Michael Pollan: Why Bother Going Green?

The always-eloquent Michael Pollan has published another op-ed piece in the New York Times that should be required reading for everyone, this time on the question of making life changes to reduce your impact on the environment and your contribution to climate change. “Why bother?” he asks, when your efforts potentially will make such a [...]

Review: An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, Elizabeth David (1952)
Elizabeth David is one of the pioneers of food writing, and even 50 years later, her ascerbic, witty style still holds up, as do, surprisingly, some of her pet subjects. She rails against processed foods, decries the commercialization and dumbing down of great traditional recipes, and [...]

Bookworm in the Pantry

Thanks to Lydia at the Perfect Pantry for featuring my food-related book selections as this week’s Bookworm in the Pantry. If you browse through this blog, you’ll quickly learn that another one of my passions is reading. (And if you want to see what I’m reading that is not food-related, go here.)
The Bookworm in the [...]

Some Thoughts on Gourmet’s Recipes

I love cookbooks. I have a carefully crafted library of them, and I have to constantly resist the urge to buy one more. Even foregoing beef, lamb and pork as I do, and eschewing the regular preparation of desserts and complicated breads at home, I doubt I’ll ever be able to cook my way through [...]

Review: Garlic and Sapphires

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (2005)
This memoir covers Reichl’s tenure as restaurant critic for the New York Times and includes some of her favorite retaurant reviews and recipes. But what I found even more fascinating were Reichl’s accounts of a critic’s life. To avoid being recognized, she donned a variety of disguises and found [...]

Review: Pot on the Fire

Pot on the Fire: Further Confessions of a Renegade Cook, John Thorne (2000)
Pot on the Fire is a collection of essays about food and cooking, each one exploring a particular dish or ingredient or meal, with recipes. It is all fascinating and eminently readable, and reading it I learned quite a lot about such diverse [...]

Review: How I Learned to Cook

How I Learned to Cook, edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan (2006)
How I Learned to Cook is a collection of 40 essays by well-known chefs and food writers, describing early pivotal incidents in their culinary careers. The title might be a bit misleading; the stories aren’t generally about learning how to cook, but [...]

Eat Food — Some Simple Advice from Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, author of one of my favorite books The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has published an article, “Unhappy Meals,” in the New York Times Magazine, that uses a lot of words to impart some simple advice:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Pollan is a commonsense voice in a culture that is entirely too obsessed with what [...]

Review: The Soul of a Chef

The Soul of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman (2001)
This book contains three “backstage” views on cooking in contemporary America. My favorite two pieces were the opener, describing the excruciating Certified Master Chef exam at the Culinary Institute of America, and the closer, spent in the kitchen of French Laundry — reportedly America’s best restaurant. Both [...]

Review: It Must’ve Been Something I Ate & The Man Who Ate Everything

It Must’ve Been Something I Ate, Jeffrey Steingarten (2002)
Steingarten’s essays on food reveal a man who is so obsessed with good cooking and the pleasures it brings that he will do all of those things many of us wouldn’t dare to attempt in the search for a good meal. He will spend all day [...]