How'd they know? This week, the lead story in New York Times' Dining Section is about cooking with wine, just in time for our Braising Week.
It Boils Down to This: Cheap Wine Works Fine: They Times says "meat and fat tend to erase the distinct flavors of wine." This means we can cook with cheaper wine -- including Two Buck Chuck -- when we braise. With recipes for Risotto al Barolo, Sauternes Custard and Port-Braised Duck Legs With Black Pepper and Dried Cherries.
Tortillas Like Mamá’s, but This Is No Bodega: Grocery stores are trying to appeal to Hispanic grocery shoppers.
For Orange Zest, Substitute Kool-Aid: We're very interested to hear what you think of this article. This wry take on "the crazy things people say about recipes on the web" is by Celia Barbour who had her detractors here this summer when she wrote a series about the farmer's market. Is this article condescending or is it cool that the Times is starting to talk about how the Internet is changing cooking?
PLUS...
To me, Barbour's article itself is not condescending, but Zanne Stewart from Gourmet does come across as a bit prickly. She's "sad" that people are modifying her recipes, which she's spent "a bare minimum of four iterations" testing? I'm glad they're doing all that testing, and I do not think that work is for naught even if people are modifying her work. Modifying recipes is a practice at least as old as the practice of putting fire to food, and the only difference today is that we can write online about these variations right beside the recipe itself.
Agree with curdnerd. Zanne Stewart, and whoever said only Emeril can improvise because he's a trained chef, are too full of themselves. Lots of us with no formal training can produce wonderful dishes without following recipes.
I rarely look at allrecipes.com or the other one that I can't think of just now. There are an awful lot of bad cooks posting on the internet. Too much cream of crap soup, cake mixes and Sandra Lee type stuff. [\rant]