Mouthing Off

The NYC Marathon is one month away, and while I’ve been pretty diligent about getting in my long training runs, I’ve been more lackadaisical about my diet. I’ve learned the hard way that late-night Momofuku pork buns and foie gras ice cream are not the best fuel for a 5 a.m. workout. So I’m making an attempt to cook at home more over the next few weeks, and I’ve found myself turning to the new cookbook from Ron and Colleen Suhanosky, the husband-and-wife chef team behind Sfoglia in Nantucket and New York City. Pasta Sfoglia features more than 100 recipes inspired by Sfoglia’s addictive pasta dishes. While I don’t always have time to make pasta from scratch during the week, I do have the luxury of being able to buy exceptional ingredients, like Sfoglia’s bread and house-made goat cheese, at Tutto Sfoglia, the tiny new market adjacent to the Upper East Side restaurant.

Last week, I was up in Boston to help host a party with rock-star chef Barbara Lynch and the founders of Fresh beauty, Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg. The occasion: To celebrate an article in F& W’s September issue, in which Lynch helped her friends add more flavor to their favorite healthy recipes.

After the party, we headed over to Sportello, one of Barbara's newest restaurants, and the dinner conversation veered to keeping fit. Barbara is on a serious health kick. To keep up her energy (she just finished a new cookbook, Stir, out next month), she’s been obsessively juicing every fruit, vegetable and herb she can get her hands and storing batches in her fridge. Lynch also told me about her new favorite energy bar, Green Vibrance. (Cameron Diaz has been in Boston, filming Wichita with Tom Cruise, and her personal assistant introduced Barbara to the dark-chocolate-covered, vitamin-loaded veggie bar.)

In addition to trail-running with the Sportello staff, Barbara has also taken up boxing. And I don’t mean the cardio-punch classes they offer at fancy fitness centers. Lynch works out at Golden Gloves champion Peter Welch’s super-old-school gym in Southie. After a few drinks, Lev (he actually does the cardio-punch gym classes) and I had agreed to join her in the ring the next day. Lev was a no-show (I think he got scared), but Barbara’s publicist, Sarah Hearn, joined me for an intense hour-long session with a group that looked straight out of Rocky. After throwing uppercuts, jabs and hooks and doing what seemed like endless push-ups, I have a new respect for Barbara Lynch, way beyond her extraordinary skills in the kitchen.

 

Vermont Butter & Cheese Co. rolls out a new name and logo today. After 25 years in business, apparently there is still some confusion over whether there’s butter in the cheese. There’s not. The newly named Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery makes an amazing (and award-winning) cultured butter with sea salt crystals. It also makes lots of artisanal cheeses, including fresh and aged goat varieties, crème fraîche and mascarpone with milk from St. Alban’s Cooperative. The new name and logo emphasize Vermont and Creamery, rather than Butter & Cheese. It's more pastoral, quaint and practical.

VBCC is on quite a roll. Founder Allison Hooper has just written her first book, In a Cheesemaker’s Kitchen (out this fall). It's a pretty cookbook full of simple recipes using the company’s products. I'm considering making the herb-roasted chicken rubbed in that wonderful butter and the crème fraîche–potato gratin for my first official autumn dinner.

I never had the opportunity to work with Sheila Lukins, who died yesterday at the age of 66. But I did love the carrot cake recipe from her inimitable Silver Palate cookbook (co-authored with Julee Rosso) and made it so often I had it memorized.  My colleague Tina Ujlaki was her editor on several of the stories Lukins wrote for Food & Wine, and her memories are amazing. “We did the most awesome Christmas story with Sheila a long time ago, “ Tina told me. “For dessert she wanted to do a panettone bread pudding. I’ve always hated panettone —I hate candied fruit—and this was topped with an amaretto sauce, which sounded awful to me, like a double whammy. And the bread pudding was absolutely delicious, it became the dessert all the food editors made every Christmas for years and years.” (That recipe, along with several others, like a wonderful Ham and Egg Salad, are at foodandwine.com.) “That was Sheila’s genius,” Tina continued, “she could take ingredients that you didn’t think you liked, or that should never go together, and make something that became your favorite dish, like Chicken Marbella”—the iconic Silver Palate dish that somehow brings together prunes, olives, capers, brown sugar and white wine. As Tina said, “Sheila was your best friend in the kitchen.”

Jill O'Connor's Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey is one of my favorite baking books. So I am totally thrilled that Chronicle Books is publishing a much-needed sequel: Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey Treats for Kids. Even though the book is aimed at kids, everything looks insanely good. I'm planning to start by trying the Holy Moly! Strawberry Jam Roly-Poly (sort of like a jelly roll but with a more flaky, biscuit-like dough), and then I'll tackle the Wicked Good Chocolate Peanut Butter Pudding Cups. The only downside? I can't share the book with friends until October, when it goes on sale. Until then, I'll be baking these great Food & Wine standbys for my kids:
Chocolate Chip–Pretzel Bars
Cookies & Cream Cupcakes
Chocolate Soufflé Sundae

When testing cookbooks, experience has taught me to not always trust popular television personalities. So when Down Home with the Neelys by Patrick and Gina Neely landed on my desk, I braced myself for a day of mediocre recipes and possible disasters. I was wrong! And I totally admit it. Much to my surprise, the recipes worked. Not only that, but I thoroughly enjoyed the delicious, original spins on homey Southern classics. (Note that you may have to diet afterward-but that's really not the point.) Skillet-baked cornbread was moist and filled with tons of cheddar cheese and broccoli. A fairly standard homemade pimento cheese was transformed into Pimento Cheese Melts. I've never thought to broil pimento cheese, but why not? What's not to like? And what's not to like about adding a touch of bacon? I've learned my lesson not to judge a book by its cover, and I look forward to testing more recipes from the Neelys. I think Candy Bar Brownie Crunch will be next on my list.

