As many were, I was shocked and disappointed to hear the last month’s announcement of the demise of Gourmet Magazine. I am still baffled. The obvious production cost that it requires, and the consumer’s tendency to lean toward things that are more approachable and earthy in the financial decline are well understood. But the decision to drop Gourmet over so many others, I don’t completely comprehend. And I find myself playing Newhouse in my head. Why not model after New York Times Magazine, and just reduce its dimensions to save printing costs, or better yet, reduce it to pocket size like Teen Vogue or Jalouse? Publish it bi-monthly, or quarterly, even. Or you know.. drop the less beautiful, less inspiring one. But it’s all futile. And the otheone is just fine, I’m sure.
I just hope that the immensely talented people who made Gourmet such beautiful publication are being pulled left and right by others to continue the legacy (hopefully by Jon Stewart’s new magazine!).
I am holding on dearly to the few copies of Gourmet that I have left, 2 of which being the thanksgiving issue from last year, and this year: the final issue. Both last year and this year, I was less than impressed with the cover featuring a picture of a giant turkey roast, but that’s just the cover. So in honor of the deceased grandmother of a food mag, our Thanksgiving menu this year will be inspired by the Gourmet Thanksgiving Issues.
The image on top, one of my favorite page of Gourmet ever, is from last year’s issue. Just so you know, our Thanksgiving table will look absolutely nothing like that.
It’ll probably look more like last year’s dinner, which was pretty clumsily put together, but it makes me imagine cartoon heart bubbles coming out of my head when I see these pictures-
I asked all my friends to bring a dish to make things easier for myself. But finding a main Thanksgiving dish for a couple of vegans is always a bit of a predicament. Having decided a long ago that we’ve been in this game for too long for tofurkey, I have yet to create a main dish that I was truly satisfied with. So this year, I am sticking with something familiar.
Shepherd’s pie. On the left is poblano potato gratin from last year’s issue, and on the right, shepherd’s pie from this year. Last year I made mashed parsnips and celery roots in lieu of the traditional mashed potatoes. I’m thinking about incorporating that, making it a bit more gratin-like, into the shepherd’s pie formula.
Matt, being a Southerner, needs to have some kind of collard greens, and this crazy thing from last years issue looks pretty perfect, so we will try to mimic. And of course there will be dessert, which will look a lot less nice than the picture above. I’ll try, but don’t expect too much, guys. Okay?
People often tend to think in black & white when talking about urban living versus rural living, but as a person who’s only lived in big cities, my personal view on that matter might be peculiar to some. Growing up with the sonic noise of traffic in the background and the klaxon sound as lullaby, staring down the cars and people the size of architectural model figures from my 16th floor windows, that, was my nature, and I thrived. The ‘real’ nature for me, was a complete fantasy where Bambi and unicorns roam. I still find rural settings to be mysterious and even frightening, and that makes it a very seductive monster. I have been riding the subway and eating street food since elementary school, never knew anyone that ‘mowed their lawn’, but have always fantasized about Thoreau’s Walden, and tree house living. I still fantasize about livining in a cottage with a cashmere goat, a lamb, and angora rabbits, and spinning my small batches of wool, and growing all of the food I consume.
I moved to New York when I was 17, and I had never been so close to living ‘rural’. For the first time in my life, I got to live in apartments below 12th floor. I even made friends who have back yards, and my Brooklyn apartment was so quiet at night. No traffic noise, no sound of screaming childen in the playgound. And the apartments came in such ‘raw’ conditions, that often I did have moments where I’d imagine my self as Thoeau in his cabin. After years of wandering around the boroughs, I put my name on the lease for the first time when I found my current apartment. Immediately, I perpetuated my rural fantasy with building my little garden in the fire escape. It became my pride and joy.
I grew most of them from seeds, some even from the seeds of the produce that we received from our CSA. If you are an avid gardener, or a farmer, you would see a more than a few things that don’t look quite right with what I have done above. But this was my first ‘gardening’ experience, although it was only a small step up from caring for houseplants. It was also the first time I got to eat the food I grew.
