What To Cook And How To Cook It is now available for pre-order from Phaidon. I don’t know much about it other than that it is by the lovely London-based Jane Hornby. It’s her first cookbook and has a fantastic cover, so I’m excited to see it!
Category Archives: Books
Between The Red Covers
From my earliest days, my father has conditioned me to revere one and only one restaurant guide: The Michelin Red Guide. For as long as I can remember, this has been the ultimate source of wisdom when it comes to making dining decisions. I remember how thrilled I was when Michelin finally made a Red Guide for New York, as if the culinary gods had turned a beam of enlightenment upon the city. I could not agree more with Chef Paul Bocuse, who said “Michelin is the only guide that counts.”
It was a childhood fantasy to be a Michelin critic one day: chic jet-setter, shrouded in mystery and powerful anonymity, eating my way through the best restaurants Europe has to offer. Now, of course, I realize that the lifestyle is hardly the glamorized one I held in my head, but instead consists of burdens, such as “the travel, the regimen of constant eating, the pressure to fill out meticulously detailed reports on time, the enforced anonymity, the low pay.” However, for all drawbacks of being a Michelin critic and for all the criticisms charged against the guide for being too stodgy, too rigid, too traditional, too scientific, I love the guides and everything about them as an institution. So it was with great delight that I read this piece from last November’s New Yorker, in which John Colapinto actually got to meet and eat with a Michelin reviewer (unheard of) and Michelin guide managing director Jean-Luc Naret. It’s absolutely riveting if you have even the slightest interest in reviewing food. Many thanks to avid blog reader and friend Max for sending it in!
{from The New Yorker}
But not much more
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I was looking through my Tumblr, which I haven’t done in ages, and I found this lovely print. So true, Morrissey, so true.
{From The Black Apple on Etsy, via Quote-Book Tumblr}
Filed under Books
Marc Jacobs to open Book Marc
I know this has been all over the blogosphere today, but Marc Jacobs is going to open a bookstore in the West Village called Book Marc. The shop’s going to be at 400 Bleecker, the Biography Book Shop’s old home and right across the street from Magnolia Bakery. Some people are all in a tizzy because it’s supposedly going to taint the genuine, old-school literary nature of the neighborhood and expand Marc’s West Village shopping empire. I’m actually pretty excited to see what sort of bookstore Marc will throw together. And let’s be serious, there absolutely needs to be some kind of bookstore across the street from Magnolia Bakery. Books and cupcakes are two of my favorite things in the world!
{from Racked}
Filed under Books
Hello Summer, is that you?
Today is the first day to remind me that sometimes it can be too hot outside. It’s not too hot outside now, but after winter I think that warm always equals better and can’t conceptualize the sizzling, too-hot heat. Anyway, it kind of almost feels like summer now and this makes me think of several things.
1. Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises is one of my favorite books and for whatever reason I have an urge to read it every summer. I’m also just finishing up A Moveable Feast right now and if you haven’t read it you need to immediately. I know some people don’t like it, but I love Hem’s prose. Maybe it is the way he writes that makes me associate him with summer. It’s so simple and solid;
2. Outdoor markets. Europeans really have the market thing nailed. There are great markets in New York and elsewhere, but I am always impressed with the ubiquity and quality of European markets. My parents took me to Western Europe every summer as a child, so when the weather starts getting warm I always want to go find one. I want fresh mozzarella from a friendly cheesemonger, tomatos that smell like a farm from a happy, wrinkly old woman, flowers from a happy-go-lucky young Italian boy… you get the idea.
3. Summer jams. Some music is just more summery than other music. Warm weather often reminds me of high school favorites like O.A.R. and Dave Matthews Band and those big, lazy summer concert tours. Right now summer has me thinking about these two albums: Discovery’s LP (no really it’s called LP) and Surfer Blood’s Astro Coast. LP came out last July and is a great, short summer album. Discovery is composed of Wes Miles from Ra Ra Riot and Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend (two of my favorite bands). It’s definitely more experimental than either band’s other work, but it’s not so experimental that you can’t enjoy it while flipping burgers or as you sink into a nap on the beach. Astro Coast is actually a winter album, released this January, but I am late on the bandwagon and am just listening to it and it feels summery to me. They are a little bit Weezer, a little bit Vampire Weekend, and a lot of something new. The music makes me want to roll down the car windows and crank up the volume. You know… if I had a car and lived somewhere where it’s pleasant to drive.
Also:
4. Tan lines.
5. Navy with white polka dots.
6. Getting drunk on the beach.
Weekend Things
Hello again. Hope everyone had a lovely Easter weekend. Here are some things I did:
1. I went to Kitchen Arts and Letters with my mom. This amazing little book store carries new, used, rare, and out of print books about cooking, food, and drinking. It’s a wonderfully old-school bookstore and I loved it. Go check it out on Lexington and 95th.
2. While I was at Kitchen Arts and Letters, I go this adorable little book about macarons. I have only tried to make these once with partial success, but now that I have this handbook devoted entirely to the creation and perfection of the macaron, maybe it is time to try again. The book is also available on Amazon.
3. I added two more plants to my collection: an aloe plant because my mother thinks I’ll need it when I burn myself, which I actually did last week making the gooey butter cake, so perhaps she is right; and a pretty little rose bush. Hopefully I won’t kill either of them.
4. I can’t help it; I have to admit that I am an insane Duke basketball fan and we won a national championship last night. So that was a pretty huge part of my weekend.
Vintage Cocktails
I am going to apologize right now for the lack of entertaining posts today. I spent yesterday stress drinking my way through a basketball game and then did a lot of celebratory drinking and now it is rainy and grey and gross and I’m not sure how much of my brain is working. You can tell because I can’t even compose sentences properly.
That being said, I saw this book in McNally Jasckson yesterday and now I’m really regretting not bringing it home with me. It’s basically a picture book for alcoholics. There are giant, pretty pictures of cocktails on every right-hand page and giant, scrawled recipes on every left-hand page. The recipes really look like someone wrote them on a cocktail napkin with a crayon. The book is entirely charming and I want it so I can roll around in my dark cave of an apartment and avoid chores and look at pretty pictures of drinks.
McNally Jackson, Addiction, Narcissism
Today I went to check out the new McNally Jackson cafe in person with my fabulous friend Alice. The cafe was super cute, the coffee was amazing, and I got two books. I should admit at this point that I have a serious, serious book problem. Books are like crack to me. No matter how many I have or how many books I am currently reading, I always needs more. One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010 was to stop buying books until I had read all the books I have. I lasted about two months and then started buying more books. I ran out of shelf space a long time ago. There are always books in my bed, stacked on my bedside table, piled on my desk, on the floor of my living room, etc. It’s a serious problem.
In any case, I felt obligated to get one of these books today because it appears to tap into a recurring theme in my life. Him Her Him Again The End of Him by Patricia Marx is supposedly about this girl who is obsessed with this guy and according to the back cover “By ‘obsessed,’ we mean, well … sex and lusting and longing and hoping and waiting for this cad who is spread too thin.” I’ve only read the first 35 pages and already Marx’s prose is getting a little grating, but I love this quotation:
“You know what I think it really was? He was a narcissist. I love narcissists – even more than they love themselves. You don’t have to buoy them up. They are their own razzle-dazzle show and you are the blessed, favored with a front-row seat.” (31)
How do you not love that? I mean the quote, not the narcissist. Actually scratch that, I mean the narcissist too.
Passively Astonished 