These are the kinds of meals I love: some charcuterie, good cheese and olives. Simple and fatty. Cheap, decent wine doesn’t hurt, either. Throw in some crusty bread and a salad (with beef tenderloin carpaccio, even) and it even seems like legit dinner.
For those curious, you see a black truffle mousse (often improperly called a pâté), sopressata and dry Italian salame, mixed Greek olives, a truffled cheese, Roquefort, a manchego-style sheepsmilk cheese and Cypress Grove’s Purple Haze chevre.
As if there weren’t already enough reality shows about cooking, Bravo announced the launching of “Top Chef Masters.” The details don’t really matter, but the judges are slated to be a guy who works for Saveur, former New York magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene, and a guy from Britain.
A question: is Greene (that’s her in the center) going to continue her tradition of only being photographed wearing hats that obscure her face? Because that’s going to look really ridiculous on television.
The Internet can take us to many great places and show us so many great foods, more than any single blog can feature. At least until now. Enter This is Why You’re Fat, which features food after fat-loaded food. You know, the kind that show up on Digg and in The New York Times and, occasionally, here.
It’s the honoring of — and the electronic lusting after — such foods that makes them ever so slightly more acceptable to consume. Not that anyone regularly eats a deep-fried Twinky on a stick dipped in chocolate syrup, or a seven-pound breakfast burrito or a mega stack of Double Stuff Oreo. But enough people are constantly trolling for salty, greasy crap to shovel (me included) that deep dish pizza vending machines make economic sense.
This theory is akin to Suicide Food’s notion that by showing more animals who are happy to be eaten we are desensitized to the fact that we’re eating animals, and ones often ill treated at that.
Tomorrow, from 10 to 11 a.m., you can hear me and Jim Duncan, food writer for City View, Relish and The Iowan, on The Exchange with Ben Kieffer. We’ll be discussing my pig slaughter and other food issues. You can call in or send an e-mail with questions or comments if you wish.
You can listen on an IPR news station or the network’s online steam.
From Michael Ruhlman’s Twitter feed and a friend comes a New York Times story about possibly the most overly baconed dish ever.
Essentially, it’s a bacon placemat wrapped around Italian sausage.
Drool.
Update:
The Kansas City Star has a better headline: “Bacon Belly Bomb is a Big Hit.”
Hanging on a bulletin board in a small Iowa town, among the ads for dog grooming and used snow blowers (each printed on colored letter paper with those easy-tear tabs with preprinted phone numbers) was an similarly styled ad for a steakhouse.
A 10 percent share in Joesph’s Steakhouse to be exact. To quote the flyer:
10% Interest in Joseph’s Steakhouse downtown Iowa City (property only) This is an established high end steakhouse and seafood restaurant located in the heart of Iowa City at 212 South Clinton Street 319-631-3268
Seems an odd way to sell a stake in a restaurant to me.
Today I’m reminded of a lesson I learned in a reporting 101 class:
People die.
People do not pass away. They do not meet Jesus. They do not cross over. They are not lost.
People die.
Burger King’s”Whopper Virgins” campaign is brilliant. But, and I’m not saying we should keep burgers all to ourselves, traipsing into Inuit villages and towns in Eastern Europe and homes in Thailand with Big Macs and Whoppers is nothing short of sick.
I’m honored Jim Duncan named me best new food writer in his food-year-in-review column in the Des Moines alternative weekly City View.
This “new media” Iowa journalist wrote old fashioned rings around other young food reporters in traditional media — by practicing self examination without self indulgence and by teaching readers about his subjects.
A ridiculously nice thing to say. While he cites this blog, which embarrassingly hasn’t been updated since September (I promise to do better), I’d urge you to look at my A Pig in Three Parts package.
I try to look choosy when I’m at the store getting a couple bottles of wine; picking up a few to closely inspect the varietal and hints of the terroir. But really I’m trolling the low-end stuff. $6-per-bottle is my wheelhouse. And I say yea or nay based on pretty much on label design alone.
But when it was time to jump to a higher price point, how could I resist a 2005 Chateau Des Moines for $13 at Dirty John’s? It’s actually French, imported by a West Des Moines company. It was just all right. Better after it breathed for a couple hours.
At least it wasn’t Chateau Chunder.
