homework and has his bath, and Sam does the dishes, and then we go downstairs and watch "Good Eats." It's perfect for us. Food, humor, history, and science. That's what we love around here. (The child was excited to learn that some of the episodes can be bought on DVD. Hmmm. His birthday's coming up...)
With all this working late business going on, I end up missing "Good Eats," sometimes, but I hear about it anyway. Sam told me the other day that Alton Brown says I can wash the mushrooms, instead of laboriously wiping them down, if I just do it quickly and don't leave them sitting in the water. Excellent! Done.
What I love about Alton Brown is that he doesn't just tell you what to do; he tells you why. In great detail. So one can cook more intelligently. What Sam and the child love about him is that he does all this with humor, so one can remember it better. His show uses Barbie and Ken dolls to great effect, along with some recurring sock puppets that represent yeast. Oh, and the child is especially fond of the people in the cow costume, with meat cuts labeled on the side.
We love him so much we bought his cookbooks. Those are nice, cause for one thing you can read them at any time, and for another thing they have actual recipes. When we're watching the show, we never write anything down. We just watch.
I love food. I love to cook it. I love to think about it and plan it and put it all together and serve it to people I love even more than the food, and then get to eat it myself.
And I'm happy happy happy to have run across a writer who sounds like this:
By and large most home cooks don't do sauce...and that's too bad. Traditional sauces are indeed scary -- as all dinosaurs (even the cute ones) are. They're scary because they are not of our time. They are of a time when toqued Frenchmen walked the earth, backed by armies of apprentices who probably didn't live to see 40 because the air in the kitchens, with their wood-burning stoves, would rot their lungs. The kitchens these culinary T-Rexes occupied bear no resemblance to the rooms we cook in, nor did the groceries that filled them. These guys worked with whole everything: they didn't buy a steak, they bought a side of beef. They didn't buy a fish filet, they bought the fish. They purchased cartloads of produce and had that army of apprentices at the ready to clean it all. This meant a lot of leftovers: meat scraps and bones and fish heads, carrot tops, mushroom stems -- that sort of thing. Being clever and innovative, the ancient chefs didn't want to waste these items. They made sauces and everyone was happy.
Fast-forward a couple hundred years and people are still buying books packed with recipes for the mother sauces and their archaic offspring. This makes about as much sense as going to the barber to have leeches slapped on a wart.
That's the intro to the "Sauce" chapter from I'm Just Here for the Food, after which he goes on to explain how to make sauces without an army of apprentices.
When we were living in England for a bit we were all addicted to Delia Smith, to whom we are still true, in our fashion. She explained things, too. Also, her recipe for Toad-in-the-Hole kicks butt. The child was three at the time, and he was allowed to stay up late to watch Delia.
But she had no sock puppets representing yeast, alas, whereas Brown's discussion of yeast, and his amusing sock puppets, have caused me to start planning artisan bread.
And to be truthful, she never talked us into actually changing things in the kitchen. But now, as of this morning, we own a mandoline, cause Alton Brown convinced us we need one. And he doesn't think you need a lot of gadgets in the kitchen.
Although I will admit that I also believe that I need the most brilliant volume-measuring device I've ever seen, the "Alton Brown Plunger."
Cause Alton Brown said so.
See you later -- I'm going to go try out the "waffle cut" feature on the mandoline.
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