New Favorite Thing: Hidden Kitchens Podcasts

I haven't done a plain old-fashioned passionate rave for a while, so it's probably about time.

Now, I admit, sometimes I'm slow to catch on to stuff. "Hidden Kitchens," a terrific NPR mini-show that sometimes appears buried within Morning Edition broadcasts, is sort of a case-in-point.

I'd heard a few of the shows in the past, but I just never got around to subscribing to the podcast. Silly me!

In the mere minutes each episode contains, the Kitchen Sisters plunge a listener into worlds that contain so much more than cooking and food.

Peppered with music and history, voices and visions, "Hidden Kitchens" adventures range from the past to the present, from Outer Space to a Louisiana prison.

Do yourself a favor and check out some of the audio on the website. Everything from 2004 onward is archived. The stories are fascinating and the recipes are beguiling...

I'm looking forward to trying out the allspice-spiked lamb stew recipe from a recent episode on Basque sheepherders.

Cheers!

Hungry for the Classics

Long before I flirted with food love, I fell hard for books. But the sad truth was, it really didn't matter how hard LeVar Burton worked at making Reading Rainbow relevant. I was still one of those bookworms that caught flying iceballs in the face from November through March.

These days I'm spared the iceballs (usually) and I'm really bowled over by what Penguin Books has been doing with their Graphic Classics series. Daaamn... The classics are suddenly edgy!

These are books I want to be seen with on my subway commute. Witty illustrators like Chris Ware doing the covers. Current scribblers like Fast Food Nation's Eric Schlosser doing commentary. For the luvvagod, French flaps!

I swoon. And when J sent along the cover to The Three Musketeers, I knew I had to share, as well.

Food Quote Friday: French Peasant in Love

A postcard sent by a peasant from the Vendée to his fiancée

"You're so fresh and lovely the only thing I can compare you to is fields of young cabbages before the caterpillars have got to them."

from Graham Robb's The Discovery of France

Gratuitous Frisee Action

No legitimate reason for this post. I just love looking at frisee.

It's a silly, fuzzy muppet in a world of staid veggies like endive, arugula and romaine, and its mere existence makes me happy.

Red! Hot!

Valentine's day's signature candy... some would claim it's chocolate.

Since I consider dark chocolate to be a major food group, a single-holiday association is terribly restrictive. Other folks are all about the "conversation hearts," but I've always found them to be chatty, chalky, cloying. Their colors seem faded, their sentiments too common.


Thanks to TS for the "cinnamon imperials" image

For me, Valentine's Day will always be about the red hots. There's something simultaneously so vixenish and second-grader cute in those shiny candy shells.

Known in the confections field under the far-too-formal generic title "cinnamon imperials," a handful of these little guys act like fireworks in the mouth, leaving you with cinnamon-fresh breath, a bright red tongue and a quick sugar high. And isn't that a bit more representative of the kind of love Valentines Day usually promotes?

Thus today, I take time to pay homage to valentines, romantic love and a million tiny droplets of sweet cinnamon with the REDHOTS Virtual Tour.

On the joys of Legos and Sandwiches

Joy! It's another wacky time-waster to provide lunchtime entertainment!

I've made my own portrait as a celebration of a couple of my favorite things: beer and sandwiches.

Speaking of which, is there a more perfect food genre? Sandwiches, I mean.

So versatile, so mobile, so tasty. There's few things I don't love more on a bun. Or a roll. Or toasted bread. For that matter, one might argue that pizza is simply an open-faced hot sandwich.

If we were to play the "what to bring when stranded on a desert island" game, there'd better be sandwiches, or I'm not going.