From Scratch

New York Magazine has finally reviewed Perilla, the restaurant opened by Top Chef Season 1 winner, Harold Dieterle. Writer (and Grub Street blogger) Adam Platt says he put it off as long as possible, not wanting to eat the sort of food that seems to have become endemic to reality show cooking competitions.
Instead, he was surprised […]

Perhaps I don’t pay enough attention to commercials, but I was aware of a store brand of microwave steamer bags long before I knew about the national brands. It was about a year ago and I thought they were so clever, but I didn’t remember to buy any till recently.
The concept is the same as […]

The Weekly Standard has published what I think is a top-notch article about our culture of celebuchefs, from the vaunted to the wannabe vaunted competing on shows such as Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen. Called Bam! Making Sense of America’s Celebrity Chef Culture, this long article goes beyond criticism of superficial food-related shows and overexposed […]

If I didn’t know Bravo’s got its ducks in a row for Season 4, I’d think this season of Top Chef is never going to end. After interrupting the season not even half way through for that silly “reunion” and after stretching the restaurant war to two episodes, there is no episode again next week. […]

Two months after it opened, The New York Times has reviewed Perilla, the restaurant launched by Top Chef Season One winner Harold Dieterle, and has awarded it one star (”Good”) on a scale of zero to four.
Critic Frank Bruni says the “cautious list of entrees” could have evolved from a focus group. About the restaurant […]

Yes, just my opinion but at some point Top Chef needs to eliminate two people in one episode. This series is becoming tedious, almost painfully so; beginning with 14 contestants instead of 12, as in Season 1, has not done a thing to increase my enjoyment. To the contrary.
There are so many contestants there are some […]

The Food Network can quit pretending now. It’s not about cooking.
Last night a new schedule took effect, with Chef Emeril Lagasse moving to 7 PM Eastern, an hour earlier than the time slot he’s had for years. When I heard the promo, I assumed it was so the network could re-run his show at 10. […]

Season 3 of Top Chef begins tonight and two episodes of the latest round of The Next Food Network Star are under our belts, and I’m scratching my head, at least figuratively, over the challenges that enable winners to advance in these competitions.
Food Network first. It was apparent immediately that many of this year’s challenges […]

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 […]

If I had to choose only one cooking magazine, it would be Fine Cooking from The Taunton Press. The magazine and the website are exemplary.
Even though I was a Charter Subscriber to Cook’s Illustrated, after seven or eight years we began drifting apart, like people in a relationship turned tepid. I let my subscription lapse but […]

Now…does ANYONE actually believe that Bobby Flay can’t make a better chili than a supermarket ground beef bearing amateur? I don’t. It’s a cruel exercise in humiliation.
So wrote Chef Anthony Bourdain in a scathing  February 8 blog post some are still chattering about. Bourdain, the outspoken author of several books, was the guest on fellow chef Michael […]

With its seemingly-backwards URL — at least to me — and the fact that it doesn’t show up on my “my Yahoo” page, I finally bookmarked this site when I found it again. You can find it in the Links.
I’ve come to appreciate this well-designed corner of Yahoo for the depth of the content, from […]

You could spend days, even weeks, exploring recipes on line. I know I’ve killed a lot of time that way. Websites I return to again and again include:
allrecipes.com- It’s in the Links and I’ve used this site since it was several separate ones, ie: cookierecipe.com, cakerecipe.com. Features go beyond the usual recipe box; there’s a clipboard […]