Fear of marketing
June 16, 2011
marketing
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Not just excellent, but influential"][/caption]
Many creative people I know (myself included) find it difficult to market themselves. By “creative”, I’m including a pretty large group of people - but I am also thinking specifically of all the people I know who create interesting products, works of art, or even businesses but don’t spend a lot of time trying to expose these things to a wider audience.
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Why read challenging books?
June 15, 2011
books, mcluhan, reading
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="McLuhan's "Understanding Media"."][/caption]
I have somewhat eclectic taste in books - I usually try to have a few at a time that I’m working on, and one of those is usually some book that is difficult to read (e.g. philosophy).
Right now I’m reading Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”. McLuhan was a communications theorist who coined the phrase “the medium is the message”.
I still don’t fully understand the implications of this phrase, but it seems to have something to do with the effect of the intrinsic properties of a medium on the content that is being transmitted through it.
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Terrine
June 10, 2011
eggplant, mint, mozzarella, peas, peppers, terrine, tomato sauce
[caption id="attachment_1087" align="alignleft" width="399" caption="This is not exactly what a terrine is supposed to look like. Tasty, though!"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1084" align="alignleft" width="399" caption="With the appropriate layering and such."][/caption]
So, technically a terrine is a layering of ground meat, made into a paste, sometimes with aspic and other components as well (e.g. herbs). But as far as I can tell, the word has come to mean almost any dish that comprises layers of ingredients and is then pressed together within a loaf pan or similar type of pan.
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Banana cardamom ice cream with peanut brittle and raspberries
June 6, 2011
bananas, cardamom, ice cream, peanut brittle, peanuts, raspberries, sugar
[caption id="attachment_1076" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Ice cream!"][/caption]
I’ve written about this ice cream briefly before, and here’s the recipe. You start by crushing and toasting some cardamom pods, then steeping the cardamom - and banana slices - in milk for a while. After that’s chilled, you add raw (yes, raw!) egg yolks and honey, and put in your ice cream machine. I’m actually not a big cardamom fan, but the result is an ice cream that’s refreshing and sweet but also strangely earthly.
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Catering
June 5, 2011
avocadoes, bananas, barbecue, blackberries, buttermilk, catering, chicken, chocolate, cilantro, condensed milk, cornbread, cornmeal, cream, cumin, dill, eggs, evaporated milk, flour, garlic, honey, ketchup, lemon, marshmallows, mayonnaise, milk, oil, onions, orange, oregano, parsley, pepper, potatoes, salt, strawberries, tomatoes, vinegar, worcester sauce
[caption id="attachment_1066" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Shopping list..."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1067" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="The ingredients for ten pounds of potato salad"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1068" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="This is about half of the shopping I did"][/caption]
Note: Part 2 of this post is here.
On this blog, I write a lot about dinners for two, and more recently dinners for five, seven, etc. I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually end up catering a 40-person barbecue.
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Tomato tarte tatin
June 1, 2011
tarte tatin, tomatoes
[caption id="attachment_1061" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="The tomatoes have to be blanched and peeled"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1062" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="After cooking in caramel for a while, they're covered with dough, which is then baked."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1063" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="When that's done, it's flipped. What you can see here is a bunch of tomatoes under a layer of very dark caramel"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1064" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="And then it can be enjoyed!"][/caption]
I had a bunch of leftover tomatoes recently that were probably not going to survive until I could use them.
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Dealing with Cauliflower
June 1, 2011
cauliflower
[caption id="attachment_1057" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Flip the cauliflower over..."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1058" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="...and cut around the stem. Then you can discard it and chop up the remaining pieces easily."][/caption]
While I was recently making an enormous quantity of cauliflower gratin (more about that later), I had to chop up about 5 heads of cauliflower very quickly. What’s really annoying about chopping cauliflower, if you’ve tried it, is that if you slice from the top, you get lots of chunks of the woody, inedible stem mixed in with the florets you want to use.
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Breakfast
May 24, 2011
asparagus, bananas, basil, blueberries, coffee, cream, eggs, flour, frittatas, honey, kiwi berries, kiwis, lemon, orange juice, oranges, plums, potoatoes, scones, strawberries, tea, yogurt
[caption id="attachment_1052" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Fruit salad with plums and berries, including kiwi berry (actinidia arguta)"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1051" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The full spread. Frittata, scones, fruit salad, orange juice, asparagus..."][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1053" align="alignleft" width="289" caption="Frittata closeup. Check out the beautiful crust that develops."][/caption]
For the first meeting of my Wharton learning team, I decided to make dinner. So I thought that, for the last meeting, it might be fitting to make breakfast.
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Pear-in-a-bottle
May 13, 2011
brandy, pears
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="246" caption="Bottles of pear brandy, with prisonniers (imprisoned fruit)."][/caption]
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="251" caption="A baby pear, taken by flickr user "Living in Monrovia"; click the picture for the source."][/caption]
Sometimes fruit shows up in strange places.
The first picture, from flickr user kasiaeryn, is of bottles of eau de vie de poire, also known as pear brandy. Pear brandy, like other fruit brandies, is made from juice, in this case pear of course, that’s been fermented and then distilled (not to be confused with fruit liqueurs, where fruit flavoring is added to an already-made alcohol such as vodka).
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The difference between caramel, butterscotch, and toffee
May 11, 2011
brown sugar, butterscotch, caramel, corn syrup, cream, dulce de leche, marshmallows, milk, nougat, peanut brittle, sugar, taffy, toffee
[caption id="attachment_1047" align="alignright" width="240" caption="From left to right: butterscotch chips, toffee, caramel"][/caption]
Here are three sugary solids that look similar - butterscotch, toffee, and caramel. It’s not too hard to tell them apart by taste and texture, but what are the actual differences in their manufacture?
All types of sugar candy are made from the same fundamental ingredient, a sugar/water syrup. The syrup is cooked, and as the temperature rises, the water boils off and the moisture content of the syrup decreases.
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