Chef Day Quotes

Good morning, good morning, good morning," Loki chirped, wheeling in a table covered with silver domes. "What are you doing?" I asked, squinting at him. He'd pulled up the shades. I was tired a hell, and I was not happy. "I thought you two lovebirds would like breakfast," Loki said. "So I had the chef whip you up something fantastic." As he set up the table in the sitting area, he looked over at us. "Although you two are sleeping awfully far apart for newly weds." "Oh my god." I groaned and pulled the covers over my head. "You know, I think you're being a dick," Tove told him as he got out of bed. "But I'm starving. So I'm willing to overlook it. This time." "A dick?" Loki pretended to be offended. "I'm merely worried about your health. If your bodies aren't used to strenous activities, like a long night of love making, you could waste away if you don't get plenty of protein and rehydrate. I'm concerned for you." "Yes we both believe that's why you're here," Tove said sarcastically and took a glass of orange juice that Loki had just poured for him. "What about you princess?" Loki's gaze cut to me as he filled another glass. "I'm not hungry."I sighed and sat up. "Oh really?" Loki arched an eyebrow. "Does that mean that last night-" "It means last night is none of your business," I snapped.

Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.

I’m famous for my Shepherd’s Pie. Here’s my recipe: lamb, potatoes, cheese, peas, paprika, and a wool-covered apron for the chef/shepherd/wolf-like politician to wear while serving the sheeple up.


But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with our friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, then the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you chew on the next one.

the story of the invention of the croissant, the tribute of a Parisian pastry chef to Vienna’s victory over the Ottomans. The croissant, of course, represented the crescent moon of the Ottoman flags, a symbol the West devours with coffee to this very day.

My friends, the hardest thing, when you reach a certain level, is to stay fresh, day in and day out. The world changes very fast around us, no? So, as difficult as it is, the key to success is to embrace this constant change and move with the times,” said Chef Piquot.

sometimes i feel like a great chef who has devoted his entire life to monastic study of the art of cooking & gathered the finest ingredients & built the most advanced kitchen & prepared the most exquisite meal so perfect, so delicious, so extraordinary more astounding than any meal ever created yet each day i stand in my window & watch ninety-seven percent of the world walk past my restaurant into the mcdonald's across the street

The plum-colored night sky was shifting to pink to make room for the day, which looked as though it might turn out “glorious and whimsical,” as the Key West Citizen had promised.

I watched Zanders strip the façade he wore for so long to allow the flight attendant on his team’s plane to see the real him.  I watched Stevie learn to love herself the way the arrogant hockey player who followed her everywhere loves her. The way we all do. I watched Indy come out of a relationship she wasn’t meant for and learn to be loved in a new, quieter way. I watched Ryan allow someone into his home and his heart after shutting everyone else out for so long, only for the brightest ray of sunshine to move in and light every dark space she could touch. I watched Kai learn to ask for help, only for that help to come in the form of a firecracker pastry chef who taught him how to have fun again. I watched Miller stop running and grow deeper roots than she ever thought she could by falling in love with a single dad and his little boy.  I watched Kennedy learn how to love and be loved thanks to her husband who refused to go a day without showering her with it. I watched Isaiah persist in showing his wife exactly who he was behind the smile, all while keeping his heart open for the only woman he wanted to have it.   

Did you ever want something so deeply you were scared to let yourself have it? Like a desire so great you know you will never forgive yourself if you fail. So you hang back. And then you wake up one day and you realize if you don't do it now, it will move out of reach forever.

We have all, of course, heard the story of the invention of the croissant, the tribute of a Parisian pastry chef to Vienna’s victory over the Ottomans. The croissant, of course, represented the crescent moon of the Ottoman flags, a symbol the West devours with coffee to this very day.

You have come nearer to mastering a good many aspects of cooking than anyone except a handful of great chefs, and some day it will pay off. I know it will. You will just have to go on working, and teaching, and getting around, and spreading the gospel until it does. (Avis DeVoto to Julia Child)

cook for a day and eat for a week/month.” Check your community college or personal chef association to find a similar class in your area.

Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water.

When aspiring chefs ask me for career advice, I offer a few tips: Cook every single day. Taste everything thoughtfully. Go to the farmers’ market and familiarize yourself with each season’s produce. Read everything Paula Wolfert, James Beard, Marcella Hazan, and Jane Grigson have written about food. Write a letter to your favorite restaurant professing your love and beg for an apprenticeship. Skip culinary school; spend a fraction of the cost of tuition traveling the world instead.

Since my earliest memory, I imagined I would be a chef one day. When other kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons or music videos on YouTube, I was watching Iron Chef,The Great British Baking Show, and old Anthony Bourdain shows and taking notes. Like, actual notes in the Notes app on my phone. I have long lists of ideas for recipes that I can modify or make my own. This self-appointed class is the only one I've ever studied well for. I started playing around with the staples of the house: rice, beans, plantains, and chicken. But 'Buela let me expand to the different things I saw on TV. Soufflés, shepherd's pie, gizzards. When other kids were saving up their lunch money to buy the latest Jordans, I was saving up mine so I could buy the best ingredients. Fish we'd never heard of that I had to get from a special market down by Penn's Landing. Sausages that I watched Italian abuelitas in South Philly make by hand. I even saved up a whole month's worth of allowance when I was in seventh grade so I could make 'Buela a special birthday dinner of filet mignon.

We are, after all, citizens of the world - a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald's? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, Senor Tamale Stand Owner, Sushi-chef-san, Monsieur Bucket-head. What's that feathered game bird, hanging on the porch, getting riper by the day, the body nearly ready to drop off? I want some.

So you want to be a chef? You really, really, really want to be a chef? If you've been working in another line of business, have been accustomed to working eight-to-nine-hour days, weekends and evenings off, holidays with the family, regular sex with your significant other; if you are used to being treated with some modicum of dignity, spoken to and interacted with as a human being, seen as an equal — a sensitive, multidimensional entity with hopes, dreams, aspirations and opinions, the sort of qualities you'd expect of most working persons — then maybe you should reconsider what you'll be facing when you graduate from whatever six-month course put this nonsense in your head to start with.

but the chef has always been insanely talented at figuring out exactly what carbs I need on any given day.

I’ll take a good chef knife over a firearm any day. Try cutting a chicken with a 9mm.

Only the unpaid cooking seems to be a woman’s job to some guys. They don’t want to do it themselves, so they push it on their wife and say it’s women’s work,” Charity said, rolling her eyes. “Given that the top chefs of the world are largely men, they are mistaken. But then, if you can get a good wage for something, men generally assume control.” She paused.

One day, aftyer my life is already over, a girls comes up to me at the back of the auditorium and says, “Are you the famous chef from Miele?” Every year that remains to me I will walk the streets of Beijing, of Seoul. I will look for a long, long time.

in front of them was the most beautiful wedding cake they had ever seen. Its seven layers were frosted snowy white. Sticking out from the cream were tiny silver twigs that looked like winter trees. “Awesome!” Nancy exclaimed. A man wearing a chef’s hat stood on a ladder

But who cooks it?" I asked, imaging an underground kitchen staffed by tiny, invisible chefs. "Who serves it?" "I don't know," he said, with a disinterested shrug. I couldn't help laughing. "John, food magically appears here three times a day, and you don't know where it comes from? You've been here for almost two hundred years. Haven't you ever tried to find out?" He shot me a sarcastic look of his own. "Of course. I have theories. I think it's part of the compensation for the job I do, since there isn't any pay. But there's room and board. Anything I've ever wanted or needed badly enough usually appears, eventually. For instance"-he sent one of those knee-melting smiles in my direction-"you." I swallowed. The smile made it astonishingly hard to follow the conversation, even though I was the one who'd started it. "Compensation from whom?" He shrugged again. It was clear this was something he didn't care to discuss. "I have passengers waiting. For now, here." He lifted the lid of a platter. "I highly recommend these." I don't know what I expected to see when I looked down...a big platter of pomegranates? Of course that wasn't it at all. "Waffles?

We always think there will be time, and when time runs out, we are told that time itself will be the healer, that the pain will subside, that she is in a better place. But I only miss her more; the pain only seems to grow with time; the seed of her loss has bloomed into an orchard that I roam every day in search of her. I wish that people understood that no words can comfort, that there is no comfort to be had or given, and that is okay.

It’s just another party,” Clearsight said, laughing. “The queen seems to have one every other night. There’s a full moon, let’s celebrate! A second full moon, celebrate again! Her oldest son’s hatching day, time for a party! One of her daughters sneezed, someone alert the chefs we need a cake! It’s kind of exhausting.

In Paris in the 1950s, I had the supreme good fortune to study with a remarkably able group of chefs. From them I learned why good French good is an art, and why it makes such sublime eating: nothing is too much trouble if it turns out the way it should. Good results require that one take time and care. If one doesn't use the freshest ingredients or read the whole recipe before starting, and if one rushes through the cooking, the result will be an inferior taste and texture--a gummy beef Wellington, say. But a careful approach will result in a magnificent burst of flavor, a thoroughly satisfying meal, perhaps even a life-changing experience. Such was the case with the sole meunière I ate at La Couronne on my first day in France, in November 1948. It was an epiphany. In all the years since the succulent meal, I have yet to lose the feelings of wonder and excitement that it inspired in me. I can still almost taste it. And thinking back on it now reminds me that the pleasures of table, and of life, are infinite--toujours bon appétit!

It wasn’t every day there was a shooting in a historic lighthouse involving a celebrity chef, an officer of the court, a standard poodle and a fudge recipe.

A guy like Franz could talk smack all day about my Afro, my lack of brains, my mother, her alleged lack of virtue.

Fridays taught me the French philosophy of the leftover, codified (I later discovered) in my Institut Bocuse textbook and older books, such as the 1899 Art of Using Leftovers. There were rules—never store a leftover in a serving dish or a cooking vessel; never store a warm liquid in a closed container without cooling it first; never reuse a preparation made with raw egg; never keep anything for more than three days; and, the most important of all: Never, under any circumstances, use a leftover twice. A leftover has one chance: to be made even better than the original.

I made tourtes of veal, of capons, and of artichokes and cardoon hearts. I slaved over pork belly tortellini and eggs stuffed with their own yolks and raisins, pepper, cinnamon, orange juice, and butter. I made sure the pastry chef was working hard on the pastry twists made with rosewater and currants. Soups of cauliflower, mushrooms, and leeks simmered for the better part of the day.

