This space has been quiet for the past couple of months, and we’ve neglected to explain why. The short answer is that we’ve had a really busy summer.

My book about the pluot was published last week by Bloomsbury and is now available at bookstores everywhere. In The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot, I tell the backstory of the pluot and its creator, Floyd Zaiger.

In its review of the book, Publisher’s Weekly wrote that “Brantley’s engaging mixture of agronomy, reportage and food porn… goes down easy.” For more information about the book, you can visit chipbrantley.com, follow me on Twitter, or check out Bloomsbury’s page on The Perfect Fruit. To keep track of upcoming readings and author events, please join The Perfect Fruit (the book) group.

One more personal note, Elizabeth, Angus and I moved to Alabama in June, and we’re slowly getting settled to life at the edge of the subtropics. Elizabeth and I grew up in Birmingham, and while we miss our life in MA, we’ve loved being closer to our families and reconnecting with old friends. Birmingham is also one of the best food towns out there. Come visit us and we’ll prove it.

In Cookthink news, we’re excited to announce that we’ve recently partnered with Weather.com on a syndication deal. We’ll share more details on that closer to the end of the summer, but be sure to check out the re-design at Weather.com–they’re adding a lot of interesting features.

One thing we’d love to see: Al Roker talking more about the impact of weather on our food cravings. As anyone who’s read Cookthink for a little while knows, that topic is one of Brys’s obsessions. In fact, he’s been busy this summer researching and writing a cookbook about the influence of weather and climate on cooking. (Right now, he’s studying the food of a certain humid coastal plain.) Look for updates from him later this summer.

More news soon. Stay cool in August.

Today is the 10th anniversary of Attila Ambrus’s escape from prison. A folk hero around the world, Ambrus is a former professional hockey goalie (maybe the worst ever to play the game) who was finally arrested in 1999 after robbing more than two dozen Hungarian banks (often with great panache).

Known as the Whiskey Robber because he was frequently spotted drinking the stuff before a robbery, Ambrus escaped from prison on July 10, 1999, and the subsequent manhunt was one of the largest in modern European history. He’s currently serving a 17-year sentence in Hungary, but he might be released in 2011 for good behavior.

For the whole story on Ambrus, read Julian Rubinstein’s fantastic book Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts. (Or download the collectors’ item audio book, performed cabaret-style by a cast that includes Eric Bogosian, Gary Shteyngart and—oddest of all—Samantha Power.)

In the meantime, pour a Whiskey Robber cocktail, named in honor of Ambrus, by mulling an orange slice in the bottom of an Old Fashioned glass filled with ice. Then, in a cocktail shaker filled with ice, combine 1 1/2 ounces of Johnnie Walker Red, 1 ounce of sour mix and 3 dashes of bitters. Shake well and strain into the glass, then top with a spritz of ginger ale.

Reading Francis Mallmann’s new book Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way (written with Peter Kaminsky), I’m reminded that for all the things that cooking is about, at heart it’s about fire — cooking’s “mother tongue” as Mallmann calls it. This beautifully written cookbook and fire-guide shows Mallmann and Kaminsky’s fluency in that language.

In the beginning of the book, Mallmann describes seven types of wood-cooking apparatus: the parilla (a grill grate set over hot coals), chapa (flat cast iron griddle set over fire), infernillo (two-story fire with a cooking surface in between), horno de barro (wood-fired oven), rescoldo (covering food with embers), asado (vertical spit for cooking whole animals) and caldero (iron kettle).

For the rest of the book he harnesses those fires to make dozens of beautiful dishes from salads to desserts, with plenty of meat, seafood and vegetable dishes in between. Savory Corn Pudding, Empanadas, Mussels With Garlic and White Wine, Beef and Potato Pie, Peached Pork . . . the alluring list goes on and on, each accompanied by a little history, clear instructions and beautiful photography.

In a world replete with books about barbecue Mallman manages a completely original take on the subject, a primal exploration of grilling’s “new frontier.” It will have you dying to cook with wood and fire.

Congratulations to Jennifer McLagan, whose Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes, won the James Beard media award for cookbook of the year.

You can find recipes from that book — including homemade country-style butter and duck confit — on Cookthink.com.

When I started Cookthink’s Twitter account a couple of years ago, one of the first people I followed was Maureen Evans, who uses her twitter.com/cookbook account to tweet recipes in 140 characters or less. (I made a request for cemita milanese, and she delivered.)

According to Ruth Jamieson and Morwenna Ferrier in yesterday’s Guardian, the micro-recipe is now officially a trend. To mark it, Jamieson and Ferrier asked eight of the UK’s top chefs to create micro-recipes suitable for Twitter. The results are sensible, maybe too much so. My favorite, if only for the Joycean “turnevrysooften,” is Mark Hix’s micro-recipe for pork crackling: “Heat oven200C. Cut 1kgporkrind into strips. Boil 15m. Drain, scatter w/csalt, roast1hr, turnevrysooften.”

Leave your best micro-recipe (max. 140 characters) in the comments. We’ll send a book of macro recipes to the person who submits our favorite.

We’re working on a very cool project with Virginia Willis, author of the beautiful and refined Southern cookbook, Bon Appétit, Y’All. More details on that soon. In the meantime, check out Virginia’s 30-minute meal spread in this week’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Herb-Crusted Tilapia, Sautéed Summer Squash and Classic Rice Pilaf.

The New Yorker has added so much good stuff to its website lately that I haven’t had time to process it all. One feature I discovered just last month is the podcast hosted by the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. Each month, she chats with a different writer who has chosen a short story from the New Yorker’s archives to read aloud.

