Macaron Meditation II

If you're just joining us, I'm going through the entire process of making macarons and considering the different approaches and what's worked best for me. 1. Ingredients and Prep To review, the shell's main ingredients are almond, egg white, confectioner's...

Posted on March 25, 2009 10:51 PM

Emptying the queue: bladesmiths and fugue states

A bunch of links I've been meaning to post for too long: FX Cuisine documents the well-funded culinary adventures of a French-speaking Swiss man. While I envy his photographic setup and his travel budget, I have to give him credit...

Posted on March 14, 2009 2:01 PM

Macaron Meditation I: The Recipes

This past fall I made about five full attempts at macarons, trying to achieve the perfect appearance and deliciousness of Pierre Hermé's creations. I'm happy to report that by the last couple of tries I was pleased with the...

Posted on February 16, 2009 12:40 PM

A Dinner and Two Cookbooks

Had a nice birthday dinner at Sushi Yasuda. This was the first time for me eating at a three-star restaurant. We ordered omakase, something I've always wanted to do, and got toro, hiramasa yellow tail, sea trout, white king salmon,...

Posted on December 7, 2008 9:38 PM

Culinary Experiments

1. When I got an ice cream maker, I was excited to try out some of the recipes in "The Sweet Life" dessert cookbook. For a holiday meal I made two: Apple Cider and Caramel Ice Cream, and Quince...

Posted on June 14, 2008 5:22 PM

Worth Every Penny

The recent Times article about cooking with ingredients from 99-cent stores, and kottke's comments and assorted links, reminds me of my own experiences with 99 cent stores in my neighborhood. I thought I had written about this, but it turns...

Posted on March 28, 2008 11:48 PM

Notes From Spain: A Meal at Cinc Sentits

Cinc Sentits is one of the best-regarded restaurants in Barcelona. It has the atmosphere of a temple of gastronomy: hushed, with few tables. At one point a cook walked out the front door and took delivery of something in a...

Posted on February 8, 2008 10:32 PM

Notes From Spain: A Meal at Comerc24

Comerç24 is a restaurant in the modern Spanish trend of experimentation and presentation, but the menu is mercifully light on foams and airs. These descriptions of the dishes are from my notes; I won't be able to write very detailed...

Posted on February 4, 2008 10:48 PM

Notes From Spain: Restaurants

Without further ado, remarks on some of the places we dined in Spain. Barcelona Neyras Via Laietana, 41 We wandered into this place on our first night in town. It turned out to be a perfectly serviceable tapas restaurant,...

Posted on January 18, 2008 8:41 PM

Notes From Spain: Food

Food was a major focus of my preparation for our trip to Spain. As usual I got a lot of my information from eGullet. I visited the sites of individual restaurants and consulted this Spanish Food Dictionary when necessary....

Posted on January 14, 2008 10:08 PM

My Favorite Supermarket

Today I'm going to write about my favorite supermarket in New York. The story begins in early 2005, when RST moved to 233rd Street and Broadway, in Kingsbridge. Across Broadway was a supermarket where we sometimes got sandwiches, and I...

Posted on December 8, 2007 2:57 PM

Google Maps for all, please

Two sites that could really benefit from massive Google Maps mashups are TripAdvisor and MenuPages. Menupages is a pretty great site for finding a restaurant. You can tell a lot from the restaurant's menu (no more having to deal with...

Posted on November 6, 2007 9:00 PM

Chikubu, I hardly knew you

It says something either about the vastness of NYC, or about myself, that even after actively keeping up on the restaurant scene for several months, I still regularly have moments like this: I find out from Eater that a restaurant...

Posted on April 13, 2007 1:52 PM

Eat Fresh

I find this story very gratifying. The condo board for a building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is suing the Subway franchise on the ground floor for the "fresh bread" odors that permeate the apartments above. For years...

Posted on February 12, 2007 3:30 PM