Cooking practice can be expensive and impractical. If you have the time, you can practice your tennis serve a thousand times a day for a few dollars. Making a thousand omelets a day? That’s a different story.

this gave me great happiness. The same is true of every job you do. Are you a teacher? You enrich the lives of young people every day! Are you a chef? Each meal you cook brings great pleasure into the world! Perhaps you do not love your job, or you work with difficult people. You are still doing important things, contributing your own small piece to the world we live in. We must never forget this. Your efforts today will affect people you will never know. It is your choice whether that effect is positive or negative. You can choose every day, every minute, to act in a way that may uplift a stranger, or else drag them down. The choice is easy. And it is yours to make.

We had been driving for days. Coming from Baltimore, Maryland where my step-dick was the lead attorney at one of the most prestigious firms in the city, we had it all. The elite private school upbringing, the high-rise apartment in the middle of the city, hell, we even had a chef prepare our meals. And somehow he agreed that moving us to Montana, in the middle of nowhere, would make it all disappear. Nothing was going to make me forget. I couldn't.

Master Chubb?' Malcolm asked. Halt grinned at the memory of that day. 'He's the chef at Castle Redmont. A formidable man, wouldn't you say, Horace?' Horace grinned in his turn. 'He's deadly with his wooden ladle,' he said. 'Fast and accurate. And very painful. I once suggested that he should give ladle-whacking lessons to Battleschool students.' 'You were joking, of course?' Malcolm said. Horace looked thoughtful before he replied. 'You know, not entirely.

For months beforehand, I fielded calls from British media. A couple of the reporters asked me to name some British chefs who had inspired me. I mentioned the Roux brothers, Albert and Michel, and I named Marco Pierre White, not as much for his food as for how—by virtue of becoming an apron-wearing rock-star bad boy—he had broken the mold of whom a chef could be, which was something I could relate to. I got to London to find the Lanesborough dining room packed each night, a general excitement shared by everyone involved, and incredibly posh digs from which I could step out each morning into Hyde Park and take a good long run around Buckingham Palace. On my second day, I was cooking when a phone call came into the kitchen. The executive chef answered and, with a puzzled look, handed me the receiver. Trouble at Aquavit, I figured. I put the phone up to my ear, expecting to hear Håkan’s familiar “Hej, Marcus.” Instead, there was screaming. “How the fuck can you come to my fucking city and think you are going to be able to cook without even fucking referring to me?” This went on for what seemed like five minutes; I was too stunned to hang up. “I’m going to make sure you have a fucking miserable time here. This is my city, you hear? Good luck, you fucking black bastard.” And then he hung up. I had cooked with Gordon Ramsay once, a couple of years earlier, when we did a promotion with Charlie Trotter in Chicago. There were a handful of chefs there, including Daniel Boulud and Ferran Adrià, and Gordon was rude and obnoxious to all of them. As a group we were interviewed by the Chicago newspaper; Gordon interrupted everyone who tried to answer a question, craving the limelight. I was almost embarrassed for him. So when I was giving interviews in the lead-up to the Lanesborough event, and was asked who inspired me, I thought the best way to handle it was to say nothing about him at all. Nothing good, nothing bad. I guess he was offended at being left out. To be honest, though, only one phrase in his juvenile tirade unsettled me: when he called me a black bastard. Actually, I didn’t give a fuck about the bastard part. But the black part pissed me off.

There were few things Dr. Chef enjoyed more than a cup of tea. He made tea for the crew every day at breakfast time, of course, but that involved an impersonal heap of leaves dumped into a clunky dispenser. A solitary cup of tea required more care, a blend carefully chosen to match his day. He found the ritual of it quite calming: heating the water, measuring the crisp leaves and curls of dried fruit into the tiny basket, gently brushing the excess away with his fingerpads, watching color rise through water like smoke as it brewed. Tea was a moody drink.

Dinner was the main meal of the day. Sahib had good taste and appetite and a weakness for Kashmiri dishes. Mughlai mutton with turnips, rogan josh, kebab nargisi, lotus roots-n-rhizomes, gongloo, karam saag, the infinitely slow-cooked nahari, and the curd-flavored meatballs of gushtaba.

My friends, the hardest thing, when you reach a certain level, is to stay fresh, day in and day out. The world changes very fast around us, no? So, as difficult as it is, the key to success is to embrace this constant change and move with the times,” said Chef Piquot... But Hewitt, seeing how hurt the chef was by this two-pronged attack, added, “You are right, of course, André, but I do think you have to change with the times in a way that renews your core essence, not abandons it. To change for the sake of change—without an anchor—that is mere faddishness. It will only lead you further astray.

My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual and transgender people in their plans or programs lean heavily on this. For them, the very fact of a transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk.

What is this food in my head, anyway? Let’s see...it’s green and good for you and so delicious. It’s prepared by angels with love. The minute you bite into it, it’s savory, chewy, nourishing, and whole- some. You feel instantly revitalized. A small, tiny amount, just a few bites, rejuvenates every cell, deepens your breath, clears your mind, heals your wounds, and mends your heart. It’s made from joyous plants that voluntarily separate themselves from their stalks, laying themselves at the feet of the approaching gardener who gathers them. They eagerly offer their vital energies to nourish living spirits. The angels in their chef hats, singing mantras, cook it tenderly to retain all the benefits of the generous plants. It’s barely sweet, barely salty, and contains all the freshness of spring herbs, summer fruit, spreading leaves, and burgeoning seeds. It comes premade in bags or boxes...you just open it up, sit down, and enjoy. It’s a full meal, enough maybe for a whole day, maybe for a week, maybe for your family, maybe for your friends and neighbors. It multiplies like loaves and fishes, in little biodegradable containers that vaporize instantly the moment you finish them, without any greenhouse emissions. Nothing to clean up!

It’s no wonder, however, that somebody would get cold who had knocked about all day in hell, where, as we know, it is not so cold as it is here in winter, and where, a chef’s hat on his head and standing before the hearth like a real cook, he had been roasting sinners with as much pleasure as any woman roasts sausages at Christmas.

I watched Zanders strip the façade he wore for so long to allow the flight attendant on his team’s plane to see the real him. I watched Stevie learn to love herself the way the arrogant hockey player who followed her everywhere loves her. The way we all do. I watched Indy come out of a relationship she wasn’t meant for and learn to be loved in a new, quieter way. I watched Ryan allow someone into his home and his heart after shutting everyone else out for so long, only for the brightest ray of sunshine to move in and light every dark space she could touch. I watched Kai learn to ask for help, only for that help to come in the form of a firecracker pastry chef who taught him how to have fun again. I watched Miller stop running and grow deeper roots than she ever thought she could by falling in love with a single dad and his little boy. I watched Kennedy learn how to love and be loved thanks to her husband who refused to go a day without showering her with it. I watched Isaiah persist in showing his wife exactly who he was behind the smile, all while keeping his heart open for the only woman he wanted to have it. I watched Hallie, with so much goddamn pride, as her heart softened again. She forgave me while also continuing to stand up for herself along the way. And I . . . well, I found love because it was always out there, waiting for me, even when I questioned its existence. In fact, I found it right next door—where it had always been.

Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation. This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid. We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to him on sheets of paper.

You see I'm wearing the tie," said Bingo. "It suits you beautiful," said the girl. Personally, if anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them on the mazzard, regardless of their age and sex; but poor old Bingo simply got all flustered with gratification, and smirked in the most gruesome manner. "Well, what's it going to be today?" asked the girl, introducing the business touch into the conversation. Bingo studied the menu devoutly. "I'll have a cup of cocoa, cold veal and ham pie, slice of fruit cake, and a macaroon. Same for you, Bertie?" I gazed at the man, revolted. That he could have been a pal of mine all these years and think me capable of insulting the old tum with this sort of stuff cut me to the quick. "Or how about a bit of hot steak-pudding, with a sparkling limado to wash it down?" said Bingo. You know, the way love can change a fellow is really frightful to contemplate. This chappie before me, who spoke in that absolutely careless way of macaroons and limado, was the man I had seen in happier days telling the head-waiter at Claridge's exactly how he wanted the chef to prepare the sole frite au gourmet au champignons, and saying he would jolly well sling it back if it wasn't just right. Ghastly! Ghastly! A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn't been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them, and Mabel hopped it.

In your light we see light. —Psalm 36:9 (NIV) ELENA ZELAYETA, BLIND CHEF Without warning at age thirty-six, Elena Zelayeta, pregnant with her second child, totally lost her sight. She had been the chef at a popular restaurant she and her husband owned. A sixty-seven-year-old widow now, she continued to prepare her famous Mexican dishes, marketing them with the help of her two sons, the younger of whom she’d never seen. Typical of San Francisco, it was raining when I arrived at her home. The door was opened by a very short, very broad woman with a smile like the sun. Well under five feet tall, “and wide as I am high,” she said, she led me on a fast-paced tour of the sizable house, ending in the kitchen, where pots bubbled and a frying pan sizzled. Was it possible that this woman who moved so swiftly and surely, who was now so unhesitatingly dishing up the meal she’d prepared for the two of us, really blind? She must see, dimly at least, the outlines of things. At the door to the dining room, Elena paused, half a dozen dishes balanced on her arms. “Is the light on?” she asked. No, she confirmed, not the faintest glimmer of light had she seen in thirty years. But she smiled as she said it. “I hear the rain,” she went on as she expertly carved the herb-crusted chicken, “and I’m sure it’s a gray day for the sighted. But for us blind folk, when we walk with God, the sun is always shining.” Let me walk in Your light, Lord, whatever the weather of the world. —Elizabeth Sherrill Digging Deeper: Ps 97:11; 1 Jn 1:5

But the launching had been a great success and now that the Space Hotel was safely in orbit, there was a tremendous hustle and bustle to send up the first guests. It was rumored that the President of the United States himself was going to be among the first to stay in the hotel, and of course there was a mad rush by all sorts of other people across the world to book rooms. Several kings and queens had cabled the White House in Washington for reservations, and a Texas millionaire called Orson Cart, who was about to marry a Hollywood starlet called Helen Highwater, was offering one hundred thousand dollars a day for the honeymoon suite. But you cannot send guests to a hotel unless there are lots of people there to look after them, and that explains why there was yet another interesting object orbiting the earth at that moment. This was the large Commuter Capsule containing the entire staff for Space Hotel “U.S.A.” There were managers, assistant managers, desk clerks, waitresses, bellhops, chambermaids, pastry chefs and hall porters. The capsule they were traveling in was manned by the three famous astronauts, Shuckworth, Shanks and Showler, all of them handsome, clever and brave. “In exactly one hour,” said Shuckworth,

