kitchenmage

A Taste for Reading benefit lunch (Seattle)

Food and books, two of my favorite things, come together next week in Seattle at A Taste for Reading(pdf), a benefit luncheon for Page Ahead. Even better, there is entertainment from an as yet unannounced school group, so you get your dose of cute kids too. Page Ahead is a children's literacy program that distributes books to kids and encourages parent and community active involvement in reading with children.

A Taste for Reading happens next Wednesday, April 9, at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center on Seattle’s Waterfront. Lunch will be served at 11:30, with the entertainment at noon. They are even promising that it will end "promptly at 1" so you can all scurry back to work. A donation will be requested (the meal is valued at ~30) and contributions over 250 will be matched.

To make (required) reservation, drop them email or call 206.461.0123.

the cookbook whisperer

As an unapologetically enthusiastic cook, I own a lot of cookbooks. A quick survey from where I sit reveals four bookshelves-one with easily 125 books-and six piles of books in varying states of precariousness. Books with recipes make up the bulk of these, but McGee, Nestle, Pollan, Schlosser, Parsons and others contribute a couple dozen reference books to the clutter in my office. It should be noted that I can only see the dining room and my office.

Out of sight, the guest room has a bookcase of food essayists, designed to be read in small bits: Reichl, Steingarten, Bourdain, the annual Best Food Writing series. Two more boxes, utterly untouched, sit where they were shoved under the entryway bench a few months ago "until we build more bookshelves," an event I expect to happen real soon now. Like next year.

Excellent series about Noka chocolate at Dallas Food

While catching up on my reading, I scanned the list of nominees for best post in the Food Blog Awards at Well Fed and came across one that I found both very well written and fascinating. As an added bonus, it was at Dallas Food, a blog I hadn't come across before.

First a bit of back story.

Noka Chocolate is a two year old Texas chocolatier with lots of stylish trappings and unbelievably expensive chocolate. Seriously. Second most expensive in the world. Ranging from a smidge over $300us to a bit under $2100us. Yep, you read that right: almost $2100 a pound! That is a pretty impressive price for any company to command for chocolate, let alone an two year old upstart in a strip mall in Plano, Texas.

But they do have pictures of the chocolate attending the Emmys and being named the  #1 luxury chocolate in the world by a British TV show (or would that be telly?) and a corporate philosophy.

NOKA Chocolatier, Katrina Merrem, has as her life-passion, the goal of returning chocolate to its pure, luxurious state by creating the finest single-origin dark chocolate truffles and chocolates, made from the rarest cacao sourced from exclusive plantations around the world.

It is with this vision that NOKA Chocolate was founded. And it is this very vision that guides NOKA Chocolate in handcrafting the most exquisite chocolates to ever grace the palate.

I am totally there with most exquisite chocolates to ever grace the palate part of this. If the best chocolate in the world costs 2000 a pound, and it is actually the best, then I'd have to buy a little bit...once. (Of course, I would then have to donate a LOT of money to the local food bank to assuage my guilt.) So it's nice that Dallas Food published this series, in which they asked a simple question: Is Noka chocolate worth the price? You know, just in case I ever win the lottery.

The answer comes in the form of a ten part series. It does an excellent job of analyzing the factors that might make the chocolate worth the exorbitant prices and coming to a conclusion that, while not necessarily surprising, is rather hard to dispute. (and comments are disabled, so no disputing is taking place) There's research and interviews and taste testing and everything! (ok, so the muckraking geek part of me was very amused)

It's well worth the read and points to one of the things that is best about independent publishing here on the tubes of the Internets: I doubt that any mainstream outlet would have cared enough to do this piece until the company got big enough to matter and, by then, the company might have mattered enough that the question never got asked.

Cookbook for a cause

While I am currently off in writing land and this site languishes (which might seem more appropriate in August when it's hot and humid and thus languishy), I'd like to take a moment and point out a project in which I had a wee smidge of involvement.

And They Cook, Too is a cookbook comprised of recipes donated by all sorts of bloggers, some of whom you might know, many of whom you probably haven't heard of yet. Spearheaded by Ginger Mayerson and Kathy Flake, all proceeds from this book will go to Doctors Without Borders, an admirable organization whose members travel the world providing medical assistance in that superhero style of running into the places most sane people are running away from.

There's a list of contributors here if you want to tease yourself, and find some interesting new blogs in the process. But really, it's only 15 bucks, so give up your take-out espresso for a week and give a little for the cause.

My contribution? Well, it's a stream of consciousness semi-recipe and might even make you laugh...at my pain. But that's what writer's have pain for: to make others laugh at it.

Cookbook for Doctors Without Borders

Kathy at What Do I Know? and Ginger of The Hackenblog are creating a book to benefit Doctors Without Borders, which is a most worthy organization. They are looking for recipes, short essays, some artwork, poetry, and so on. (note to writers: I even read the legal stuff and it's fine, you retain copyright, etc) I've offered my Fish Tail Soup recipe as a sort of cross between humor and cooking. Check out the idea and see if you've got something to contribute to this great project.

Books, bread, and buckets of rain.

Don't you just love "odds and ends" posts? If not, why are you here? (Uh, nevermind, don't want to drive away all three of my fans!) I've got a number of accumulated things to write about; today's random accumulation is brought to you by the letter B.

Let's start with a bit of trivial cuteness. River staring balefully at the buckets of rain. More on that later.

Books
On my list of life's small pleasures, there's not much better than a new cookbook. Even better is free cookbooks. Today, I've got a slim new volume titled Very Pesto, which I won over at Cooking With Amy—see, all that trivial herbish information does come in handy! Although I've yet to make a recipe from it, I am having fun deciding where to start. One thing I really like about the book is that it has recipes that can be made in most seasons. (Meaning it's not all basil, which I love, but Nov. is not the time for it.) There's fennel pesto, which sounds like it would be amazing on salmon; thyme and/or oregano pestos; and a sage pesto that I am thinking about for a condiment at Thanksgiving. So much fun and I haven't even started cooking yet. Thanks Amy!

I've been slashfooded!

Okay so my life is very boring, but I am excited. Sarah Gilbert, another confessed rosemary thief, saw my Saucy article and wrote about it at slashfood!

What I am really curious about is the rosemary thievery--is this a Pacific Northwet phenomenon? Does our greenery grow in such abundance that we feel free to pinch a bit of our neighbor's? I know that anyone who visits me in my fog valley is likely to leave with a box of small plants with which to start their herb garden. And I even have lots of rosemary, one of the apprentices has made it his calling to propagate thousands of them (in one little flower bed at the moment) and an acre or two of amazingly peppery, pungent greek oregano.

Sarah, if you're reading this, come visit and I'll give you your very own rosemary. Or two.

the ethics of free recipes

As I was perusing this mornng's updated flogs, I stumbled across someone raving about Google Print. (Find it if you are interested, I am not supporting them by making it easy to find them. I'm also not linking to the blog where I found it because I like her writing and this isn't about her.) For those of you unfamiliar with the "service" being offered by Google, it takes the full text of published books and makes them available free online. Sounds pretty cool, huh?

Well, it depends on who you are.

Cookbook Meme

Wow, I've had this blog a month and haven't been memed yet. So when I came across  Spiceblog's cookbook meme, and already had the pictures on my camera, it seemed like a natural. Without further ado, here's shelf #1.