Dancing Spoon

Chocolate (Postage) Stamps

Beyond Above and

by J. Michael Wheeler
Who Wants to Lick the Stamps?

Send your loved ones chocolate in the mail. Well, actually on the mail. In France, (where else?) food and postage are strangely blended as a .56€ first class postage stamp. These chocolate-scented postage stamps tell the story of chocolate from bean to bar in ten scented stamps.

At La Boutique Web du Timbre, the French Post Office online stamp store, the Bloc Le Chocolat is described:

Le chocolat est un aliment issu de la fève de cacao après fermentation et torréfaction. Le cacaoyer est originaire d’Amérique centrale et des forêts tropicales humides d’Amazonie. Monnaie d’échange, nourriture des Dieux, favoris des cours des grands rois, plaisir des enfants d’aujourd’hui, le chocolat est devenu un mythe dont l’histoire est retracée sur un bloc de 10 timbres traités de façon hyper réaliste. Le bloc est imprégné d’une senteur chocolat.

(Chocolate is a food derived from the cocoa bean after fermentation and roasting. The cacao tree is native to Central America and the rainforests of the Amazon. Currency exchange, food of the gods, favorite of the great kings, and joy for children of today, chocolate has become a myth whose history is traced on a block of 10 hyper realistic stamps. The block is impregnated with a chocolate scent.)

Your Bloc Le Chocolat is available at La Poste in France of course, but you can order a box, I mean a sheet, of chocolate-scented stamps online. La Boutique Web du Timbre. With stamps like these, snail mail may make a comeback: Viva la poste d'escargot!

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NY Times Holiday Cookbooks

Cookbooks Best

by J. Michael Wheeler
NY Times 36 Holiday Cookbooks
Summer’s over and the grilling’s no longer easy. So as Christine Muhlke of The New York Times says, “Summer’s homesteading how-to’s and grilling guides have given way to fall’s fearlessly bountiful lineup. It’s the time of year when big chefs send out their big books... It’s also the time for really useful books that will nudge you deeper into the winter kitchen to discover (or rediscover) the secret to no-brainer bread — or find out how much more your co-workers will like you if you bring in a “Naughty Senator” cake."

Here’s an amuse-bouche of Muhlke’s review, followed by the full course of books she’s laid out for our pleasure. All the books listed here are available at Foodie’s Emporium NY Times Holiday Cookbooks.
 
Muhlke begins with Thomas Keller, “...the biggest American chef with the biggest book...is a pro at translating his restaurant menus into lavish cookbooks for the advanced home cook.”  AD HOC AT HOME: Family-Style Recipes

Gordon Ramsay “has also set out to prove he can cook like the little people,” with his new COOKING FOR FRIENDS. This year’s most talked about restaurant book this year is MOMOFUKU from David Chang.

Should a diner who orders a dish called Sound of the Sea listen to an iPod playing waves? Well of course, according to Heston Blumenthal, the chef of the three-Michelin-starred Fat Duck in Bray, England. His new tome, FAT DUCK COOKBOOK  is a “lavish extravaganza.”

GOURMET TODAY: More Than 1,000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen, compiled by the magazine’s editor, the former New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl.

I KNOW HOW TO COOK (Je Sais Cuisiner)  was written in the early 1930s by the Sorbonne home-economics teacher Ginette Mathiot. It is the French “Joy of Cooking.” While I lived in France I sought out such a book and this it the one I found. My copy is the French version. But that’s okay, because if a dish doesn't come out quite right, I can blame it on my tortured French!

LA CUCINA: The Regional Cooking of Italy translated by Jay Hyams

THE PLEASURES OF COOKING FOR ONE by Judith Jones, who  concluded that it’s a delight to cook for one: “I open up the wine and light the candles, turn on some music, and give thanks.” 

Best Cookbooks IACP 2009

2009 Best Books

by J. Michael Wheeler
The IACP Cookbook Awards
The IACP Cookbook Awards annually celebrate the year's most outstanding food and beverage publications. The awards program was created to encourage and promote quality and creativity in cookbook writing and publishing and to expand awareness of culinary literature. The IACP Cookbook Awards have become the industry's most coveted acknowledgment of excellence in the cookbook publishing world.

Cookbook of the Year
A16: Food + Wine
At San Francisco's acclaimed A16 restaurant (named for the highway that cuts across southern Italy), diners pack the house for chef Nate Appleman's house-cured salumi, textbook Naples-style pizzas, and gutsy slow-cooked meat dishes. Wine director Shelley Lindgren is renowned in the business for her expeditionary commitment to handcrafted southern Italian wines. In A16: FOOD + WINE, Appleman and Lindgren share the source of their inspiration--the bold flavors of Campania.

Winner: Compilations Category
The Bon Appetit Cookbook: Fast Easy Fresh
For more than half a century, Bon Appétit has been the go-to source for straight-forward, sophisticated recipes, each with a contemporary twist. Now more than ever we also want to be conscientious about choosing responsibly sourced ingredients and healthy foods. The experts at Bon Appétit show how, in the most comprehensive collection—ever—of the magazine's best, most delicious, fast and easy recipes. As a cookbook, Fast Easy Fresh is unparalleled—every recipe is simple to use and has been tested with care by the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen.  It will become your indispensable source for all the tips, hints, and tricks you need to keep you on top of your game. Eating local, eating better, eating fresh—it all starts here, in The Bon Appétit Fast Easy Fresh Cookbook.

Chocolate & Zucchini, the Book

Review Book

Chocolate & Zucchini
Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen
by Clotilde Dusoulier

Meeting fellow food enthusiasts is a bit like reconnecting with long-lost friends. It takes just a glance and a few words to recognize them, and soon enough a feeling of mutual understanding, of natural ease, sets in: you belong to the same club, speak the same language, and share the same values about life, and the enjoyment thereof.
Clotilde Dusoulier

If you don't know Clotilde Dusoulier from her wonderful blog ChocolateandZucchini.com, let me introduce her: she is definitely a fellow food enthusiast to whom you should be connected.

Dusoulier takes us along with her as she shares her love and joy of cooking, shopping, entertaining, and the pleasures of food discoveries. She lives and cooks in Paris, but her Philosophie de Cuisine can be practiced by all of us, no matter where we live.

In dining as in all areas of life, I am very much in favor of spontaneity, improvisation, and drop-of-a-hat decisions. Few things please me more than to talk to a friend in the middle of the afternoon and casually ask, "Well, why don't you come to dinner tonight?"

Thus begins the section she calls Impromptu, and her drop-of-a-hat recipes such as Zucchini Carpaccio with Raspberry Vinegar and Asparagus and Sea Bass Paillotes. 

Chocolate & Zucchini has over 75 intriguing recipes. But what really makes this book is Dusoulier's style: if only you could bump into her on an afternoon and hear her ask, "Well, why don't you come to dinner tonight?" 

 

Heat

Review Book

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave,
Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a
Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford

Heat is Buford’s odyssey from chaotic home cook (“more confident than competent”) to culinary spiritualist. His book chronicles Mario Batali’s rise to fame (Batali’s Italy becomes part of Buford’s quest), the inner-workings of the restaurant world, and Buford’s culinary journey to Italy culminating in his “theory of smallness.” The journey begins through a birthday dinner party  Buford hosted for a friend. Among the guests was Batali (“the most recognized chef in a city with more chefs than any other city in the world ”), who promptly took over the kitchen.

From that meeting with Mario, Buford discovered “he wanted the know-how of people who ran restaurants.” To do that he needed to become a kitchen slave and Mario admitted him to restaurant world as a kitchen slave in Mario’s New York restaurant, Babbo.