In summer, most ramen restaurants in Tokyo serve hiyashi chūka, a cold ramen noodle salad topped with strips of ham, cucumber, and omelet; a tart sesame- or soy-based sauce; and sometimes other vegetables, like a tomato wedge or sheets of wakame seaweed. The vegetables are arranged in piles of parallel shreds radiating from the center to the edge of the plate like bicycle spokes, and you toss everything together before eating. It's bracing, ice-cold, addictive- summer food from the days before air conditioning. In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, a young lifestyle reporter wants to write an article about hiyashi chūka. "I'm not interested in something like hiyashi chūka," says my alter ego Yamaoka. It's a fake Chinese dish made with cheap industrial ingredients, he explains. Later, however, Yamaoka relents. "Cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings," he muses. "The idea of trying to make a good dish out of them is a valid one." Good point, jerk. He mills organic wheat into flour and hires a Chinese chef to make the noodles. He buys a farmyard chicken from an old woman to make the stock and seasons it with the finest Japanese vinegar, soy sauce, and sake. Yamaoka's mean old dad Kaibara Yūzan inevitably gets involved and makes an even better hiyashi chūka by substituting the finest Chinese vinegar, soy sauce, and rice wine. When I first read this, I enjoyed trying to follow the heated argument over this dish I'd never even heard of. Yamaoka and Kaibara are in total agreement that hiyashi chūka needs to be made with quality ingredients, but they disagree about what kind of dish it is: Chinese, Japanese, or somewhere in between? Unlike American food, Japanese cuisine has boundary issues.

Now I was lucky, in a way, because my money didn’t come overnight. It started with a gradual easing of housekeeping restraints so that Tana could shop without working out the sums beforehand. She could impulse-buy and fill the kitchen shelves with things that were fun to buy, even if they never saw the light of day again. Norwegian wooden toothpicks, plastic swords for the olives, pink loo paper with the imprint of raspberries

Today I saw the most beautiful girl in the world... She is the most beautiful girl in the world, Bartolomeo Scappi thought. Never have I seen a woman so perfect, so angelic, so impossible for me to attain. "Bella," he breathed when air filled his lungs once again. Even Ippolito d'Este's presence at the dining table could not mar his giddiness. The girl was so beautiful she glowed like a painting of the Madonna, making everyone around her seem colorless in comparison. She was clearly a principessa of a grand house, sitting between Ippolito's father, the Duke of Ferrara, on one side, and a woman most likely to be her mother on the right. Bartolomeo sought to memorize every feature of this goddess with golden hair that shone with glints of red in the last rays of the day's sunlight. Her eyes were dark chestnut, rich and deep, while her lips were pink, like the inside of a seashell. Her hair was braided, but much of it flowed loose over shoulders, teasing her pale skin. She wore a dress of red, with sleeves billowing white. Rubies and pearls spilled across her delicate collarbone toward her beautiful breasts. Scappi painted her picture in his mind and stored it deep within the frame of his heart. That evening, while staring at the sky, his thoughts lost in the memory of the signorina, a shooting star passed across his vision. "Stella," he said under his breath. I will call her Stella. My shining star.

This place, our little cloud forest, even though we missed our papi, it was the most beautiful place you've ever seen. We didn't really know that then, because it was the only place we'd ever seen, except in picture in books and magazines, but now that's I've seen other place, I know. I know how beautiful it was. And we loved it anyway even before we knew. Because the trees had these enormous dark green leaves, as a big as a bed, and they would sway in the wind. And when it rain you could hear the big, fat raindrops splatting onto those giant leaves, and you could only see the sky in bright blue patches if you were walking a long way off to a friend's house or to church or something, when you passed through a clearing and all those leaves would back away and open up and the hot sunshine would beat down all yellow and gold and sticky. And there were waterfalls everywhere with big rock pools where you could take a bath and the water was always warm and it smelled like sunlight. And at night there was the sound of the tree frogs and the music of the rushing water from the falls and all the songs of the night birds, and Mami would make the most delicious chilate, and Abuela would sing to us in the old language, and Soledad and I would gather herbs and dry them and bundle them for Papi to sell in the market when he had a day off, and that's how we passed our days.' Luca can see it. He's there, far away in the misty cloud forest, in a hut with a packed dirt floor and a cool breeze, with Rebeca and Soledad and their mami and abuela, and he can even see their father, far away down the mountain and through the streets of that clogged, enormous city, wearing a long apron and a chef's hat, and his pockets full of dried herbs. Luca can smell the wood of the fire, the cocoa and cinnamon of the chilate, and that's how he knows Rebeca is magical, because she can transport him a thousand miles away into her own mountain homestead just by the sound of her voice.

Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?

When older people ask me, “How have you been so successful after age 65?” I tell them, “Anyone who’s reached 65 years of age has had a world of experience behind him. He’s had his ups and downs and all the trials and tribulations of life. He certainly ought to be able to gather something out of that, something he can put together at the end of his 65 years so he can get a new start.” The way I see it, a man’s life is written by the way he lives it. It’s using any talent God has given him, even if his talent is cooking food or running a good motel. You can reach higher, think bigger, grow stronger and live deeper in this country of ours than anywhere else on Earth. The rules here give everybody a chance to win. If my story is different, it’s because my life really began at age 65 when most folks have already called it a day. I’d been modestly successful before I hit 65. After that I made millions. When they’re about 60 or 65, a lot of people feel that life is all over for them. Too many of them just sit and wait until they die or they become a burden to other people. The truth is they can make a brand new life for themselves if they just don’t give up and hunker down. I want to tell people, “You’re only as old as you feel or as you think, and no matter what your age there’s plenty of work to be done.” I don’t want to sound like I’m clearing my throat and giving advice about how a man can be successful. I’m not all puffed up. My main trade secret is I’m not afraid of hard, back-cracking work. After all, I was raised on a farm where hard work is the way of life.

Every day when I walk the streets of this city, I am just that. I am an Indochinese laborer, generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same. It is this curious mixture of careless disregard and notoriety that makes me long to take my body into a busy Saigon marketplace and lose it in the crush. There, I tell myself, I was just a man, anonymous, and, at a passing glance, a student, a gardener, a poet, a chef, a prince, a porter, a doctor, a scholar. But in Vietnam, I tell myself, I was above all just a man.

Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. Erotically enjambed in our loft bed, Clea patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chef in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, insuring that a soufflé or sourdough would rise. A good brave sentence (“I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring”) might jolly Clea to instant climax. We’d rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat on bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms, nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous endless war, if only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels. They never would be. All the media trumpeted the Administration’s lousy grammar.

I cooked with so many of the greats: Tom Colicchio, Eric Ripert, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz. Rick Bayless taught me not one but two amazing mole sauces, the whole time bemoaning that he never seemed to know what to cook for his teenage daughter. Jose Andres made me a classic Spanish tortilla, shocking me with the sheer volume of viridian olive oil he put into that simple dish of potatoes, onions, and eggs. Graham Elliot Bowles and I made gourmet Jell-O shots together, and ate leftover cheddar risotto with Cheez-Its crumbled on top right out of the pan. Lucky for me, Maria still includes me in special evenings like this, usually giving me the option of joining the guests at table, or helping in the kitchen. I always choose the kitchen, because passing up the opportunity to see these chefs in action is something only an idiot would do. Susan Spicer flew up from New Orleans shortly after the BP oil spill to do an extraordinary menu of all Gulf seafood for a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner Maria hosted to help the families of Gulf fishermen. Local geniuses Gil Langlois and Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard joined forces with Gale Gand for a seven-course dinner none of us will ever forget, due in no small part to Gil's hoisin oxtail with smoked Gouda mac 'n' cheese, Stephanie's roasted cauliflower with pine nuts and light-as-air chickpea fritters, and Gale's honey panna cotta with rhubarb compote and insane little chocolate cookies. Stephanie and I bonded over hair products, since we have the same thick brown curls with a tendency to frizz, and the general dumbness of boys, and ended up giggling over glasses of bourbon till nearly two in the morning. She is even more awesome, funny, sweet, and genuine in person than she was on her rock-star winning season on Bravo. Plus, her food is spectacular all day. I sort of wish she would go into food television and steal me from Patrick. Allen Sternweiler did a game menu with all local proteins he had hunted himself, including a pheasant breast over caramelized brussels sprouts and mushrooms that melted in your mouth (despite the occasional bit of buckshot). Michelle Bernstein came up from Miami and taught me her white gazpacho, which I have since made a gajillion times, as it is probably one of the world's perfect foods.

Robin’s voice on the executive chef’s line came to signify tongue. She didn’t say more than a word or two before Denise tuned out. Robin’s tongue and lips continued to form the instructions demanded by the day’s exigencies, but in Denise’s ear they were already speaking that other language of up and down and round and round that her body intuitively understood and autonomously obeyed; sometimes she melted so hard at the sound of this voice that her abdomen caved in and she doubled over; for the next hour-plus there was nothing in the world but tongue, no inventory or buttered pheasants or unpaid purveyors; she left the Generator in a buzzing hypnotized state of poor reflexes, the volume of the world’s noise lowered to near zero, other drivers luckily obeying basic traffic laws. Her car was like a tongue gliding down the melty asphalt streets, her feet like twin tongues licking pavement, the front door of the house on Panama Street like a mouth that swallowed her, the Persian runner in the hall outside the master bedroom like a tongue beckoning, the bed in its cloak of comforter and pillows a big soft tongue begging to be depressed, and then.