After my semi-successful endeavor at the fire escape, I have gained some confidance, and a little envious of people I know who have amazing gardens. So I asked my landlord if we could take over our weed-jungle of a backyard that no one was using. To my surprise, she granted me access!
We had this talk on Saturday afternoon, and by Sunday morning, my landlord’s husband had weeded the entire backyard, bless his heart. The pressure was on. But then I started really thinking about it. Now I had this empty lot filled with toxic soil, with a weird entry way through the bastment and throught the awkward undergound access point that would make it very difficult for me to tackle alone. I knew the amount of work it would require to maintain the space, and I will have to leave it eventually. What have I gotten myself into? It’s too late to be planting most things for this year anyway. Worst of it all, practically speaking, I really don’t even have time for this.
But living in North Brooklyn, hanging out in people’s backyards in summertime is almost a required activity, unless you’re allergic to daylight. And everytime I pass a community garden, it’s as if I am under a hippie spell. I couldn’t deprive myself of fullfilling my childhood fantasies no longer.
So, I have made a commitment. I’ve been pilfering some plants that I can re-root, and last night, I stayed up until very late ordering seeds from seeds of change. I’m so excited to imagine not having to spend money buying cut flowers, growing more herbs, and starting a compost. But I am still worried about the soil. I’m going to have to cover the ground with something, and get compost/soil from somewhere, and that’s not going to be cheap. My plan is to plant the flowers and plants straight to the uncovered ground, and build beds for the edible plants. Hopefully it won’t fail horribly. Off to get a shovel!
Photo by Daniel Schaub via Flickr
I suppose I’m a couple of days behind, but I just read this. It makes me pretty sad. So many times he’d distract me from running my errands around Union Square with his charming but sometimes-annoying repertoire. There are a lot of bizarre people around the city that I’ve been curious about, like the man who dresses in all white and asks for change around 1st avenue, and the tranny lady who wears pink leg warmers and used to smile at me when I’d walk around my old neighborhood in Chelsea, but this gentleman was by far the most charismatic. Now that he won’t be there, I wonder if there will be someone to replace him. Or whatever will happen to all the veggie peelers?Although I’ve resisted the temptation to get me one of those many times, this time, I really need one. Seriously. We have misplaced our peeler and neither of us have any idea where it is. Also, I suddenly have an urge to chop some flower shaped carrots slices.
i send my condolences to the family and friends of Mr. Ades.
I don’t usually like to make bold, general statements, but you’d just have to take my word on this one. Jaques Torres chocolate chip cookies are the best chocolate chip cookies in the world.
Yes, they are better than your mom’s, dad’s, Mrs. Fields’, Tate’s, Pepperidge Farm’s, Vegan Treats’, Alternative Baking Companie’s, City Bakery’s,* aaand everyone else’s.
Most cookies are delicious, but I don’t think I knew that plain chocolate chip cookies can be so extraordinary until I tried one of his cookies. It’s got the just right ratio of crispy and soft texture, and everything works to bring out the main star of the piece- the chocolate. Some how it melts just perfectly inside the dough, that cookie kind of becomes a chocolate sandwich.
And I’m lucky that dairy and egg products really don’t do well with me, because other wise, I think that I’d be suffering from health as well as monetary problems. But my restrictions can’t keep me away from trying. After a minute of googling, I came across a plenty of recipes that claimed to be the original recipe for the Jacques Torres chocolate chip cookies. That’ the problem with the internet. You can find anything, sure. But is it always reliable? Perhaps, perhaps not.
Baking really isn’t my forte (yet). But when J invited me for a dinner at her place, I thought, this might be a great change for me to give this another try.
