Congrats to my dear friend Blake Bailey, whose bio of John Cheever, won best bio of 2009 from the National Book Critics Circle on Thursday. I mentioned this bio when it came out. It's fabulous, highly recommended. Blake also wrote a bio of Richard Yates, which is every bit as good, if not better. I have no doubt his Charles Jackson bio (which he talks about on the WSJ blog) will be the same, even if Jackson is all but forgotten.
Michael Symon and I will be at Joseph-Beth Booksellers at Legacy Thursday from 7 to 9. He no-doubt wants help flogging that damned book of his. I'll be out front selling out of my van. If it's good enough for Bourdain, it's good enough for me.
At last, we’ve put together this basic video demonstration of Ratio: The Smart Phone Application (built by Will Turnage, designed by Leah McCombe) so that people can see what it does and how it works. I love the application because it’s truly useful. If I’m making hamburgers or meatloaf, it will give me the amount of seasoning I need depending on how much meat I have. If I only want a few cookies, not two dozen, it will create the recipe for me. If I find I only have one egg, but still want to make a blueberry muffin, it calculates the amount based on one egg. If I want to whip up a last minute caramel sauce it tells me how. If I want to know even the basic proportions of a stock, it’s there for me. It’s also a great ounces-to-grams converter.
This application will be of special value to anyone who works in a kitchen and to any and all culinary students. And you chefs, authors, and bloggers who develop your own recipes, this application provides the trunk from which a thousand variations branch off. I hope you’ll have a look!
This is version 1.0.1, with all bugs taken care of. Will and Leah are working on the Droid version now!
Here are some comments and reviews about the application:
Russ Parsons, in the LATimes Blog: “Michael Ruhlman wrote a really good book earlier this year called Ratio. Now he’s gone out and turned it into an even better iPhone application. … And though [his] approach may seem a little mechanistic in a cookbook (what if you happen to want a cookie with a different texture than the one chosen?), it’s sheer genius in an app, where the expectations are different. Think of ‘Ratio, the App’ as a combination culinary pocket calculator and aide-memoir.”
Chicagoist: “This application is so good it almost makes us regretting buying the book first. … At $4.99, it’s a steal.”
From the Village Voice Blog: “While Ruhlman’s app enters an already crowded market for cooking-related iPhone applications, with its gee-whiz calculations, it has the potential to be one of the most useful. The home cooking world may finally have its own version of Turing Bombe, complete with pretty colors and custard icons.”
Click here to see go to its iTunes page. All comments and criticisms welcome.
Cleveland's Galleria mall has turned indoor vacant retail space into farmland. Great idea more cities can adopt!
Shortbread, photo by Donna
Good opinion piece by Nick Kristoff in the NYTimes today on new bad bugs our factory farming system and rampant antibiotic use are creating, such as ESBL-producing E. coli, bacteria we don't have the drugs to fight.
I was honored to be asked to speak at our local TEDxCLE last Friday where I was allowed to try to explain why I think cooking is important. There's a great book out now that argues that our ancestors became human only after we began cooking for ourselves and our families. I believe it's still important, but for different reasons. Not just sort of important. Really important. I'm not saying anything that hasn't already been said before, but I know it can't be said enough. Consider that cooking food might be far more vital than you ever imagined. I don't believe that everyone ought to cook. But I think at least one person in every group ought to cook. We fail to cook for ourselves at our ...
Great story on chefs using the whole pig in LATimes. "Let's face it, the pig is one generous animal, and we've only begun to explore its possibilities." Recipes for belly confit using olive oil and pig ear and celery salad! Nice.
Gremolata topping wine-braised beef short rib, photo by Donna
Cleveland Chef Jonathan Sawyer takes the My Last Meal game real beyond the conversation stage. Since we never know when the inevitable catastrophe of death will strike, my advice is to take him up on it!
Welcome to Ruhlman.com where I blog about food, cooking, recipes and technique, because the world is better when we cook for ourselves. Thanks for visiting and I hope you’ll join the conversation.
