 |
|
LindyChef on Cooking
Well, I've finally earned that "Chef" part of my online
handle and am now a full fledged cook. Check out my travails in
my blog. My interest
in cooking started when I was young, when I was living
in Saudi Arabia at the age of 10. When you're in a compound in
the middle of the desert, you try to find ways to entertain yourself.
One of the things I would do is bake, although sometimes I would start a
cake batter only to realize we had no eggs. Unfortunately, the Betty
Crocker cookbook doesn't list any emergency substitute for eggs ... now I'm a little more diligent about my mise-en-place,
in no small part thanks to some of the brilliant culinary minds listed
below.
|
|
|
 My modern
interest in food stems from this guy. I moved into an apartment
right when his show was taking off on
Food Network.
I loved the fact that he made cooking more about the joy of the
experience rather than a set of recipes and instructions that needed to
be slavishly followed. Besides, how can you not get hyped up by a
guy running around and yelling BAM all of the time? |
 Hands down,
the most interesting person in the modern culinary scene. His
show, Good Eats, isn't about teaching recipes; it teaches
culinary fundamentals. So if he does a show about steak, not only
will he tell you how to cook it, he'll also give you information on how
to select cuts of meat, where they come from, why you salt your meat
before cooking, and the physics of sudden thermodynamics. Cool.
I mean hot. Check it out on
Food Network. |
Culinary Celebrities
|
Culinary Authors
|
 | Tony Bourdain - Tony is kinda like the bad boy of the
culinary world. He wrote a memoir on his years working in
kitchens called
Kitchen Confidential, which explains, among other things,
why you should never order fish on a Monday. His second book,
A Cook's Tour, is a series on
Food Network. |
| Thomas Keller - His restaurant,
The French Laundry, is one of
the tops in the world. I feel lucky just to have eaten there.
Check out his
cookbook. |
|
| Harold McGee - The culinary bible,
On Food and Cooking, explains the science of all food. A
must have. |
| Shirley Corriher - A frequently seen guest on Good Eats,
Shirley wrote
Cookwise, a book that takes a lot of McGee's principles and
breaks them down into easy to read chunks. |
| Michael Ruhlman - Michael has written a couple of books
that center around his experiences at the CIA (that's Culinary
Institute of America). They are both fascinating reads:
The Soul of a Chef and
The Making of a Chef. |
|
Mike Johnson
|
|
| Mike
is the proprietor of BARcelona and Figaro, both restaurants in Clayton,
MO. At his old spot, Cafe Mira, I started
coming in as a college student and Mike befriended me and made me feel
welcome, to the point where I could come into the back of the house,
and, on a rare occasion, help out. Cafe Mira became a third space
for me (that comfort zone that's not home and that's not work) and I'll
always treasure that. Mike let me see a kitchen up close and,
though he tried his best to dissuade me, I'm still fascinated with
restaurant cooking. |
America's Test Kitchen is sort of like PBS' version of Good
Eats, sans gags and wacky visuals. Still, the style they use
is very useful: take one ingredient or one meal and demonstrate how to cook it
well. They use examples of what not to do, along with taste tests,
scientific explanations, and equipment tests to provide an outstanding
value for a half hour invested in watching the show. |
|