Five years from today. Where, exactly, do you want to be?" Her eyes lit up. Sadie loves that kind of question. "Ooh. Wow. Let me think. December, getting close to Christmas. I'll be twenty-one..." "Passed out under the tree with a fifth of Jack, half a 7-Eleven rotisserie chicken, and a cat who poops in your shoes." Frankie returned our startled glances with his lizard look. "Oh, wait. That's me. Sorry." I opted to ignore him. "Five years to the day,Sadie." She glanced quickly between Frankie and me. "Do we need a time-out here?" "Nope," I said. "Carry on." "Okay. Five years. I will be in New York visiting the pair of you because, while NYU is fab, I will be halfwau through my final year of classics at Cambridge, trying to decide whether I want to be a psychologist or a pastry chef. You," she said sternly to Frankie, "will be drinking appropriate amounds of champagne with your boyfriend, a six-three blond from Helsinki who happens to design for Tory Burch. Ah! Don't say anything. It's my future. You can choose a different designer when it's you go. I want the Tory freebies." She turned to me. "We will be sipping said champagne in the middle of the Gagosian Galley, because it is the opening night of your first solo exhibit. At which everything will sell." She punctuated the sentence by poking the air with a speared black olive. "I love you," I told her. Then, "But that wasn't really about you." "Oh,but it was," she disagreed, going back to her salad. "It's exactly where I want to be. Although" -she grinned over a tomato wedge- "I might have the next David Beckham in tow." "The next David Beckham is a five-foot-tall Welshman named Madog Cadwalader. He has extra teeth and bow legs." "Really?" Sadie asked. Frankie snorted. "No.Not really.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

1 To prepare the squash, peel off the tough skin with a potato peeler. Cut the squash in half lengthwise with a sharp chef’s knife, then scoop out the seeds and goop. (You can save the seeds for a tasty snack later, if you like—see page 52.) 2 Next, slice off the stem and the very bottom of the squash and throw them away. Place each half of the squash flat side down on a cutting board. Chop each half into ½-inch slices, then cut each slice into cubes. 3 Melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion, bell pepper, and garlic and sauté until translucent, about 2 minutes. 4 Add the cubed squash, cumin, coriander, turmeric, and cayenne, and

Most of the garden was devoted to the usual things- lettuces, onions, cabbage, and eggplant- ordinary ingredients for good, honest meals. But then there were the chef's other plants, the ones that made the cooks cross themselves and kiss their thumbnails whenever they were forced to handle them. Take love apples, to start with. Their poisonous reputation was as well known as that of hemlock, and the cooks protested loudly the day the chef put in his seedlings. What if their roots contaminated the onions? What if their fumes caused swoons or fits? What if the odd, tangy smell of their leaves attracted disgruntled ghosts from the nearby dungeons? It took repeated assurances, the installation of a wire enclosure, and the fact that nothing catastrophic followed their planting to keep the staff from uprooting the love apples behind the chef's back. Even so, one cook quit, and another developed a twitchy eye and started nipping at the cooking sherry. After the love apples, the chef put in beans- another rarity from the New World- and then potatoes. Once, he tried something he called maize, but the plants failed, so instead he bought sacks of dried maize from an unknown source. In a giant stone mortar, he ground the dried maize down to a coarse yellow meal from which he made one of his exotic specialties- polenta.

It wasn’t just the flavors that knocked me on my ass. It was seeing different people holding it, preparing it, serving it. Sometimes the chefs were not in the white jackets, and it wasn’t only men, it was women, it was children, it was everyone. There were Indians, blacks, Koreans, mixed people. When I had my own restaurant someday, I thought, I would never rule out someone based on race or sex or nationality. I wouldn’t do it because it was egalitarian, I’d do it because cutting people out meant cutting off talent and opportunity, people who could bring more to the table than I could ever imagine. I felt like I was climbing aboard a new food train, one that I’m still on to this day.

The sky was so blue. It’s only been five years. My skyline was never marked with an absence. Remember that wine school? Windows on the World? I had been underneath them, on the F train coming from Brooklyn just one hour before. I was late for high school but glued to the TV. I had taught a class there - on Rioja - on the night of September tenth. Chef made soup. So I heard something and looked out my window - you know I’m on the East Side. It was too low. But it was steady and went by almost in slow motion. The Owner set up a soup kitchen on the sidewalk. No, I haven’t been down there. The smoke. The dust. But the sky was so blue. My buddy was the somm at the restaurant - we came up at Tavern on the Green together. You guys never talk about it. I was going into a class called, I’m not joking, Meanings of Death. I always wondered: If I had been here, would I have stayed? And I thought, New York is so far away. My cousin was a firefighter, second-wave responder. Nothing on television is real. But am I safe? Because what else is there to do but make soup? But I really can’t imagine it. I was pouring milk into my cereal, I looked down for one second… I was asleep, I didn’t even feel the impact. A tide of people moving up the avenues on foot. Blackness. Sometimes it still feels too soon. It’s our shared map of the city. Then the sirens, for days. We never forget, really. A map we make by the absences. No one left the city. If you were here, you were temporarily cured of fear.

In a village quaint and bright, Lived a chef with great delight. Every morn, with break of day, He’d cook his meals, then he’d say “Did you eat?” His voice so clear, Echoed far and echoed near. Neighbors smiled, children played, In his care, their hearts were laid. One fine day, a stranger came, Hungry, tired, seeking fame. “Teach me, chef, your art so fine, I long to make my dishes shine.” With a nod and knowing glance, The chef began the culinary dance. “First, you learn to truly care, For food is love, you must declare.” Days turned weeks, the lessons flew, The stranger learned and friendships grew. But fame and glory filled his mind, Leaving care and love behind. He opened a place, grand and vast, But love for food, a thing of the past. “Did you eat?” He’d never ask, Focused solely on his task. DID YOU EAT? Customers came, then soon they went, For something vital had been spent. Food was fine, but heart was cold, A lesson learned, a tale retold. Back he went, with heavy heart, To the chef who’d played his part. “Teach me now, what I have missed, For love and care, I have dismissed.” The chef then smiled, wise and kind, “To care for others, open your mind. The food you make, with love instill, And hearts you’ll nourish, a void you’ll fill.” “Did you eat?” He asked anew, And in that question, wisdom true. For food with love is more than treat, It’s a bond, a joy, a life complete. So here’s the tale, both light and deep, A lesson strong for all to keep. In every meal, in every greet, Ask with love, “Did you eat?

Cendrillon specialized in seafood, so we had four fish stations: one for poaching, one for roasting, one for sautéing, and one for sauce. I was the chef de partie for the latter two, which also included making our restaurant's signature soups. O'Shea planned his menu seasonally- depending on what was available at the market. It was fall, my favorite time of the year, bursting with all the savory ingredients I craved like a culinary hedonist, the ingredients that turned my light on. All those varieties of beautiful squashes and root vegetables- the explosion of colors, the ochre yellows, lush greens, vivid reds, and a kaleidoscope of oranges- were just a few of the ingredients that fueled my cooking fantasies. In the summer, on those hot cooking days and nights in New York with rivulets of thick sweat coating my forehead, I'd fantasize about what we'd create in the fall, closing my eyes and cooking in my head. Soon, the waitstaff would arrive to taste tonight's specials, which would be followed by our family meal. I eyed the board on the wall and licked my lips. The amuse-bouche consisted of a pan-seared foie gras served with caramelized pears; the entrée, a boar carpaccio with eggplant caviar, apples, and ginger; the two plats principaux, a cognac-flambéed seared sea scallop and shrimp plate served with deep-fried goat cheese and garnished with licorice-perfumed fennel leaves, which fell under my responsibility, and the chief's version of a beef Wellington served with a celeriac mash, baby carrots, and thin French green beans.

Did You Eat?" In a village quaint and bright, Lived a chef with great delight. Every morn, with break of day, He’d cook his meals, then he’d say “Did you eat?” His voice so clear, Echoed far and echoed near. Neighbors smiled, children played, In his care, their hearts were laid. One fine day, a stranger came, Hungry, tired, seeking fame. “Teach me, chef, your art so fine, I long to make my dishes shine.” With a nod and knowing glance, The chef began the culinary dance. “First, you learn to truly care, For food is love, you must declare.” Days turned weeks, the lessons flew, The stranger learned and friendships grew. But fame and glory filled his mind, Leaving care and love behind. He opened a place, grand and vast, But love for food, a thing of the past. “Did you eat?” He’d never ask, Focused solely on his task. Customers came, then soon they went, For something vital had been spent. Food was fine, but heart was cold, A lesson learned, a tale retold. Back he went, with heavy heart, To the chef who’d played his part. “Teach me now, what I have missed, For love and care, I have dismissed.” The chef then smiled, wise and kind, “To care for others, open your mind. The food you make, with love instill, And hearts you’ll nourish, a void you’ll fill.” “Did you eat?” He asked anew, And in that question, wisdom true. For food with love is more than treat, It’s a bond, a joy, a life complete. So here’s the tale, both light and deep, A lesson strong for all to keep. In every meal, in every greet, Ask with love, “Did you eat?

No, I’d open a refuge for mothers. A retreat. Concrete 1970s brutalism, an anti-domestic architecture without flounces. Something low with big windows and wide corridors, carpets to deaden sound. There will be five or six rooms off the corridor, each with a wall of glass and sliding doors looking on to a cold, grey beach. Each room has a single bed in the corner, a table and chair. You may bring your laptop but there is no internet access and no telephone. There are books with a body count of zero and no suffering for anyone under the age of eight. A cinema where everything you wanted to see in the last eight years is shown at a time that allows you to have an early night afterwards. And the food, the kind of food you’re pleased to have eaten as well as pleased to eat, is made by a chef, a childless male chef, and brought to your room. You may ask him for biscuits at any moment of the day or night, send your mug back because you dislike the shape of the handle, and change your mind after ordering dinner. And there is a swimming pool, lit from below in a warm, low-ceilinged room without windows, which may be used by one mummy at a time to swim herself into dream. Oh, fuck it, I am composing a business plan for a womb with a view. So what? I’ll call it Hôtel de la Mère and the only real problem is childcare. Absent, children cause guilt and anxiety incompatible with the mission of the Hôtel; present, they prevent thought or sleep, much more swimming and the consumption of biscuits. We need to turn them off for a few days, suspend them like computers. Make them hibernate. You can’t uninvent children any more than you can uninvent the bomb.

It was Lola Simeona who served their bestseller: Soup No. 5 was a horrifying concoction of bull testes and spices, yet still was the best broth this side of the city, a popular meal for the adventurous and for those who prize umami above all. Occasionally a new customer would stagger out, pale and green all at once, because Lola Simeona was never shy about telling them exactly what they were eating, and in great detail. If it tasted good, she liked to say, then why would knowing this change anything? Lola sold Soup No. 5 regular at nearly all hours, closing at two a.m., only to begin again at nine the next day. Soup No. 5 regular was a picker-upper, a mood brightener. Soup No. 5 regular put people in cheerful temperaments, ready to face the day with optimism- a surprising side effect, given the cantankerous nature of the chef.

