Michael Ruhlman's Blog, page 57

Classic Hollandaise

  On Saturday night, sitting in the Ohio State Theater waiting for Jim Gaffigan to go on, I got a tweet from Elise alerting me that a website had stolen my text and Donna’s photos from the following post. Elise, creator of the site Simply Recipes and vigilant crusader for blogger rights and general Internet justice, [...]

Friday Cocktail Hour: The Negroni

I actually hadn’t heard of a Negroni until Bourdain ordered one after an event we did at the 92nd Street Y. It wasn’t like him to be order a girly drink, I thought, when the server arrived with a pinkish, on-the-rocks concoction, so I took note. It would become one of my favorite cocktails, and [...]

Staple Meal: Stir-Fry

When your computer crashes, you find out just how precarious your life is without technology. None of yesterday’s work was backed up, so that’s what’s going on here! Today will be spent trying to restore what I can. Life will be normal again, I suppose, soon but not now. Thank goodness for good partners (viz [...]

Cinco De Mayo—Should It Be “Celebrated”

Having drinks last month with Shaw Lash, a Chicago chef, after a steller meal at Frontera Grill (Shaw works for executive chef Rick Bayless, renowned Mexican cuisine authority), and the subject of Cinco de Mayo came up. Shaw, who had a few month earlier showed me how they make their own chocolate, above, shook her head and [...]

Friday Cocktail Hour: The Whiskey Sour

I had my first cocktail with an egg white in it at The Best Bar In the World, and it was a revelation. A Ramos gin fizz. The egg white gave it the kind of body I’d never felt. (And nutrition! If LA starlets can call an egg white omelet a meal, I can call [...]

Culinary Intelligence—An Emerging Trend?

I spent a couple days in New York last week meeting with two very good publishers, one of whom, a veteran and very smart editor asked whether I’d thought about how busy people can actually integrate real cooking and real food into their daily lives. He wasn’t talking about the crispy pig I had at [...]

Foie Gras Wars Back On

I spotted a tiny news item in this morning’s Plain Dealer, culled from The San Francisco Chronicle reports, and was thrilled to see people like Thomas Keller, Michael Chiarello, Tyler Florence, and scores of other chefs beginning to protest California’s hypocritical and uninformed ban on foie gras that goes into effect this summer. (Watch news [...]

Friday Cocktail Hour: The Manhattan

I’m old-fashioned, I admit, and this is another Friday cocktail post devoted to classic cocktails. It’s not because I’m nostalgic (though I am). It’s because classics are classics for a reason: they’re good. There’s a reason you don’t have a Swanson’s TV dinner in your freezer but will never tire of a well-made Martini. My [...]

Ghostwriter Dustup

A lot of friends emailed me last month asking what I thought about the stink bomb Julia Moskin dropped on the cookbook world in her bitter account of chefs not writing their own books (or sometimes not even reading them). Then there was the dustup that followed—Paltrow histrionic with the Times, Regina Schrambling (indefatigable NYTimes [...]

Chicken Curry: Teach Kids To Cook

There are lots of ways to change the food system, and you and I aren’t likely to do it. It’s going to be our kids who do it. Two weeks ago I threw together a quick chicken curry and both the kids liked it, so I asked, “Is this a keeper?” and they nodded, chewing [...]