Thursday, February 12, 2009

Food, Freud, and Fussiness

My friend Lauren Shockey has a very cool article in Slate about attempts at recreating restaurant food at home. Restaurant cookbooks, it seems, do not actually want you to recreate their food, as doing so would eliminate the need to go to the restaurant. Sneaky bastards! I especially appreciated her mentioning how many dishes one recipe took to prepare at home--this is an important question far too often left out of food writing, as though dishes did themselves. (I could go on...)

In totally unrelated news, two quotes of the day:

1) "Gordon's wife, Rebecca, 27, has the same career as his mom -- teaching gifted elementary-schoolers -- and the women share a love of cooking and talking on the phone."-from a CNN story (via Jezebel) about people who marry all Freudian-style. Gordon's in quite the predicament. Two women, both elementary school teachers, who enjoy talking on the phone and cooking, what were the chances? If it turns out both his wife and his mother like shopping for shoes, they're all in Greek-tragedy territory.

2) "'I don’t even look at [manicures] as luxury,' she said. 'It’s basic cleanliness.'"-Some woman foolish enough to agree to be interviewed by the NYT Styles section, who seems to have confused nail polish with Purell.

2 comments:

Tom said...

Turns out Gordon and his father-in-law are both lawyers and love the Yankees. Dude, what are the odds!?

Anonymous said...

I've been struggling to get the motivation to recreate the aforementioned lentil soup at home. But that place won't even disclose its recipe (wisely!), so it'll involve far too much experimentation, and apparently it takes forever to cook lentil soup. So I have about 5 pounds of lentils sitting in my cupboard collecting dust. Perhaps the solution is to get a job at the restaurant for about an hour, assiduously avoid signing any kind of confidentiality agreement, and learn the soup recipe by industrial espionage.