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!

 

When chef David Bull, an F&W Best New Chef 2003 and executive chef at Bolla in Dallas’s iconic Stoneleigh Hotel, told me he was working on a cookbook a few months ago, I told him to make sure he sent me a copy. This cookbook, however, was not going to be a traditional, tangible, get the pages dirty, dog-ear your favorite recipe type cookbook. Chef Bull was launching an online cookbook, which debuted last week, called Bull’s Eye On Food. Instead of going to Barnes & Noble, people sign up here and pay $34.94 for an annual subscription. A user name and password let you access 80 recipes, plus loads of other information that gets continuously updated throughout the year. I got to give it a test run this week and spent hours on the interactive site, which includes much more than just recipes. I loved the one-click grocery list (which you can then send to your PDA) and the video-demo segments. There’s a glossary for esoteric ingredients. You can search by recipe title, recipe type, “with” or “without” certain ingredients, difficulty level (ranging from one through five), lifestyle (e.g., vegetarian) and cooking method. Cooking tips and wine pairings are also built into the site, as is a fantastic party-planner tool that lets you customize place cards and design e-vites. I won’t be giving up my hard copy of Joy of Cooking anytime soon, but I do wonder if we won’t start seeing more of these eco-friendly, web-based cookbooks in the future.
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First disclosure: Monica Bhide is a close friend. Second disclosure: I love curling up with cookbooks to read them almost more than I do cooking out of them, so my judgments are often swayed as much by the chapter introductions and recipe headnotes as by the recipes themselves. So when I say that Monica's new collection of recipes and essays, Modern Spice, is one of my favorite new cookbooks of 2009, I have at least two causes for fuzzy judgment. But you don't have to take my word for it. Pick up a copy at your local bookstore and have a peek at some of Monica's stories, about how going through her oddball coffee cup collection helped her patch things up with her husband after an argument, or how cutting off the end of a ham reveals that certain recipe traditions don't always make any sense, and you may also fall in love. So don't say I didn't warn you when you also fall hard for her peanut and potato cakes and find yourself craving them at 3 a.m. on an occasional Sunday.

Check out Monica's favorite Mumbai restaurants here.

This morning I had had breakfast with writer Anna Watson. Anna used to be a peripatetic editor at the brilliant but sadly shuttered Culture + Travel magazine. These days the La Varenne–trained foodie has been spending her days in the kitchen, on a mission to try and eat extraordinarily well on a budget. She recently launched a new blog called The Recession Cookbook, where she shares her cost-saving strategies (steak dinner and a bottle of red for two for under $35), excellent recipes and genius ideas for turning leftovers into delicious meals. I know I’ll be regularly checking in for value-minded dinner party inspiration.

Celery is the most common ingredient in tuna salad, second to mayonnaise. This week, I tested an awesome tuna melt recipe from Tom Colicchio's new cookbook, 'wichcraft. This recipe turned the volume up on the diner classic by using English muffins, Gruyére cheese and supersweet, slow-roasted plum tomatoes. My greatest surprise was Colicchio's use of finely chopped raw celery root in place of the usual celery. It added a mild celeryness along with a good crunch. I thought this was an unusual idea that worked very well. Not standard at the diner, but now it might be the standard at my house.

I love to find new, easy cooking techniques. While testing a bulgur-salad recipe in Aglaia Kremezi's new cookbook, Mediterranean Hot and Spicy (May 2009), I found a new way to prepare bulgur. Usually bulgur is a quick-cooking grain, which is great, but sometimes you want to make a meal where you don't turn on your stove. Kremezi makes her bulgur salad by soaking dry bulgur in a bowl of cool water for 20 to 30 minutes, until it becomes tender. I filled a bowl with water and added the bulgur, and 30 minutes later, the bulgur was ready to be drained and mixed with nuts, herbs and a light dressing. In preparing for the warmer weather (I'm counting down the days!) I will try this technique to keep my small apartment kitchen cool.

I love to bake and I test a ton of baking books throughout the year so I get a little tired of seeing the same old recipes for chocolate layer cake and oatmeal cookies. Once in a while a great surprise will land on my desk, a book with originality that rethinks familiar sweets. Baked: New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito of Brooklyn's Baked bakery is '08's inspired dessert cookbook. Yesterday I made the Peanut Butter Crispy Bars, a cross between a Rice Krispies Treat, a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and a Whatchamacallit (but for grown-ups, of course). A coworker called these luscious, silky bars "dessert's answer to foie gras."  Another one of my new favorite recipes: the Sweet and Salty Cake, a fairly traditional chocolate cake layered untraditionally with salted caramel and coarse salt.

 I’m not a serious baker, but every so often, a new book comes out that makes me fantasize about becoming one. Two years ago, it was Heirloom Baking, a charming collection of community cookbook recipes updated by the Boston-based Brass sisters. Then it was Jill O’Connor’s Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey, which became an office favorite for its over-the-top desserts that somehow managed to not be too sweet. Right now, I’m loving Mani Niall’s new Sweet!, a book that looks beyond white granulated sugar to brown cane sugars as well as plant-based sweeteners like agave and maple syrup. For his Mexican bread pudding, which has a rich, earthy sweetness, Niall adds panela, a dense, dark brown cane sugar that’s formed into cones and must be grated. To give shortbread cookies a deeper, rounder flavor, he adds maple sugar. Demerara, a moist, light brown sugar, adds a caramelly note to chocolate fudge. Niall even includes a few savory recipes, including roasted sweet potatoes glazed with sorghum, the South’s answer to the North’s maple syrup. In our upcoming January issue, we will be running his supereasy cranberry-orange scone recipe, which gets toffee-like notes from turbinado sugar—the crunchy crystals that come in those brown “Sugar in the Raw” packets.