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By Online Editor, ... at 2008-04-21 21:45
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by Georgia Freedman, Acting Managing Editor
Reporting a story in a foreign country is always an adventure. No matter how many plans you make ahead of time, the situation on the ground is never quite what you expected, so, to get the story you want, you learn to as flexible and resourceful as possible. The upside is that sometimes you come away with a richer, more interesting story that you had anticipated, and once in a while you find a story that you didn't foresee at all.
That was certainly the situation last year when I traveled to Beijing with my husband, Josh Wand (a freelance food photographer), hoping to take a long-awaited vacation while doing some reporting for the magazine. I lived in Beijing for a few months while I was in college, but I hadn't been back in nearly eight years. When we arrived I found that the city had changed so much that it was almost unrecognizable. In the rush to prepare for this summer's Olympics, major highways had been added, thousands of steel and glass skyscrapers had sprung up all over the city, and entire neighborhoods had been razed to the ground and rebuilt. What's more, I hadn't spoken Mandarin with any frequency in nearly a decade, and Josh doesn't speak Chinese at all, so our first couple of days were spent mute, afloat in a sea of food possibilities but without a rudder to direct us toward the subjects we had come to work on.
After two difficult days, I decided to call in some backup. I contacted a few American expats living in the city, including Sandra Huang, one of the creators and authors of Savour Asia, a wonderful website that offers restaurant recommendations in cities all over Asia. Sandra happily agreed to act as informal interpreter on our outings. One morning, as the three of us were trying to coax the secret to some especially juicy and delicious steamed buns out of the proprietor of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, Sandra announced that we were only a couple of blocks from a great cooking school where she had taken lessons. Would we like to see it?
Ten minutes later we were in a sunny courtyard, where Chunyi Zhou was teaching a handful of students how to make kung pao chicken. She greeted us warmly and invited us to stay and watch. Thinking of SAVEUR's Kitchenwise column, I asked whether she would mind if I wrote about her home. By the end of lunch, I had a story and Josh had dozens of photographs, and a completely unplanned but wonderful article was on its way to the pages of SAVEUR.
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By Online Editor, ... at 2008-02-15 18:52
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By Jeanne Hodesh, SAVEUR Editorial Assistant
I didn't intend to read all of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. I in one night, but once I started skimming its pages--and imagining the aroma of a soufflé just taken out of the oven, or wine simmering in a reduction--I couldn't put the book down. I'd cooked along with Julia Child's instructions before, but never sat down to simply read the book. Who knew it was a page-turner?
So, when I recently heard Alex Prud'homme describe his great aunt's recipes as carefully crafted short stories, it was an aha moment. Prud'homme, who collaborated with Child on her memoir, My Life in France, was in New York, taking part--along with the legendary Knopf editor, Judith Jones--in an event called "Mastering the Art of Writing About Food." Prud'homme went on to say that Child's recipes were a way of "distilling and holding on" to her first years in France, the rosy time when she discovered her passion for cooking and eating good food. "Cooking comes out of memory," Jones agreed, "and memory is a great way to unlock your past."
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By Online Editor, ... at 2008-02-04 16:30
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by Anna Papoutsakis, SAVEUR Editorial Assistant
I adore my baby nephew, Gryphon, for many reasons, but particularly because at just six months of age, he already loves the action of the kitchen. Many nights I've put him in his bouncy chair to oversee the preparation of a meal. He watches contentedly as I methodically chop an onion or peel a carrot. Gryphon even laughs when I burn myself on the frying pan, but that may be because it makes me jump up and down in pain. Given his natural affinity for food and cooking, it would be only a matter of a few years before I had him whisking hollandaise alongside me, I thought.