This was the 3rd time I’ve tried to duplicate the masterpiece of Mr. Dessert Circus, and the 2nd time I’ve used this recipe from New York Times as a base, and I think I’m getting closer each time. I just use soy butter in place of butter, and egg substitute in place of eggs.
From my experience, I learned that the ratio of bread flour and pastry flour really makes a difference. Bread flour is what gives the ‘crisp’ part of the cookie that I love. This time I ran out of pastry flour at about 2/3 the cup, so I compensated with bread flour, and it turned out a bit more dense. Also, if reading about the amount of sugar and oil going into baking on the recipe sickens you like it does me, put in less sugar. But unless you’re an expert, don’t skimp on the oil. I learned this the hard way.
And most importantly, you should always use the best chocolate you can find. That’s what the cookie is about after all.
Jacques Torres Chocolatier in the West Village:
350 Hudson at King Street, New York, NY
212.414.2462
*All the cookies from the above bakeries are excellent, especially the City Bakery/Build-A-Green Bakery’s.
** Just so you know, these cookies really look nothing like the original Jacques Torres cookies. I think this is due to the aforementioned flour, and maybe that whole “butter” thing. But I still think that’s a worthy sacrifice.
Our little playground 
I’ve been a fan of The Minimalist for some time, but I am really starting to feel a warm sense of solidarity after his defense of his small kitchen in Saturday’s Times. Over the years there have been times when my friends would visit various tiny kitchens (some actually smaller than Mark Bittman’s “pathetically small kitchen”) and gasp in horror/awe/pity at the amount of cooking that happens. For me, cooking has always been a natural part of my routine, so I never thought that my small kitchens posed any great restrictions. Roasting a whole pig was never on my menu anyway.
When some of my friends started lamenting over the lack of space in our city dwellings and tell me that they couldn’t understand how I can bring myself to cook in such a small space, I started to think about the relationship of our living spaces to our eating habits.
For the first year after graduating from college, I worked for a very stylish lady in her late 50’s as a private art dealer’s assistant. She worked out of her tidy West Village 1 bedroom studio, and her kitchenette/living room space was converted to an elegant office space with a large flat file in the place of a kitchen work table. On her counters were stationary items, books, and the mini fridge was filled with nothing but bottles of Fiji water.
Evidently, food was not one of her priorities. She had one full meal a day and never cooked. Returning home every day to the spacious 2 bedroom in Chelsea which I was sharing with a friend, I would often compare our unrenovated kitchen with its well-worn Formica counter tops and the cabinets filled with grubs to her spotlessly modern abode and feel so unrefined. I saw something romantic about a hot mature single woman working out of her tiny, but beautiful space, dining at impeccable restaurants every day instead of getting her hands wet. I felt the same affinity when I saw this picture from The Selby the other day, although it’s quite dissimilar:
I particularly liked that I could spot SYBIL and the Mötley Crüe bio on her shelf right from the initial glance.
In so many ways I want that to be my kitchen. And I want the spotless, food-less kitchen in the West Village apartment with a huge flat file. But I could never truly aspire to live in such ways. I enjoy cooking and eating too much. If I could afford to take advantage of our city’s illustrious restaurants daily it just might be a different story, but that’s a far cry from my reality. And even though I have no plans or real aspirations of centering my life around my epicurean endeavors in any professional way, food is an integral part of my world. Sometimes I wish that this wasn’t the case. Everything about food for me is purely hedonistic, and even counterproductive in some aspects, since I’m often taking time off from getting actual work done.
Since leaving that job, and the Formika countertop of the Chelsea apartment, the size of my kitchen only got smaller, but to this day, I continue to cook. Maybe it’s the growing up in ‘tight’ spaces that resulted in my some what peculiar way. Having minor constraints have taught me to improvise and seek for new ways, thus making everything about cooking a fun challenge. Besides, despite the inherent inconveniences, it seems though I have always had what I needed, according to Mr. Bittman- “A stove, a sink, a refrigerator, some pots and pans, a knife and some serving spoons.”
