Food Life & People

The host of no-knead recipes from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day have been making quiet ripples through the baking community, and we felt that it was time take a look for ourselves to see what the hubbub was all about.Given that this book was likely in production around the time when Jim Lahey’s recipe appeared in the New York Times, we were curious to see how they compared.

We break from our regularly scheduled programming to let you know that the new Gourmet website is reaching further back into the magazine’s fabled archives and bringing forth… varmints?The Gourmet website republished a selection of recipes from their back issues to show what their readers in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s did with woodchucks and wild hare. They do stipulate that these recipes have not been retested; they are more cultural artifact than dinner tonight.

My party for forty in my 650 square foot apartment is just four days away.Here’s some sources that I count on when I’m cooking for a crowd:Bed Bath & Beyond While I am not a fan of big box stores, my weekend trips to Bed Bath & Beyond will make serving this large crowd more affordable.My partner and I want our guests to eat off “real” plates and drink from glass glasses. Ever year, we re-stock our supply of Nuance Stemware Sets. They’re just $9.99 a dozen.

[The sixth and last finalist in our Green Tomato Contest is Roopa – we liked the ease of this recipe and also that she used homegrown green tomatoes in her tomato and lentil stew. Voting on all six finalists will open around lunchtime today.] This is a recipe for a South Indian dish called Thakali Masiyal. It’s an original recipe I wrote based on my mom’s instructions. The green tomatoes I used were homegrown. I have (actually, had) tomato plants growing in pots on my balcony.

The only horrifying thing about these cute Ghost Fruit from Godiva is the price – $4.50 each! We saw them in Epicurious’ roundup of Halloween treats, and we think they would be very easy to make yourself. If we had time to try today, here’s how we would do it: • Fruit: Small seasonal fruit. Strawberries are completely out of season. Instead, look for small green figs, globe grapes, or very small lady apples.

Have you heard about the brownies made with carrots and spinach (PDF recipe)? The new cookbook Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld, wife of comedian and sitcom star Jerry Seinfeld, shares advice on how to hide vegetables so kids will eat them. There’s recipes for pureed cauliflower in mac and cheese and kale in spaghetti and meatballs.

Plastic has had some bad press lately. Phthalates and other compounds in plastic have been linked to serious health issues, and we are beginning to be a little more aware of how much plastic touches our food. One relatively easy way to reduce plastic use is to switch to glass storage containers. We are gradually doing this, and there is a real difference in food’s freshness and taste when it’s kept in glass instead of plastic. Here are a couple options we’ve looked at.

In our watermelon thread last Friday, a commenter asked a question we were thinking about too: who puts salt on their watermelon? This was a very strange and foreign concept until recently when we tried it, and the piquancy of the salt did indeed bring out a little more of the melon’s sweetness, concentrating the juices .

The Zuni Cafe Cookbook has quickly become a classic in our kitchen, and we know that it is in many of yours as well. After we mentioned Judy Rodgers’ granitas last week we thought it would be good, though, to spotlight this book for those of you who have never picked it up.Rodgers acquired her training in France and later at Chez Panisse.

Secret Agent Derek Flint (James Coburn) is the kind of man who likes to unwind after a long day by stopping his pulse while lying rigid between two chairs, who travels to Moscow not to watch ballet, but to teach it, and whose lighter has 82 different functions—”83 if you wish to light a cigar.” So it should come as no surprise that he knows a thing or two about French cuisine.

If you had to choose just one drink for all time, what would it be? For me, it wouldn’t be sweet vermouth.But in Groundhog Day (1993), disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray, right) chooses just that. Caught in an endless time loop, he relives the same day repeatedly until he gets it right.The first “day” he sits down at a bar with his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell, left), he orders a “Jim Beam, ice, water.

La cucina povera is an Italian phrase that means “cooking of the poor,” or “peasant cooking.” This often refers to a now-fashionable mode of Italian cooking, popularized by Mario Batali and usually involving entrails, in some fashion. On a deeper level it reflects a necessary philosophy that is common in all cultures: making do with what you’ve got to transform humble ingredients into dishes that are more than the sum of their parts.

“Annie, there’s a big lobster behind the refrigerator. I can’t get it out… Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side.” Lobsters bring out a strange range of emotions. Here, in one of the many memorable moments in Annie Hall (1977), we get a dizzying, scuttling display. The scene is a scant 1 min.