That Thanksgiving has evolved over hundreds of years into a national holiday of eating is rather ironic given the quality of Thanksgiving food. Stuffing and roasting a twenty-pound turkey is, without a doubt, the worst possible way to enjoy a game bird. The whole notion of eating a game bird is to savor those subtleties of flavor that elude the domesticated hen. Partridge, pheasant, quail are all birds that can be prepared in various ways to delight the senses; but a corn-fed turkey that’s big enough to serve a gathering of ten or more is virtually impossible to cook with finesse. The breasts will inevitably become as dry as sawdust by the time the rest of the bird has finished cooking. Stuffing only exacerbates this problem by insulating the inner meat from the effects of heat, thus prolonging the damage. The intrinsic challenge of roasting a turkey has led to all manner of culinary abominations. Cooking the bird upside down, a preparation in which the skin becomes a pale, soggy mess. Spatchcocking, in which the bird is drawn and quartered like a heretic. Deep frying! (Heaven help us.) Give me an unstuffed four-pound chicken any day. Toss a slice of lemon, a sprig of rosemary, and a clove of garlic into the empty cavity, roast it at 425° for sixty minutes or until golden brown, and you will have a perfect dinner time and again. The limitations of choosing a twenty-pound turkey as the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal have only been compounded by the inexplicable tradition of having every member of the family contribute a dish. Relatives who should never be allowed to set foot in a kitchen are suddenly walking through your door with some sort of vegetable casserole in which the “secret ingredient” is mayonnaise. And when cousin Betsy arrives with such a mishap in hand, one can take no comfort from thoughts of the future, for once a single person politely compliments the dish, its presence at Thanksgiving will be deemed sacrosanct. Then not even the death of cousin Betsy can save you from it, because as soon as she’s in the grave, her daughter will proudly pick up the baton. Served at an inconvenient hour, prepared by such an army of chefs that half the dishes are overcooked, half are undercooked,

The day after setting foot upon the deck of the whale-ship, Snowball was appointed chef de caboose, in which distinguished office he continued for several years; and only resigned it to accept of a similar situation on board a fine bark, commanded by Captain Benjamin Brace, engaged in the African trade. But not that African trade carried on by such ships as the Pandora. No; the merchandise transported in Captain Brace’s bark was not black men, but white ivory, yellow gold-dust, palm-oil, and ostrich-plumes; and it was said, that, after each “trip” to the African coast, the master, as well as owner, of this richly laden bark, was accustomed to make a trip to the Bank of England, and there deposit a considerable sum of money. After many years spent thus professionally, and with continued success, the ci-devant whalesman, man-o’-war’s-man, ex-captain of the Catamaran, and master of the African trader, retired from active life; and, anchored in a snug craft in the shape of a Hampstead Heath villa, is now enjoying his pipe, his glass of grog, and his otium cum dignitate. As for “Little William,” he in turn ceased to be known by this designation. It was no longer appropriate when he became the captain of a first-class clipper-ship in the East Indian trade,—standing upon his own quarter-deck full six feet in his shoes, and finely proportioned at that,—so well as to both face and figure, that he had no difficulty in getting “spliced” to a wife that dearly loved him. She was a very beautiful woman, with a noble round eye, jet black waving hair, and a deep brunette complexion. Many of his acquaintances were under the impression that she had Oriental blood in her veins, and that he had brought her home from India on one of his return voyages from that country. Those more intimate with him could give a different account,—one received from himself; and which told them that his wife was a native of Africa, of Portuguese extraction, and that her name was Lalee. They had heard, moreover, that his first acquaintance with her had commenced on board a slave bark; and that their friendship as children,—afterwards ripening into love,—had been cemented while both were castaways upon a raft—Ocean Waifs in the middle of the Atlantic. The End.

6 Eight days before he died, after a spectacular orgy of food, François Mitterrand, the French president, ordered a final course of ortolan, a tiny yellow-throated songbird no bigger than his thumb. The delicacy represented to him the soul of France. Mitterrand’s staff supervised the capture of the wild birds in a village in the south. The local police were paid off, the hunting was arranged, and the birds were captured, at sunrise, in special finely threaded nets along the edge of the forest. The ortolans were crated and driven in a darkened van to Mitterrand’s country house in Latche where he had spent his childhood summers. The sous-chef emerged and carried the cages indoors. The birds were fed for two weeks until they were plump enough to burst, then held by their feet over a vat of pure Armagnac, dipped headfirst and drowned alive. The head chef then plucked them, salted them, peppered them, and cooked them for seven minutes in their own fat before placing them in a freshly heated white cassole. When the dish was served, the wood-paneled room—with Mitterrand’s family, his wife, his children, his mistress, his friends—fell silent. He sat up in his chair, pushed aside the blankets from his knees, took a sip from a bottle of vintage Château Haut-Marbuzet. —The only interesting thing is to live, said Mitterrand. He shrouded his head with a white napkin to inhale the aroma of the birds and, as tradition dictated, to hide the act from the eyes of God. He picked up the songbirds and ate them whole: the succulent flesh, the fat, the bitter entrails, the wings, the tendons, the liver, the kidney, the warm heart, the feet, the tiny headbones crunching in his teeth. It took him several minutes to finish, his face hidden all the time under the white serviette. His family could hear the sounds of the bones snapping. Mitterrand dabbed the napkin at his mouth, pushed aside the earthenware cassole, lifted his head, smiled, bid good night and rose to go to bed. He fasted for the next eight and a half days until he died. 7 In Israel, the birds are tracked by sophisticated radar set up along the migratory routes all over the country—Eilat, Jerusalem, Latrun—with links to military installations and to the air traffic control offices at Ben Gurion airport.

The first thing I see when I get home from the hospital after midnight is the glint of the stainless steel oven in the semidarkness of the kitchen. The air smells sweet and eggy. I walk to the oven and pull open the door. Six white ramekins hold six perfect-looking crème caramels, and I wonder if they're safe to eat. It's been more than three hours since I turned off the oven. I remember a Swedish chef telling me years ago when I worked as a prep cook that unrefrigerated food will keep for four hours, but he also cleaned his fingernails with the tip of his chef's knife, so who knows. I pick up one of the dishes and sniff it. It smells fine. Without taking off my coat, I dig into a drawer for a spoon and eat the crème caramel in five seconds flat. The texture is silky and it tastes sweet and custardy, if not perfect. I pull the rest of the dishes from the oven to put in the fridge, telling myself one was enough. An extra treat at the end of a hard day. I've put three ramekins into the refrigerator when I can't stand it and dig into the second, eating more slowly this time, slipping out of my coat, savoring the custard on my tongue. Two is definitely enough, I'm thinking as I lick the inside of the cup, two is perfect. I'm picking up the remaining cup to put in the fridge but I turn instead, head for the bedroom with ramekin in hand. At least wait until you've gotten undressed and in bed, I told myself, surely you can wait. I make it as far as the doorway and I'm digging my spoon into a third caramel. Don't beat yourself up, I think when I'm done, it's just fake eggs and skim milk, a little sugar. It's for Cooking for Life, for God's sake, it can't be bad for you, but I feel bad somehow as I finish off the third ramekin. Okay, I'm satisfied now, I tell myself, and I can go to sleep. I get undressed , pull on my T-shirt and flannel boxers, head for the bathroom to brush my teeth, but suddenly I'm taking a detour to the kitchen, opening the fridge, staring at the three remaining custards. If I eat just one more, there'll be two left and I can take them to share with Benny tomorrow. That won't be so bad. I pick up the fourth ramekin, close the fridge, and eat as slowly as I can to truly appreciate the flavor. Restaurant desserts are easily as big as four of these little things.

As soon as he was out of sight, Gui pulled the macaron mixture towards him, and took a deep breath. He whipped it back and forth, beads of sweat springing on his forehead as his arm muscles released and contracted. When it was almost ready, he reached up for the shelf where the spices and colors were kept. Carefully, he brought down the bottle of 'creme de violette,' the jar of delicate, dried violets, their petals sparkling with sugar. In tiny drops, he measured the purple liqueur into the mixture. He was acting on impulse, yet at the same time he felt certain, as though his first teacher, Monsieur Careme, was with him, guiding his steps. The scent reached up as he stirred, heady and sweet as a meadow, deep as lingering perfume in a midnight room. Hands shaking, he piped the mixture onto a tray in tiny rounds, enough to make six, one for each day that he and Jeanne would have to make it through before they could be together for the rest of their lives. Maurice was delayed talking to Josef, and by the time he returned, Gui was putting the finishing touches to his creations, filling them with a vanilla cream from the cold room, balancing one, tiny, sugar-frosted violet flower upon each.

Italian cuisine is the most famous and beloved cuisine in the world for a reason. Accessible, comforting, seemingly simple but endlessly delicious, it never disappoints, just as it seems to never change. It would be easy to give you, dear reader, a book filled with the al dente images of the Italy of your imagination. To pretend as if everything in this country is encased in amber. But Italian cuisine is not frozen in time. It's exposed to the same winds that blow food traditions in new directions every day. And now, more than at any time in recent or distant memory, those forces are stirring up change across the country that will forever alter the way Italy eats. That change starts here, in Rome, the capital of Italy, the cradle of Western civilization, a city that has been reinventing itself for three millennia- since, as legend has it, Romulus murdered his brother Remus and built the foundations of Rome atop the Palatine Hill. Here you'll find a legion of chefs and artisans working to redefine the pillars of Italian cuisine: pasta, pizza, espresso, gelato, the food that makes us non-Italians dream so ravenously of this country, that makes us wish we were Italians, and that stirs in the people of Italy no small amount of pride and pleasure.

It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals. I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports. The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it. I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it? I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.” And I’m still angry. But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay? I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference. Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed. About them, I’m not angry anymore.

Once upon a time I'd left Los Angeles and been swallowed down the throat of a life in which my sole loyalty was to my tongue. My belly. Myself. My mother called me selfish and so selfish I became. From nineteen to twenty-five I was a mouth, sating. For myself I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it. I drank, smoked, flew cheap red-eyes around Europe, I lived in thrilling shitholes, I found pills that made nights pass in a blink or expanded time to a soap bubble, floating, luminous, warm. Time seemed infinite, then. I begged famous chefs for the chance to learn from them. I entered competitions and placed in a few. I volunteered to work brunch, turn artichokes, clean the grease trap. I flung my body at all of it: the smoke and singe of the grill station, a duck's breast split open like a geode, two hundred oysters shucked in the walk-in, sex in the walk-in, drunken rides around Paris on a rickety motorcycle and no helmet, a white truffle I stole and shaved in secret over a bowl of Kraft mac n' cheese for me, just me, as my body strummed the high taut selfish song of youth. On my twenty-fifth birthday I served black-market fugu to my guests, the neurotoxin stinging sweetly on my lips as I waited to see if I would, by eating, die. At that age I believed I knew what death was: a thrill, like brushing by a friend who might become a lover.

