Sunday, September 30

 
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FoodWords is a free weekly digest of great food stories from all
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"In Taiwan, one sentence that was often repeated when friends
greeted each other was 'Ni ch'ih pao le, mei yu?' ('Have you
eaten yet?'). Clearly, I had come to the right place."
-- Nina Simonds
Gourmet magazine
January 1979


FoodWords
Volume 1, Number 2
September 30, 2001


Today's Specials:

o Letter from the Editor: Read Any Good Cookbooks Lately?
o The Buffet Table
o Announcements
o Subscription Details



Dear FoodWords readers,

This issue is a week or so late, for which I apologize. Just
couldn't work up the enthusiasm for putting the newsletter
together. However, today is a beautiful fall day in Green Bay,
Wisconsin -- the sky is a deep blue, the leaves are beginning
to turn color, and the guard hairs on my cat Tia's thick brown
fur are shot golden with sunlight. Today, I want to think about
food! Hope you do, too.

While visiting a friend's house for lunch, I started paging
through the library copy of "Hot Sour Salty Sweet" (Jeffrey Alford,
published by Workman Publishing) which her husband had used to
create a Thai chicken soup the night before. It's a wonderful book;
As soon as I got home, I reserved it for myself. Better return it
soon, Don.

I've also been poring over Gourmet magazine's 60th anniversary issue.
I'm a fan of Editor Ruth Reichl, although I run hot and cold on
the magazine itself. However, the September issue is a treasure.
Today's quote came from it.

Thanks to everyone who subscribed to FoodWords' first issue,
which of course was riddled with errors. Welcome to our new
subscribers, and thanks to those readers who were brave enough to
come back for another helping.

Here we go!
Comments? Click here



1. Sushi in Paris? Worth the Wait and the Crowds
(International Herald Tribune)

One of the great services the World Wide Web affords fans of
terrific food writing is 24-hour access to Patricia Wells, a
cookbook author, newspaper food writer and a great person to
interview. (I met with her for more than an hour one icy Chicago
afternoon. Good writers can be awful interviews, but she was a joy,
and the interview wandered far afield before we concluded.) Today,
her pieces appear regularly in the International Herald Tribune,
published in Paris, her adopted hometown.


2. Trans-fat Labeling Standards Urged
(foodnavigator.com)

The Bush Administration has asked the Food and Drug Administration
to finish making food-labeling rules clarifying the presence of
trans fatty acids in food products. "Trans" fats are those that
have been hydrogenated - had an extra hydrogen molcule added, as
in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil - in order to make them
firmer for use in cooking and baking. "Trans" fats are considered
to be among the worst for heart health. Some food manufacturers
are resisting, although they acknowledge the new labeling results
are inevitable.


3. Bread in a Can, Man
(Flak Magazine)

I can think food that are much more unnerving than Boston brown
bread in a can (anything with the eyes left on, for starters), but
the concept apparently unhinged this poor writer. However, he
recovered long enough to do something creative with it. Perhaps too
many years of eating Vienna Sausages has inured me to strange food.
Or maybe it was those Pampered Chef hors-d'oeuvre bread tubes that
did it. Anyway: normal or not? You make the call.


4. Brazen Careerist: The Art of the Meal
(Business 2.0)

Penelope Trunk is the pseudonym for a woman who lives and writes
(and is trying to get her life back together) in New York City.
In this article, published before the terrorist attacks, she
describes, in snarky detail, how to eat your way through a
business meal without embarrasing yourself.


5. Emeril's Sitcom: Flat or Funny?
(New York Post, MediaLife Magazine)

Personally, I find Emeril Lagasse to be like cayenne pepper: a little
goes a long, long, long way. No denying he's popular with some of the
masses, however; so popular that - how could you have missed this big
news? - he has his own TV sitcom this fall. I don't know if it
has been on yet, but critics have been sniping for months that it's
as flat as a fallen souffle. Now that the delayed TV premiere season
is here, either the fat's in the fire or the proof is in the pudding.
One critic says it's ho-hum, the other says it's actually kind of
funny. You watch it and let me know.

Not so funny

Not so bad


6. The Brioche that Failed
(Troika magazine)

If you've never made or consumed really good brioche (a French egg bread,
indescribably moist, chewy and delicious when made correctly), you might
not understand the poignancy behind this writer's fate, to be so near and
yet so far from heaven, even if it does come from a baker with a temper
so foul he makes the Soup Nazi look like Mother You-Know-Who.


Thanks for reading. Look for the newsletter in another two weeks, or so, or tune in here every once in a while to see what kind of quirky,
short-shelf-life, bizarre or breaking news I have posted that
day.




posted by Unknown 9:08 PM