From Scratch

What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.
Former White House news secretary Scott McClellan in his book, What Happened. It reached #1 on Amazon before its official publication date and his charge that the war was just a Bush propaganda campaign sent Administration spinmeisters […]

I wish I had a dollar for every cartoon this week about Scott McClellan’s book. My favorite, for its creativity and political memory, was Huffaker’s at Cagle Cartoons.
Related: Quote of the Month - March 08        Quote of the Month - May 08

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Recipes are not assembly manuals. Recipes are guides and suggestions for a process that is infinitely nuanced. Recipes are sheet music.
The quote is from Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking and The New York Times calls them “Three of the most important sentences anyone reading about cookbooks may see this or any year.”
The Times’ special […]

I’ve been writing a couple pieces about supermarkets and the tricks of the their trade, which I’ve written about often over the years. But this is different, a concept Jacques Pépin calls cuisine d’oppportunité. He employs it and so do I, enjoying significant savings and little waste.
Only two things are required: the willingness to try something new with […]

We all know childhood obesity is a major problem in America, but did you know that only 2% of those between the ages of two and 19 are fulfilling the dietary recommendations of the Food Pyramid? Two percent. I was staggered to read that in an article about Eat This, Not That. The authors also cite […]

One of my favorite bloggers, MusEditions, is a fellow book lover and recently tagged me to take part in a fun little book-related meme. The rules were few: pick up the book nearest me, turn to page 123, find the fifth sentence and post the next three.
In truth, the book nearest me at the time […]

The James Beard Foundation, celebrating its 20th anniversary, has compiled a list of 20 books it believes are essential to anyone’s culinary library. Most are cookbooks; The Food Lover’s Companion is an exception and is a reference I consult almost daily.
This presentation includes one of the judges, Charlotte Observer food editor Kathleen Purvis, who chairs […]

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Those seven words open In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a 2006 best-seller.
A simple manifesto, those words, but how difficult for millions in this era of vitamin-laced soft drinks. While it would seem we Americans are obsessed with nutrition, despite the […]

The New York Times Book Review’s annual lists of notable and gift-worthy books are out. While the list of notable cookbooks is available only online, the holiday section is both hard copy and at the website.
The notable books run the gamut from those by well-known chefs, such as Jamie Oliver, and specialty cooking, including vegetarian fare, […]

A few weeks ago Carl Bernstein described himself as a missionary for A Woman in Charge, his biography of Hillary Clinton. And why not? It’s an excellent book and, as I said in April and will say again, an important book. As he has pointed out, had there been real biography about our current president before […]

The first time I ate gnocchi I was about seven years old and was served them at a playmate’s house. We had a lot of fun saying the word over and over, wrinkling our noses in an exaggerated way on the “nyuh” sound. It was certainly more fun than eating them; they were leaden starch balls and altogether […]

I know search engines are bringing you here because it was in one of my incoming RSS feeds; you can still get there from here. You can find the article/review either by going to the Sunday Times Book Review RSS feed at the bottom of the sidebar or by following the permalink from Bernstein’s Hillary […]

I feel a bit bad for Carl Bernstein. After years of work to produce 600+ well-crafted pages about Hillary Clinton, sex still sells. Three television interviews and three times now he has had to say there is no sex act in the book. It must be somewhat frustrating. As usual, we need the print media to […]

Carl Bernstein was to have gone on the Today show next Tuesday, when his biography of Hillary Clinton is published; the competing book by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta will be excerpted in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday. So who showed up on Today this morning? Bernstein, of course, in an interview […]

The Sunday Times of London has published an excerpt of Carl Bernstein’s forthcoming biography of Hillary Clinton, to be published June 5.
The excerpt, headlined The pain of being Hillary, focuses not only on marital discord but also on the distress caused by mis-steps in Bill Clinton’s political career and their effects on her own ambitions. […]