That black horse we used for packin’ up here is the most cantankerous beast alive,” Jake grumbled, rubbing his arm. Ian lifted his gaze from the initials on the tabletop and turned to Jake, making no attempt to hide his amusement. “Bit you, did he?” “Damn right he bit me!” the older man said bitterly. “He’s been after a chuck of me since we left the coach at Hayborn and loaded those sacks on his back to bring up here.” “I warned you he bites anything he can reach. Keep your arm out of his way when you’re saddling him.” “It weren’t my arm he was after, it was my arse! Opened his mouth and went for it, only I saw him outter the corner of my eye and swung around, so he missed.” Jakes’s frown darkened when he saw the amusement in Ian’s expression. “Can’t see why you’ve bothered to feed him all these years. He doesn’t deserve to share a stable with your other horses-beauties they are, every one but him.” “Try slinging packs over the backs of one of those and you’ll see why I took him. He was suitable for using as a pack mule; none of my other cattle would have been,” ian said, frowning as he lifted his head and looked about at the months of accumulated dirt covering everything. “He’s slower’n a pack mule,” Jake replied. “Mean and stubborn and slow,” he concluded, but he, too, was frowning a little as he looked around at the thick layers of dust coating every surface. “Thought you said you’d arranged for some village wenches to come up here and clean and cook fer us. This place is a mess.” “I did. I dictated a message to Peters for the caretaker, asking him to stock the place with food and to have two women come up here to clean and cook. The food is here, and there are chickens out in the barn. He must be having difficulty finding two women to stay up here.” “Comely women, I hope,” Jake said. “Did you tell him to make the wenches comely?” Ian paused in his study of the spiderwebs strewn across the ceiling and cast him an amused look. “You wanted me to tell a seventy-year-old caretaker who’s half-blind to make certain the wenches were comely?” “Couldn’ta hurt ‘t mention it,” Jake grumbled, but he looked chastened. “The village is only twelve miles away. You can always stroll down there if you’ve urgent need of a woman while we’re here. Of course, the trip back up here may kill you,” he joked referring to the winding path up the cliff that seemed to be almost vertical. “Never mind women,” Jake said in an abrupt change of heart, his tanned, weathered face breaking into a broad grin. “I’m here for a fortnight of fishin’ and relaxin’, and that’s enough for any man. It’ll be like the old days, Ian-peace and quiet and naught else. No hoity-toity servants hearin’ every word what’s spoke, no carriages and barouches and matchmaking mamas arrivin’ at your house. I tell you, my boy, though I’ve not wanted to complain about the way you’ve been livin’ the past year, I don’t like these servents o’ yours above half. That’s why I didn’t come t’visit you very often. Yer butler at Montmayne holds his nose so far in t’air, it’s amazin’ he gets any oxhegen, and that French chef o’ yers practically threw me out of his kitchens. That what he called ‘em-his kitchens, and-“ The old seaman abruptly broke off, his expression going from irate to crestfallen, “Ian,” he said anxiously, “did you ever learn t’ cook while we was apart?” “No, did you?” “Hell and damnation, no!” Jake said, appalled at the prospect of having to eat anything he fixed himself.

Spaghetti alla puttanesca is typically made with tomatoes, olives, anchovies, capers, and garlic. It means, literally, "spaghetti in the style of a prostitute." It is a sloppy dish, the tomatoes and oil making the spaghetti lubricated and slippery. It is the sort of sauce that demands you slurp the noodles Goodfellas style, staining your cheeks with flecks of orange and red. It is very salty and very tangy and altogether very strong; after a small plate, you feel like you've had a visceral and significant experience. There are varying accounts as to when and how the dish originated- but the most likely explanation is that it became popular in the mid-twentieth century. The first documented mention of it is in Raffaele La Capria's 1961 novel, Ferito a Morte. According to the Italian Pasta Makers Union, spaghetti alla puttanesca was a very popular dish throughout the sixties, but its exact genesis is not quite known. Sandro Petti, a famous Napoli chef and co-owner of Ischian restaurant Rangio Fellone, claims to be its creator. Near closing time one evening, a group of customers sat at one of his tables and demanded to be served a meal. Running low on ingredients, Petti told them he didn't have enough to make anything, but they insisted. They were tired, and they were hungry, and they wanted pasta. "Facci una puttanata qualsiasi!" they cried. "Make any kind of garbage!" The late-night eater is not usually the most discerning. Petti raided the kitchen, finding four tomatoes, two olives, and a jar of capers, the base of the now-famous spaghetti dish; he included it on his menu the next day under the name spaghetti alla puttanesca. Others have their own origin myths. But the most common theory is that it was a quick, satisfying dish that the working girls of Naples could knock up with just a few key ingredients found at the back of the fridge- after a long and unforgiving night. As with all dishes containing tomatoes, there are lots of variations in technique. Some use a combination of tinned and fresh tomatoes, while others opt for a squirt of puree. Some require specifically cherry or plum tomatoes, while others go for a smooth, premade pasta. Many suggest that a teaspoon of sugar will "open up the flavor," though that has never really worked for me. I prefer fresh, chopped, and very ripe, cooked for a really long time. Tomatoes always take longer to cook than you think they will- I rarely go for anything less than an hour. This will make the sauce stronger, thicker, and less watery. Most recipes include onions, but I prefer to infuse the oil with onions, frying them until brown, then chucking them out. I like a little kick in most things, but especially in pasta, so I usually go for a generous dousing of chili flakes. I crush three or four cloves of garlic into the oil, then add any extras. The classic is olives, anchovies, and capers, though sometimes I add a handful of fresh spinach, which nicely soaks up any excess water- and the strange, metallic taste of cooked spinach adds an interesting extra dimension. The sauce is naturally quite salty, but I like to add a pinch of sea or Himalayan salt, too, which gives it a slightly more buttery taste, as opposed to the sharp, acrid salt of olives and anchovies. I once made this for a vegetarian friend, substituting braised tofu for anchovies. Usually a solid fish replacement, braised tofu is more like tuna than anchovy, so it was a mistake for puttanesca. It gave the dish an unpleasant solidity and heft. You want a fish that slips and melts into the pasta, not one that dominates it. In terms of garnishing, I go for dried oregano or fresh basil (never fresh oregano or dried basil) and a modest sprinkle of cheese. Oh, and I always use spaghetti. Not fettuccine. Not penne. Not farfalle. Not rigatoni. Not even linguine. Always spaghetti.

Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic. His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a halloween mask and shout boo? He never saw the point of views -- what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide someplace with a beautiful view. Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That's all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude. A cutting word is worse than a bowstring. A cut may heal but a cut of the tongue does not. The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals -- which included animal sacrifice -- to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud. of which there was a wide variety. The British Empire spend five hundred years plundering the world. The word is 'thanks'. 'That's what it is, Roy! He won't come out, he has locked the doors! What if he self-harms, Roy! I mean -- what if he kills himself?' 'I will have to take him off my Christmas list.' "Any chance you can recover any of it?' 'You sitting near a window, Gerry?' 'Near a window? Sure, right by a window?' 'Can you see the sky?' 'Uh-huh. Got a clear view.' 'See any pigs flying past?' To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the death have no more fears. '...Cleo took me to the opera once. I spent the whole time praying for a fat lady to come on stage and start singing. Or a heart attack --whichever come sooner.' '..there is something strongly powerful -- almost magnetic -- about internet romances. A connection that is far stronger than a traditional meeting of two people. Maybe because on the internet you can lie all the time, each person gives the other their good side. It's intoxicating. That's one of the things which makes it so dangerous -- and such easy pickings for fraudsters.' He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss's morning -- and, with a bit of luck, his entire day. ..a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year. '...Then at some point in the future, I'll probably die in an overcrowded hospital corridor with some bloody hung-over medical student jumping up and down on my chest because they couldn't find a defibrillator. 'Give me your hand, bro,' the shorter one said. 'That one, the right one, yeah.' On the screen the MasterChef contestant said, 'Now with a sharp knife...' Jules de Copland drove away from Gatwick Airport in.a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis. 'I was talking about her attitude. But I'll tell you this, Roy. The day I can't say a woman -- or a man -- is plug ugly, that's the day I want to be taken out and shot.' It seems to me the world is in a strange place where everyone chooses to be offended all the time. 'But not too much in the way of brains,' GlennBranson chipped in. 'Would have needed the old Specialist Search Unite to find any trace of them.' 'Ever heard of knocking on a door?' 'Dunno that film -- was it on Netflix?' 'One word, four letters. Begins with an S for Sierra, ends with a T for Tango. Or if you'd like the longest version, we've been one word, six letters, begins with F for Foxtrot, ends with D for Delta.' No Cop liked entering a prison. In general there was a deep cultural dislike of all police officers by the inmates. And every officer entering.a prison, for whatever purposes, was always aware that if a riot kicked off while they were there, they could be both an instant hostage and a prime target for violence.