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By Online Editor, ... at 2008-01-30 17:18
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By Sarah Karnasiewicz
On Tuesday, January 29th, 2008, without warning or ceremony, pomp or circumstance, an Ivy League institution came to an end. The only farewell hung in block print on a locked door. It read:
"THE YANKEE DOODLE COFFEE SHOP WOULD LIKE TO THANK ALL IT'S CUSTOMERS, FRIENDS AND FAMILY FOR 58 YEARS OF PATRONAGE. UNFORTUNATELY, DUE TO ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS, I REGRETFULLY ANNOUNCE THAT TODAY, JANUARY 29TH, 'THE DOODLE IS CLOSING ITS DOOR FOR GOOD.' "
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By Online Editor, ... at 2008-01-28 21:45
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by Karen Shimizu
Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic for LA Weekly, writes his weekly restaurant column--"Counter Intelligence"--with expeditionary zeal. A thoroughly democratic eater, Gold celebrates Los Angeles's gastronomic landscape in all of its permutations, from trendy tapas bars to street-side taco shacks.
In this week's column, however, the LA critic returns to his old, er, chomping grounds (from 1999 to 2001 he wrote reviews of New York restaurants for Gourmet magazine) to salute the passing of the Year of the Pig in the Big Apple. With just a weekend to canvas the city, Gold gets busy. "I ate 30 different pig preparations in a little less than 48 hours," he writes, "and it would have been more if I'd gone with the flow."
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By Online Editor, ... at 2008-01-16 19:04
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By Meg Zimbeck
The mascot is whimpering alone in the corner, his world utterly changed. The patrons used to pet him during breaks from their tables. Now they're all outside on the terrace.
Alone in the glow of their unattended laptops, I consider the impact of the recent Paris smoking ban. The forecast is for fewer cancers and better-smelling woolen coats. In the short term, however, the effects are worrying.
The Chéri(e) regulars are all out in the cold, shivering in smoky clusters. And because the server has been similarly exiled, I am growing very thirsty. While I wait for a drink that will not be coming soon, I console myself by considering the bright side. A number of restaurants, before the ban, were too toxic to frequent. We expats used to keep a "safe list" for visiting asthmatics and Californians. That's in the dustbin now, along with our matchbooks and lighters.
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By Online Editor, ... at 2008-01-09 23:24
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By Katherine Cancila
By now it's no secret that eating locally grown food is the way to go--it tastes better, and, in most cases, protects the environment by lowering transportation costs and greenhouse gas emissions. But until recently, wine, which is shipped great distances and in copious amounts, was overlooked as an ecological threat. Enter Tyler Colman: a wine blogger whose recent New York Times article, "Red, White, or Green?" sounded a wake-up call about the very real "carbon footprint" left by his beloved beverage.
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By Online Editor, ... at 2007-12-27 17:15
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By Emily Halpern
Somehow, in addition to the beloved sauerbraten, the latkes, the meltingly soft home-made applesauce, the crackling roast duck, the braised red cabbage, and the jelly doughnuts that leave us licking our fingers and wiping sugar from our cheeks, a traditional Sicilian Christmas cookie called cucidati has become my German-Jewish family's most prized holiday recipe.
"Mary cookies", as we call them, came to us by way of my mother's childhood neighbor, Mary. My mother, the only child of two German immigrants, grew up in the 1950s in a snowy upstate New York farming town where her bookworm tendencies and skills as a flautist made her feel like a black sheep. Needless to say, no one there had ever heard of a latke.
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By Online Editor, ... at 2007-11-27 23:37
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By Julie Wilson, Associate Online Editor
Does the scent of nutmeg-spiced eggnog set your pulse racing? Can the smell
of fresh baked sugar cookies make you drool? Just in time for America's
annual holiday shopping and eating binge, one New York perfume company is
packaging and selling those scrumptious aromas -- minus the added calories and
unwanted inches to the waistline.
More than 200 different "flavors" of eau de toilette are available from Demeter Fragrance Library, ranging from the classic French pastry croquembouche to the rum, butter and sugar brew of a hot toddy. Other highlights from the line include the cocktail-inspired
cosmopolitan (part of the company's happy hour collection) and the wearable
chocolate chip cookie (part of their dessert collection) -- both of which
feature corresponding recipes on their glass bottles.
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