Lunch with Michael Pollan:
Two Words of Warning

On Monday, Writer’s Center Stage and Cuyahoga Public Library brought Michael Pollan to Cleveland to speak. He happened to be free for lunch and seemed delighted to be taken to The Greenhouse Tavern (above, photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman), for a taste of fall. Pollan, who lives, teaches and writes in Berkeley, CA, is tall and lanky, bobs his head a lot, smiles easily, and is engaging in conversation. He was for years a magazine editor in New York, and left full-time employment with no small amount of anxiety to complete his first book. His second book had mediocre sales, he noted (I read it long ago, excellent book). The Botony of Desire faired better, but it was The Omnivore's Dilemma that transformed him from non-fiction author and ...

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Green!

I ran this photo by Donna a while ago, but came across it this weekend and love it so much I decided to put it back up. Just because. Want to see something even more beautiful? Watch this video, from Grant Achatz and the team at Alinea and Next, the restaurant that is now devoted to childhood. Anyone else tear up? It was the beaters that got me. (My colleague Emilia Juocys found it and put it in the Sidenotes here but it deserves to be featured.)

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Chicago, XOCO & Chocolate

I'm such a homebody, I dread book tour trips and typically stress about them, and I nearly always return thrilled to have gone and surprised and amazed by what I encountered. Last week was Chicago and the schedule was so tight that I took a taxi from O'Hare straight to the Chicago Tribune's test kitchen where Monica Eng, formerly a food reporter now on the investigative beat, reverted to her former purview to join me in making an easy Coq au Vin from Ruhlman's Twenty (I forgot how good it was till I tasted it—haven't made it since Donna took the pix). I had time for a quick lunch after across the street at The Purple Pig (pig ears and the artichokes), excellent casual place recommended by a twitter friend. That night there was ...

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Curing Ground Meat: Soppressata

Soppressata w-credit In honor of this month's #charcutepalooza challenge over at Mrs. Wheelbarrow, I'm reposting this soppressata recipe from a couple years back. Wishing all who take up the challenge well. Happy curing! While David Lebovitz considers molecular gastronomy and  The Alinea Cookbook in a long and thoughtful post today (he approaches with great skepticism, as he's a traditionalist at heart, and leaves with appreciation having come back round to where he'd begun but by a whole new route), I would like to consider some of the oldest molecular gastronomical magic known to man.  Combining ground pork and salt and seasonings, introducing to it some microscopic creatures, and waiting for it to dry a little, to achieve a tangy flavorful sausage that has never gone above room temperature. In December, a few of us went in on a pig.  One of the pleasures of hand-raised hog is ...

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Ruhlman’s Twenty: The Winners

Whisk/photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman (the book's opening image)

Winners were chosen at random, but the ah-ha moments were so interesting and so vast, they deserve their own post, or maybe even a book!  Many thanks to all who offered their personal "Ah-Ha."  And thank you Rob Levitt, of Chicago's Butcher & Larder for suggesting this idea in the first place! Here are the winners of a signed copy of Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques; 100 Recipes; A Cook's Manifesto and their "Ah-Ha" moment: Ryan: My Ah-Ha moment came the first time I used a knife that wasn't from a garage sale or Walmart. Before that moment cutting food (much less cooking it) was always a chore; something done because it had to be, not because I wanted to. But from the first moment I used a real ...

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Ruhlman’s Twenty Giveaway:
Win a Signed Copy (Ah-Ha!)

As I begin to travel this week to promote my new book, I want to give away five personalized signed copies. But I want something from you. An "ah-ha" moment. Earlier in the month, promoting my appearance at Butcher & Larder in Chicago, owner Rob Levitt asked people for just such a moment, a revelation, a moment when you tasted something, combined two uncommon ingredients, used a tool in a new way, that changed the way you saw food, the kitchen, cooking. I've had many, and they're always a thrill. I write about one in the new book, the time my chef instructor at the CIA, Michael Pardus, tasted my cream of broccoli soup and said, "This is good. But I want you to take this back to your station and taste it again. Then I want you to ...

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French Onion Soup

 

Onion soup, with croutons and melted cheese/Photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman

Funny.  The recipes people are pulled toward, desire, crave, are the most basic. Like Onion soup. Part of why I love people’s hunger for basic food is because there’s so much to learn from the simplest dishes. This recipe is from the new book, Ruhlman’s Twenty.  The new book attempts to distill cooking down to 20 fundamental techniques. Two of the techniques are not verbs but rather nouns: water and onion—two of the most powerful ingredients in your kitchen, rarely given the reverence they deserve. The soup deserves this high praise not only because it’s delicious and satisfying, but because it was borne out of economy. This is a peasant soup, made from onions, a scrap ...

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Homemade Yogurt

 

Straining yogurt/photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman

Most weekday mornings I eat a bowl of homemade granola with a big dollop of homemade yogurt on top.  It’s hard to get over the amount of money you pay for granola at the store. Also, I find most granola too loaded with sugar; I don’t like it as sweet as it invariably is (here's my strawberry-banana granola recipe). Yogurt is the same, both the quality and the cost make the home-prepared better and less expensive than what you can buy at the grocery store. Also, I want to make sure it’s got plenty of vigorous, gut-healthy bacteria. I make a batch of yogurt about once every three weeks or so, using a spoonful of the previous batch to inoculate the fresh whole milk. I usually make regular yogurt because I like ...

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Snickerdoodle Fix

Snickerdoodles/photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

It turns the stomach, the kind of email Marlene sent me over the weekend. Marlene who runs the cooking site CooksKorner said that one of Ruhlman's Twenty recipe testers, Matthew Kayahara, had done a 4x recipe of the cookies in the book (page 161), the basic cinnamon-sugar cookie, and it was badly out of whack. Indeed, when Marlene checked what was in the book, she found that the published recipe contained three times the amount of granulated sugar it should have. It's a book writer's nightmare. It also reminds me what a great thing an ebook is or an app that updates on your device automatically. But there is some small recourse. I can announce the error here and publish a correction. Here it is, the tested and true snickerdoodle recipe, based ...

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The Lessons of Pork Belly

 

Crispy Pork Belly with Caramel-Miso Glaze/photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman

These are some of the pix we didn't use in the new book, Ruhlman's Twenty, and I wanted to share them because they make me hungry for pork belly. But when I sat down simply to mention this dish, Crispy Pork Belly with Miso-Caramel Glaze, it surprised me with all the lessons it has wrapped up in it. First of all, it's a delicious dish (I was delighted that Rob Misfud, in his review of the book in Toronto's Globe and Mail, tried it and loved it—while it's not difficult, it's more involved than most of the other recipes in the book).  But go below the deliciousness and you will see it's a lesson in braising, in understanding the nature of pork skin, of the power ...

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