Who better to adapt two heartfelt, moving memoirs on food and its enormous powers to delight, inspire and transform—Julie Powell's Julie & Julia and My Life in France, by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme—than Academy Award-nominated writer-director-producer Nora Ephron? While in her twenties in New York, she, like Powell, cooked through Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, though Ephron estimates in her book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, that she got through over half of the recipes—not quite accomplishing Powell's feat of cooking all 524. (Ephron wrote that preparing entire meals for four to eat alone in front of the TV made her feel “very brave and plucky.”) Here, her insights on the film:

On what kind of food statement Julie & Julia makes I don’t think it makes a revolutionary statement. It’s not making a statement about corn, or keeping a compost heap, or growing your own food supply. It’s just a celebration of food and how it can change people’s lives. I hope people will cook more after seeing this movie—but it’s okay if it doesn’t change that either.

On intertwining the lives of Julie Powell and Julia Child When I first read about Julie Powell in the New York Times, I thought, ‘no, this isn't a movie.’ I couldn’t see how the story could be two hours long. It was producer Amy Robinson’s idea to combine the two books—like in my favorite movie, The Godfather: Part II.

On Meryl Streep playing Julia Child She had very clear ideas of the Julia she wanted to do—Julia before she had her show and before she became more and more ‘Julia Child-like.’ Meryl read everything, knew everything. But you never had any sense of all that while she was working. There was no sense that anything she did was hard for her.

On Amy Adams playing Julie Powell Amy Adams is so able to become all sorts of things. [I wanted an actress] who could play someone smart. Amy’s also the perfect example of someone living in New York City but is not of New York City [like Julie]. Julie has so much Texas in her.

On food and film I said to the actors that everyone had to eat in the movie—that was a given. I wanted to shoot something that I’d want to eat. The bruschetta should look like it deserves its own web page. We didn’t want it to look styled. We didn’t want it to look as if a home cook couldn’t do it. (The one downside Chris Messina [who plays Julie’s husband, Eric Powell] really threw himself into it. The first day we shot, he swallowed 32 Tums.)

I've always wondered what it's like to be an ambitious, charismatic and kleptomaniac chef. Last night I lived out my fantasy by playing The Sims 3, the newly released version of the popular life-simulation computer game The Sims, now with special features for the virtual foodie.

Using the Create-A-Sim tool, I came up with an avatar that has the above-mentioned personality traits. My Sim self reads cookbooks (such as Cooking Vol. 2: Why You Need Baking Soda), takes cooking classes at the local grocery store and practices making everything from mac and cheese to sushi, all in an effort to move up from Kitchen Scullion to Celebrated Five-Star Chef at Little Corsican Bistro.

So far, things are going pretty well in my virtual life: I’ve eaten pancakes and waffles for breakfast every day, gotten promoted twice and "acquired" new furniture for my home (OK, so I stole lamps and chairs from the bistro, but kleptomania is an acceptable mental disorder in The Sims 3). I just hope my stealing habit won't derail my culinary aspirations.

I know plenty of food writers, but not very many historians. So I was excited to meet British writer Tom Standage, who spoke at a dinner at NYC's Bouley last week to promote his most recent book, An Edible History of Humanity. Standage’s day job is business and technology editor at the Economist, but he's also fascinated by history and food, and all his passions come together in this book. Some topics he tackles: how the spice trade led to the discovery of the New World, how Napoleon's inability to feed his army brought about his defeat in Russia, and how Britain's decision to import food instead of grow it led to the Industrial Revolution. The book isn't exactly beach reading, but I’d recommend it to those who are looking to broaden their culinary horizons.

I’ve never put anything up—that is, preserved it to eat later. Then I picked up Eugenia Bone’s newest book, Well-Preserved, and thought I’d give it a try. Well-Preserved, which got a glowing write-up in today’s New York Times, is a conversational cookbook that explains in detail (and without too much science-speak) all means of preserving, from pickling to smoking to water-bath canning. Bone’s instructions looked easy and her recipes, like fried ricotta balls with apricot-amaretto jam, too good to pass up.

I picked cherries in wine, which infuses Bing cherries—just now in my supermarket—in red wine reduced with cloves and orange zest. After finding an inexpensive cherry pitter, preparing four pounds of cherries and scouring for stray pits, the process went smoothly and swiftly. I had only to boil the jars and wash the red juice from my fingers. The preserved cherries are proudly resting, like little rubies, in my kitchen. They’ll be perfect alongside grilled beef tenderloin or duck (Bone’s suggestions), spooned over vanilla ice cream or served straight with whipped cream. 

Eugenia’s a busy woman. Not only does she scour the greenmarkets and put up enough to feed her family year-round, she’ll be publishing a holiday food diary in our December issue. I can’t wait!