Highlights so far: Aleksandar Hemon reading Bernard Malamud’s “A Summer’s Reading” (collected in The Complete Stories); T.C. Boyle reading Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” (collected in The Night in Question); and Mary Gaitskill reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Signs and Symbols (collected in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov), which stars an eerie gift basket containing “ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.”

Related: The Amateur Gourmet wrote about his love of Nabokov.
Related: New Yorker writer Jane Kramer talks about profiling Claudia Roden.

Virginia Willis’ wide and varied food career started in Atlanta as an apprentice to Nathalie Dupree. She worked with Dupree on four PBS series and cookbooks, including the James Beard award-winning Comfortable Entertaining.

Later, Virginia worked as the Kitchen Director for Martha Stewart Living Television and as the Executive Producer for Epicurious on the Discovery Channel.

In Virginia’s new book Bon Appétit, Y’All, she marries traditionally Southern ingredients and dishes with classic French technique in a style she calls “refined Southern cuisine.” Bon Appétit, Y’All is a clear and beautiful addition to the library of “new Southern cooking.” We caught up with Virginia recently during a book tour to promote Bon Appétit, Y’All.

Q: In Bon Appétit, Y’All, you describe your style of cooking as “refined Southern cuisine.” Tell us more about what that means. How does it compare to traditional Southern cuisine?

A: Traditional Southern cuisine is most often thought of as long-cooked vegetables and fried chicken. But I like to not overcook the food and let the flavor of the food shine through. I use classic French technique to do as little as the food as possible. My recipes for the most part are fairly simple, not complicated chef-driven creations. I love long-cooked collards and fried chicken, too, but there is so much more to Southern cooking than that.

An example might be my black-eyed pea salad in which, instead of cooking the peas with fatback or hog jowl, the peas are cooked and combined with finely diced carrot, celery, Vidalia onion and tomato, and then tossed in a light vinaigrette.

Q: You have a recipe called Funeral Grits, which you call the “perfect dish to take to the bereaved after the funeral.” What makes a dish perfect for a Southern funeral?

A: [LOL] This dish is comfort food at its absolute finest. Not only is it comforting, it holds well, can be re-heated and can be made in mass quantities. There’s nothing better than a gratin of cheese grits!

Q: In your Bourbon Sweet Potatoes recipe, you note that “only a Southerner…would add massive quantities of butter and sugar to a dish and still regard it as a vegetable. Add a shot of bourbon? No problem.” What does the bourbon add to that dish? What other vegetable dishes could stand a shot of bourbon?

A: I can’t think of many other vegetables — perhaps butternut squash. Bourbon has a sharpness thats needs sweetness. Bourbon marries particularly well with pork.

Q: Throughout the book, you write about your mother’s and grandmother’s cooking. (I love that in your recipe for Bourbon Baked Ham, you write that your grandmother Meme wouldn’t go to the liquor store alone to buy the bourbon she needed for fruitcake.) Do you have a first memory of being in the kitchen with them?

A: I have photos of me as young as 3 or 4 years old cooking biscuits with my Meme. I have always loved to cook and so very much enjoyed being in the kitchen with Mama and Meme. I learned so much and had real quality time with them. With them, I first cooked old-fashioned Southern, then cooked classic French, and now, I have “grown up” and found my own cuisine, which is a marriage of the two.

Q: Most, if not all of your recipes are absolutely clear and very approachable, but they require some doing. What’s your response to those who say they don’t have time to cook?

A: It’s all about choices. I make shrimp nachos for dinner some nights and have a back-up of Amy’s Pizzas from Whole Foods in the freezer. It’s just so much more satisfying to have a home-cooked meal of wholesome food. Spend time in the kitchen with your family. It’s not a chore; it’s an experience, a process. The bell doesn’t ring when the food hits the table — or at least it shouldn’t.

Recipe: Mama’s Crawfish Etoufée (Bon Appétit, Y’All)
Recipe: Funeral Grits (Bon Appétit, Y’All)
For more about Virginia and Bon Appétit, Y’All, visit her website at http://www.virginiawillis.com. atch Virginia on tour all summer. cooFull schedule after the jump. (more…)

After a lifetime of eating the fish, writer Taras Grescoe is “swearing off salmon.” In an NYT op-ed, Grescoe makes a powerful case against both wild Pacific salmon and farm-raised salmon, which have enjoyed a relatively good reputation for sustainability and cleanliness.

“Wild Atlantic salmon are commercially extinct, and runs of Pacific salmon south of the Alaska panhandle are experiencing catastrophic collapses. This year, for the sake of the remaining wild salmon on the West Coast, as well as my own health, I’m changing my diet…

“Until recently, [wild salmon] was something for which I was willing to pay a premium. But with so many fisheries closed this year, I can no longer afford to splurge on sustainably fished salmon. It’s just too scarce and too expensive…

“Ninety percent of the fresh salmon consumed in the United States is from farms, and I have come to believe that the farmed product is not a healthy alternative to wild…”

Read the full op-ed here and then pick up Grescoe’s new book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood (Bloomsbury USA).

Related: Nicole Pasulka interviewed Grescoe back in April (Salon)
Related: Jared Bland reviewed Bottomfeeder (The Walrus)

The James Beard Awards went down last night at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Ed Levine has a report up at Serious Eats with a rundown of the main restaurant/chef awards (and the James Beard Foundation has posted all the winners.)

We were excited to see that the Times- Picayune’s Brett Anderson won for his fantastic five-part series on the post-Katrina resurrection of that classic New Orleans joint Mandina’s. (more…)