Cookthinktanker VeganYumYum has a really fantastic breakdown of how she approaches the art-science of food photography. I didn’t know tutorials could be beautiful, but this one is. It’s instructive for those of us who regularly photograph food but the best kind of eye candy for those of us who don’t.
(Image courtesy of VeganYumYum.)
We loved The Kitchn when it was a mere twinkle in Apartment Therapy’s eye, so we were delighted to see Emma’s post about Cookthink on Friday. Thanks for the love, Kitchn, and for really helpful posts like this one about which foods you can carry on the plane. We’re flying south tomorrow–our first trip since Angus has learned to crawl and snatch–so the food we take also needs to have very few moving parts. Suggestions?
The Kitchn has a round-up of TasteSpotting alternatives. The most similar of the bunch is Food Gawker, a near clone of TasteSpotting that was created by Chuck of Sunday Nite Dinner. Will it catch on like TasteSpotting? It went live yesterday and there are already 124 posts.
Hangover-friendly, hearty and energizing. Grilled ciabatta on the side.
Update: Congratulations to Richard Kahane, who came closest to naming all the quarters which feature something a dairy eating pescetarian would consider edible.
Richard identified five of the nine quarters we were looking for: Georgia (peach), Vermont (maple sugar), Washington (salmon), Wisconsin (cheese and corn), and Alaska (salmon).
We would also have accepted South Carolina (palmetto palm, aka the swamp cabbage), Arkansas (rice), Florida (palmetto palm), and Kansas (sunflower).
Who is Caesar Rodney and why is he riding a horse on Delaware’s quarter?
That’s just one question tackled by our friend Jim Noles in his very cool new book A Pocketful of History: Four Hundred Years of America—One Quarter at a Time (Da Capo, $25.00).
A fan of the 50 State Quarters Program, Jim got interested in how each state chose what would go on its quarter. He used that research as a jumping-off point to explore little slivers of American history that are now memorialized on the quarters and in this book. Each state gets its own short chapter. It’s a perfect book to keep on your bedside table or by the bathtub.
Jim has agreed to personalize a copy of the book for a Cookthink reader who correctly answers this question: Which quarters feature something a dairy-eating pescetarian would consider edible?
Send us an email to contest [at] cookthink [dot] com with the names of the states and the edible things. We’ll randomly select one name from everyone who answers correctly and announce the winner in next week’s Root Source. Deadline to submit is one week from today, Wednesday, May 28, at noon EST.
Taylor Clark’s “Meatless Like Me” at Slate reminded me of Laura Fraser’s old essay in Salon, “Why I Stopped Being a Vegetarian.” Maybe it’s because I live in western Massachusetts and work on a food blog, but is opt-out vegetarianism still so foreign that there are widespread myths about it that must be debunked?
The International Association of Culinary Professionals has just announced the finalists for its 2008 cookbook awards.
We’re very excited for Mary Lou and Bob Heiss, whose The Story of Tea is one of three finalists in the single-subject category. (Go here and here to read some of the superlatives used to describe this stunning book.) For the past 30 years, Mary Lou and Bob have run Cooks Shop Here, a small but impeccably stocked specialty foods store down the road in Northampton.
Congratulations Mary Lou and Bob!
Our friend Johanna’s dad has terminal cancer. It all happened really fast. Last summer, he was going about his business, and now he’s in a hospice. A lifelong gourmand and oenophile, he’s unable to digest solid food and is fed through IV. The one thing he can eat for pleasure is sorbet, and so Johanna is trying to create as many delicious sorbets as humanly possible.
She borrowed our ice cream maker and recently sent out an email asking for recipes, “particularly any that feature wine or port and/or strange and interesting ingredients.”
Please help Johanna out! Post recipes and links in comments.
Editor’s note: Since August, Kristin Hohenadel has been writing and editing for the Cookthink reference section. Beginning today, Kristin will also become a regular contributor to the Cookthink blog. Based in France, Kristin is the European correspondent for Apartment Therapy and the Paris city editor for Gridskipper. Her work has appeared in, among other places, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vogue and Gourmet.
I went to a new dentist recently and during our little get-to-know-you session (conducted by the doctor himself, who also answers his own phone, with or without a drill in his hand; books his own appointments; walks you to the door; and takes the money right from your very hand) he asked for my profession. “Why?” I asked. “It’s for my statistics,” he said, looking up from his computer (he was typing in answers with a single finger). “To calculate which professions have the worst teeth.”
Journalists, it turns out, have pretty decent dental hygiene, though they are known to cancel appointments at the 11th hour to be whisked off on out-of-town assignments, and sometimes let their check-ups lapse. So who had the worst teeth?
“Bakers!” he said.
I suddenly had a vision of my old friend Hubert, a cute boulanger with a mouthful of rotten teeth at the ripe old age of 34. He’d been working as a baker since an apprenticeship at 14 in his native Cannes, and years of living without health insurance as an otherwise successful expat baker in Los Angeles hadn’t allowed him to acquire a set of American pearly whites.
It turns out that French bakers have the worst teeth because they breathe in flour dust all day, the sugars of which get between the teeth and gums and cause cavities galore. Flour is also the leading cause of on-the-job asthma in France; one in four patients declaring a respiratory illness are bakers by profession.
The national boulangerie association is trying to come up with preventive measures to protect the health of the nation’s bakers. Those measures include teaching them how to reduce the amount of flour dust they inhale by modifying their gestures — from emptying flour sacks to cleaning up countertops — that they didn’t learn in cooking school.
We’ve gushed over TasteSpotting before, but their 100 most popular links from 2007 almost singlehandedly filled my daily capacity to look at beautiful things.
Each tiny little picture is jam-packed with tasty-looking dishes, and I’ve been clicking from one to the other all morning. None of ours ended up in the top 100, but 20 — 20! — belong to the wonderful Rasa Malaysia. We love her work normally, but we have even more reason to love her these days — you’ll have to check back on Monday to find out why.