I have been all over the world cooking and eating and training under extraordinary chefs. And the two food guys I would most like to go on a road trip with are Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlmann, both of whom I have met, and who are genuinely awesome guys, hysterically funny and easy to be with. But as much as I want to be the Batgirl in that trio, I fear that I would be woefully unprepared. Because an essential part of the food experience that those two enjoy the most is stuff that, quite frankly, would make me ralph. I don't feel overly bad about the offal thing. After all, variety meats seem to be the one area that people can get a pass on. With the possible exception of foie gras, which I wish like heckfire I liked, but I simply cannot get behind it, and nothing is worse than the look on a fellow foodie's face when you pass on the pate. I do love tongue, and off cuts like oxtails and cheeks, but please, no innards. Blue or overly stinky cheeses, cannot do it. Not a fan of raw tomatoes or tomato juice- again I can eat them, but choose not to if I can help it. Ditto, raw onions of every variety (pickled is fine, and I cannot get enough of them cooked), but I bonded with Scott Conant at the James Beard Awards dinner, when we both went on a rant about the evils of raw onion. I know he is often sort of douchey on television, but he was nice to me, very funny, and the man makes the best freaking spaghetti in tomato sauce on the planet. I have issues with bell peppers. Green, red, yellow, white, purple, orange. Roasted or raw. Idk. If I eat them raw I burp them up for days, and cooked they smell to me like old armpit. I have an appreciation for many of the other pepper varieties, and cook with them, but the bell pepper? Not my friend. Spicy isn't so much a preference as a physical necessity. In addition to my chronic and severe gastric reflux, I also have no gallbladder. When my gallbladder and I divorced several years ago, it got custody of anything spicier than my own fairly mild chili, Emily's sesame noodles, and that plastic Velveeta-Ro-Tel dip that I probably shouldn't admit to liking. I'm allowed very occasional visitation rights, but only at my own risk. I like a gentle back-of-the-throat heat to things, but I'm never going to meet you for all-you-can-eat buffalo wings. Mayonnaise squicks me out, except as an ingredient in other things. Avocado's bland oiliness, okra's slickery slime, and don't even get me started on runny eggs. I know. It's mortifying.

Well then, first would be the abalone and sea urchin- the bounty of the sea! Ah, I see! This foam on top is kombu seaweed broth that's been whipped into a mousse!" "Mm! I can taste the delicate umami flavors seeping into my tongue!" "The fish meat was aged for a day wrapped in kombu. The seaweed pulls just enough of the moisture out of the meat, allowing it to keep longer, a perfect technique for a bento that needs to last. Hm! Next looks to be bonito. ...!" What rich, powerful umami!" Aha! This is the result of several umami components melding together. The glutamic acid in the kombu from the previous piece is mixing together in my mouth with the inosinic acid in the bonito! "And, like, I cold aged this bonito across two days. Aging fish and meats boosts their umami components, y'know. In other words, the true effect of this bento comes together in your mouth... as you eat it in order from one end to the other." "Next is a row... that looks to be made entirely from vegetables. But none of them use a single scrap of seaweed. The wrappers around each one are different vegetables sliced paper-thin!" "Right! This bento totally doesn't go for any heavy foods." "Next comes the sushi row that practically cries out that it's a main dish... raw cold-aged beef sushi!" Th-there it is again! The powerful punch of umami flavor as two components mix together in my mouth! "Hm? Wait a minute. I understand the inosinic acid comes from the beef... but where is the glutamic acid?" "From the tomatoes." "Tomatoes? But I don't see any..." "They're in there. See, I first put them in a centrifuge. That broke them down into their component parts- the coloring, the fiber, and the jus. I then filtered the jus to purify it even further. Then I put just a few drops on each piece of veggie sushi." "WHAT THE HECK?!" "She took an ingredient and broke it down so far it wasn't even recognizable anymore? Can she even do that?" Appliances like the centrifuge and cryogenic grinder are tools that were first developed to be used in medicine, not cooking. Even among pro chefs, only a handful are skilled enough to make regular use of such complex machines! Who would have thought a high school student was capable of mastering them to this degree! "And last but not least we have this one. It's sea bream with some sort of pink jelly... ... resting on top of a Chinese spoon." That pink jelly was a pearl of condensed soup stock! Once it popped inside my mouth... ... it mixed together with the sea bream sushi until it tasted like- "Sea bream chazuke!

We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's Naples at Table and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal. The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments. If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, tourists, and various passers-through begin to clog the Strip, aggressively vying for the precious few available parking spaces, not to mention tables at Pamela's, a retro diner that serves the best hotcakes in Pittsburgh. On weekends, street vendors crowd the sidewalks, selling beaded necklaces, used CDs, bandanas in exotic colors, cheap, plastic running shoes, and Steelers paraphernalia by the ton. It's a loud, jostling, carnivalesque experience and one of the best things about Pittsburgh. There's even a bakery called Bruno's that sells only biscotti- at least fifteen different varieties daily. Bruno used to be an accountant until he retired from Mellon Bank at the age of sixty-five to bake biscotti full-time. There's a little hand-scrawled sign in the front of window that says, GET IN HERE! You can't pass it without smiling. It's a little after eight when Chloe and I finish up at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company where, in addition to the prosciutto, soppressata, both hot and sweet sausages, fresh ricotta, mozzarella, and imported Parmigiano Reggiano, all essential ingredients for pizza rustica, I've also picked up a couple of cans of San Marzano tomatoes, which I happily note are thirty-nine cents cheaper here than in New York.

To this day, I merely have to see the words sauce au poivre on a menu to think of Vergé’s reinvention of that classic sauce: the sweet and spicy Sauce Mathurini made with cracked exotic pepper, golden raisins, cognac, and extremely full-flavored beef stock. Vergé could move easily from the big tastes of meat and game sauces to a whimsical and delicate Sauce Poivre Rose—a light, creamy emulsion of paprika and sweet Sauternes, brought to a briny finish with Mediterranean rock lobster.

Imagine you’re invited to a celebratory dinner. The chef’s talent is legendary, and the invitation says that this particular dinner is going to be a feast of monumental proportions. Bring your appetite, you’re told—come hungry. How would you do it? You might try to eat less over the course of the day—maybe even skip lunch, or breakfast and lunch. You might go to the gym for a particularly vigorous workout, or go for a longer run or swim than usual, to work up an appetite. You might even decide to walk to the dinner, rather than drive, for the same reason. Now let’s think about this for a moment. The instructions that we’re constantly being given to lose weight—eat less (decrease the calories we take in) and exercise more (increase the calories we expend)—are the very same things we’ll do if our purpose is to make ourselves hungry, to build up an appetite, to eat more.

Say you’re running a restaurant and you want to know if your chef is doing a good job. One way to measure success is to track how many customers pay for a meal each day. If more customers come in, the food must be good. If fewer customers come in, something must be wrong. However, this one measurement—daily revenue—only gives a limited picture of what’s really going on. Just because someone pays for a meal doesn’t mean they enjoy the meal. Even dissatisfied customers are unlikely to dine and dash. In fact, if you’re only measuring revenue, the food might be getting worse but you’re making up for it with marketing or discounts or some other method. Instead, it may be more effective to track how many customers finish their meal or perhaps the percentage of customers who leave a generous tip. The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.

banana coffee cake

I was just thinking that I'm beginning to understand why this is Chef Beckett's signature dish. I've eaten many a tarte à la bouille in my day, but usually in a Cajun setting. It is, after all, a Louisiana trademark. But watching Chef Beckett create her version is fascinating. She's managed to keep all the heart and tradition of the Cajun creation, while adding her own unmistakable Nashville flair.

But why are you taking him?” Monya added a wrapped blueberry pie and three loaves of day-old bread to the box of food items she was packing. Then she looked over at Percy. “Why do you care?” she asked, squinting slightly as she studied her chef, then pointing. “And you’re burning your toast.” “Shoot,” Percy said, and dropped the toast from singed fingers. Then he glared at Monya. “I care. We all care. This guy just shows up and waltzes in here from… wherever, and you just start taking up with him, just like that? It’s not like you. I mean, what do you even know about him?” “I know he kisses like a…” “Gah,” Percy made a pained noise. “You’re burning my ears.

JJ, as a professional chef, defends the ground on which he stands. “ When we were promoting the cuisine of the Cecil, I got into a little argument with one sister. I said our cuisine is the celebration of the food of slaves. She winced. ‘ How can you celebrate the slaves?’ No, I’m not celebrating slavery, I’m celebrating how they survived, and you have to know the source and what happens when people from that background met incoming migrants from Asia. But that’s the part I really need to know. I never made it to the slave castle and that’s why I need to get back. I’m going to learn more about our cooking, the way our ancestral grandmothers cooked because at the end of the day, your goal as a chef is you want to cook like your grandmother.

Embrace Efficiency, Elevate Flavor: Smart Kitchen Tools for Culinary Adventurers The kitchen, once a realm of necessity, has morphed into a playground of possibility. Gone are the days of clunky appliances and tedious prep work. Enter the age of the smart kitchen tool, a revolution that whispers efficiency and shouts culinary liberation. For the modern gastronome, these tech-infused gadgets are not mere conveniences, but allies in crafting delectable adventures, freeing us to savor the journey as much as the destination. Imagine mornings when your smart coffee maker greets you with the perfect brew, prepped by the whispers of your phone while you dream. Your fridge, stocked like a digital oracle, suggests recipes based on its ever-evolving inventory, and even automatically orders groceries you've run low on. The multi-cooker, your multitasking superhero, whips up a gourmet chili while you conquer emails, and by dinnertime, your smart oven roasts a succulent chicken to golden perfection, its progress monitored remotely as you sip a glass of wine. But efficiency is merely the prologue. Smart kitchen tools unlock a pandora's box of culinary precision. Smart scales, meticulous to the milligram, banish recipe guesswork and ensure perfect balance in every dish. Food processors and blenders, armed with pre-programmed settings and self-cleaning prowess, transform tedious chopping into a mere blip on the culinary radar. And for the aspiring chef, a sous vide machine becomes a magic wand, coaxing impossible tenderness from the toughest cuts of meat. Yet, technology alone is not the recipe for culinary bliss. For those who yearn to paint with flavors, smart kitchen tools are the brushes on their canvas. A connected recipe platform becomes your digital sous chef, guiding you through each step with expert instructions and voice-activated ease. Spice racks, infused with artificial intelligence, suggest unexpected pairings, urging you to venture beyond the familiar. And for the ultimate expression of your inner master chef, a custom knife, forged from heirloom steel and lovingly honed, becomes an extension of your hand, slicing through ingredients with laser focus and lyrical grace. But amidst the symphony of gadgets and apps, let us not forget the heart of the kitchen: the human touch. Smart tools are not meant to replace our intuition but to augment it. They free us from the drudgery, allowing us to focus on the artistry, the love, the joy of creation. Imagine kneading dough, the rhythm of your hands mirroring the gentle whirring of a smart bread machine, then shaping a loaf that holds the warmth of both technology and your own spirit. Or picture yourself plating a dish, using smart portion scales for precision but garnishing with edible flowers chosen simply because they spark joy. This, my friends, is the symphony of the smart kitchen: a harmonious blend of tech and humanity, where efficiency becomes the brushstroke that illuminates the vibrant canvas of culinary passion. Of course, every adventure, even one fueled by smart tools, has its caveats. Interoperability between gadgets can be a tangled web, and data privacy concerns linger like unwanted guests. But these challenges are mere bumps on the culinary road, hurdles to be overcome by informed choices and responsible data management. After all, we wouldn't embark on a mountain trek without checking the weather, would we? So, embrace the smart kitchen, dear foodies! Let technology be your sous chef, your precision tool, your culinary muse. But never forget the magic of your own hands, the wisdom of your palate, and the joy of a meal shared with loved ones. For in the end, it's not about the gadgets, but the memories we create around them, the stories whispered over simmering pots, and the laughter echoing through a kitchen filled with the aroma of possibility.

The two grandmas did all the cooking—all day long, it seemed to me—moving slowly around each other in the narrow kitchen and producing pierogies or wedding soup or Irish soda bread, stuffed cabbage, roasts, meatballs, cookies, iced layer cakes. Like chefs in some commercial kitchen, they cooked constantly, in no particular order and with no particular meal in mind. Just the endless turning out of something good to eat.

The coast of Austria-Hungary yielded what people called cappuzzo, a leafy cabbage. It was a two-thousand-year-old grandparent of modern broccoli and cauliflower, that was neither charismatic nor particularly delicious. But something about it called to Fairchild. The people of Austria-Hungary ate it with enthusiasm, and not because it was good, but because it was there. While the villagers called it cappuzzo, the rest of the world would call it kale. And among its greatest attributes would be how simple it is to grow, sprouting in just its second season of life, and with such dense and bulky leaves that in the biggest challenge of farming it seemed to be how to make it stop growing. "The ease with which it is grown and its apparent favor among the common people this plant is worthy a trial in the Southern States," Fairchild jotted. It was prophetic, perhaps, considering his suggestion became reality. Kale's first stint of popularity came around the turn of the century, thanks to its horticultural hack: it drew salt into its body, preventing the mineralization of soil. Its next break came from its ornamental elegance---bunches of white, purple, or pink leaves that would enliven a drab garden. And then for decades, kale kept a low profile, its biggest consumers restaurants and caterers who used the cheap, bushy leaves to decorate their salad bars. Kale's final stroke of luck came sometime in the 1990s when chemists discovered it had more iron than beef, and more calcium, iron, and vitamin K than almost anything else that sprouts from soil. That was enough for it to enter the big leagues of nutrition, which invited public relations campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and morning-show cooking segments. American chefs experimented with the leaves in stews and soups, and when baked, as a substitute for potato chips. Eventually, medical researchers began to use it to counter words like "obesity," "diabetes," and "cancer." One imagines kale, a lifetime spent unnoticed, waking up one day to find itself captain of the football team.

Staff meal." The words are sweet relief, and I untie the apron Roberto gave me, hanging it up on the hook by the entrance. Sure, I ate here last night. But there were so many things on the menu I didn't order. The open-faced duck confit sandwich with red wine aioli, the almond-crusted salmon with zucchini puree, tempura vegetables, chipotle oil. I wonder how this works, if we get to choose whatever we want. Or maybe it's some new creation, some experimental dish that Chef tries out on the staff before adding it to the menu. To think that I might try one of her dishes before anyone else is all the reward I need for today's scrubbing, for the hot water that has splashed all over me throughout the day. What I find instead is a sheet tray of charred burger patties, most of them covered in toxic-yellow American cheese. There's another sheet tray with toasted buns and matchstick fries. Morris and Boris are leaning against the coffee station, taking huge bites in sync. I try to hide my disappointment, follow Elias's lead and grab a plate. I'm shocked that some people are eating it just like that, munching down as quickly as possible without bothering with the condiments. I'm starving too, but it's crazy to me that Chef Elise's food is at their fingertips and everyone's just letting it sit there. There's a whole line of deli containers right in front of us, and I can't even tell what's in them, but the mere thought is making my mouth water. Whispering so that no one can laugh and/or yell at me, I ask Elias if it's cool to use some of the mise to spruce up the burger. He shrugs. "Do your thing." It mellows the disappointment a little: pickled red jalapeños, cilantro aioli, Thai slaw.

I came up with a variation on the molten-chocolate cake that doesn't make me crazy with how brainless it is. You said the theme was date restaurant, man accessible, right?" "Right." "So I added the Black Butte Porter---the one from Deschutes Brewery---to the chocolate cake. It makes the flavor a little darker, a little more complex. I wanted to do five or six desserts, with at least three of them seasonal. For the standards, I thought the chocolate cake and an Italian-style cream puff." She nodded toward the cream puffs on the table. "Try one and tell me what you think." I wasn't awake enough for silverware, so I picked up the cream puff and bit straight into it, forming a small cloud of powdered sugar. "That's so good," I said. Clementine continued to watch me. I dove in for a second bite. And then I found it---cherries. Ripe, real cherries in a fruity filling hidden at the center. "Oh my goodness," I said, my mouth full. "That is amazing." "Glad you think so. I thought it was a clever play on Saint Joseph's Day zeppole---cherries, but not those awful maraschino cherries." I nodded. "Maraschino cherries are the worst." Another bite. "This cream puff almost tastes like a grown-up doughnut. And I mean that in the best way.

When they heard that someone was full figured and liked cooking & eating, most men imagined someone who was quiet and domestic; someone whose interior life would not surpass their own. But did that reasoning really hold up? Eating was fundamentally an individual and egoistic compulsion... a gourmand was ultimately a seeker of the truth. You could wrap up their mission in all kinds of fancy language, but it was simply confronting their desires day in and day out. As you learn to cook, you become increasingly able to shut out the outside world and create a fortress within your own spirit. You hunted down your prey using fire and blade to fashion them down into the form you desired... it takes a deathly earnestness to remain faithful to your desires at all times.

Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic. His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a halloween mask and shout boo? He never saw the point of views -- what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide someplace with a beautiful view. Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That's all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude. A cutting word is worse than a bowstring. A cut may heal but a cut of the tongue does not. The Sakawa students were all from poor, underprivileged backgrounds. Sakawa was a mix of religious juju and modern internet technology. They were taught, in structured classes, the art of online fraud as well as arcane African rituals -- which included animal sacrifice -- to have a voodoo effect on their victims, ensuring the success of each fraud. of which there was a wide variety. The British Empire spend five hundred years plundering the world. The word is 'thanks'. 'That's what it is, Roy! He won't come out, he has locked the doors! What if he self-harms, Roy! I mean -- what if he kills himself?' 'I will have to take him off my Christmas list.' "Any chance you can recover any of it?' 'You sitting near a window, Gerry?' 'Near a window? Sure, right by a window?' 'Can you see the sky?' 'Uh-huh. Got a clear view.' 'See any pigs flying past?' To dream of death is good for those in fear, for the death have no more fears. '...Cleo took me to the opera once. I spent the whole time praying for a fat lady to come on stage and start singing. Or a heart attack --whichever come sooner.' '..there is something strongly powerful -- almost magnetic -- about internet romances. A connection that is far stronger than a traditional meeting of two people. Maybe because on the internet you can lie all the time, each person gives the other their good side. It's intoxicating. That's one of the things which makes it so dangerous -- and such easy pickings for fraudsters.' He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss's morning -- and, with a bit of luck, his entire day. ..a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year. '...Then at some point in the future, I'll probably die in an overcrowded hospital corridor with some bloody hung-over medical student jumping up and down on my chest because they couldn't find a defibrillator. 'Give me your hand, bro,' the shorter one said. 'That one, the right one, yeah.' On the screen the MasterChef contestant said, 'Now with a sharp knife...' Jules de Copland drove away from Gatwick Airport in.a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis. 'I was talking about her attitude. But I'll tell you this, Roy. The day I can't say a woman -- or a man -- is plug ugly, that's the day I want to be taken out and shot.' It seems to me the world is in a strange place where everyone chooses to be offended all the time. 'But not too much in the way of brains,' GlennBranson chipped in. 'Would have needed the old Specialist Search Unite to find any trace of them.' 'Ever heard of knocking on a door?' 'Dunno that film -- was it on Netflix?' 'One word, four letters. Begins with an S for Sierra, ends with a T for Tango. Or if you'd like the longest version, we've been one word, six letters, begins with F for Foxtrot, ends with D for Delta.' No Cop liked entering a prison. In general there was a deep cultural dislike of all police officers by the inmates. And every officer entering.a prison, for whatever purposes, was always aware that if a riot kicked off while they were there, they could be both an instant hostage and a prime target for violence.

I spent a long time traveling. When I was human, I became a guard so I could see the world. That and… well, look at me.” He gestured to himself with a half smile. “What else was I going to do with myself? I could choose between blacksmith and solider, and only one of those didn’t require me to stare at horses’ asses all day.” “You could’ve been a chef,” I countered, and when he laughed—an actual laugh—the sound of it loosened something in my chest.

He was like a jazz musician, joyfully improvising, imagining tastes that ordinary people could not. He pulled ingredients apart and reconstructed them in endlessly surprising ways: clear little cubes that tasted of just-picked tomatoes still warm from the sun, or cheese puffs that floated into your mouth and simply vanished, leaving a trail of flavor in their wake. One day he melted chocolate, mixed in chilies, and wrapped the sauce around tart orange ice; people begged for seconds. She'd never met anyone like him, and as she watched him cook, Stella saw that in the kitchen all the qualities that made him a poor choice as a parent or a partner turned into strengths. Utterly unafraid of failure, he was willing to try anything. It was the source of his creativity. He was a confident person who pleased himself; if it didn't work out, he simply moved on.

PROCESS FOR ADAPTING TO KETOFASTING Step one: Stop eating three hours before bedtime. Step two: Begin shortening your eating window—typically this is most easily done by continuing to not eat for three hours before bedtime and then delaying breakfast. Step three: As you gradually reduce your eating window to between six and eight hours a day, begin following a ketogenic diet. Step four: After you are regularly producing ketones, add in one “feast” day a week when you eat more net carbs and protein in what’s known as a cyclical ketogenic diet.

Let me phrase this a different way. Why would I make you cook?” “Why else did you think I was here?” I throw my hands up. “Wait. Wait. Wait. Me hovering around the kitchen, or having my own knives, or even me cracking terrible food jokes didn’t give it away?” With a grin potent enough to get me pregnant, he says, “I never knew you were a chef. That makes sense.” I bask in his sunshine, the warmth in his eyes better than the first day of summer growing up. And then I make breakfast for the two of us.