Posted by Erin Zimmer, July 8, 2008 at 2:15 PM
Editor's note: Another Meet & Eat today with the folks behind Serious Eats. Today we're pleased to introduce Shane Lyons, Sunday night's dismissed contestant on The Next Food Network Star. His cereal-crusted chicken didn't make the cut, but he put up a good fight all season. —Erin
Name: Shane Lyons
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
Occupation: Cook
URL: thebluestar.net
Favorite comfort food? I LOVE Buffalo wings with thick and stinky blue cheese.
Guilty pleasures? Ben and Jerry's Cinnamon Buns ice cream.
What food won't you eat? Soy butter.
What would you like to try but haven't yet? Haggis.
Favorite food person? Alton Brown.
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Posted by The Serious Eats Team, June 25, 2008 at 6:15 PM
Editor's note: Another Meet & Eat today with the folks behind Serious Eats. Today we're pleased to introduce you to Erin Zimmer. She's been with us for a while, writing from D.C., but she recently moved to New York and has joined us here in the office as our staff blogger. We're happy to have her here, 'cause we've got lots for her to do in helping make the site even better. You've seen her name all over the place on Serious Eats, now get to know her! Please give Erin a warm howdoyoudo! —Adam
Name: Erin Zimmer
Location: New York
Occupation: Serious Eats staff blogger
Favorite comfort food? Oatmeal every morning with rotating toppings. Blueberries, roasted almonds, dried fruits, various milks.
Guilty pleasures? Drinking more diet Coke (and Coke Zero, and diet cherry Coke, and various other forms of aspartame-containing liquid junk) than I should. If you ask me, I'll say I quit last week and doing just great! "Green tea exclusively now, can you believe it?!"
Describe your perfect meal. Slow-cooked barbecue grub with a cold wheat beer. A piece of berry pie for dessert, and a tiny cup of pistachio gelato wouldn't hurt—eaten with a tiny spoon of course.
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Posted by The Serious Eats Team, June 24, 2008 at 5:30 PM
Editor's note: And we continue our Meet & Eat interviews with the various folks behind Serious Eats with intern Sarah Wolf. Sarah's with us for the summer, blogging about everything under the sun, from wacky (Bon Jovi Teapot) to serious (On the Scarcity of Women Chefs). She's also put together some great summer holiday menus for serious eaters to dig into. So please give Sarah a hearty hello. —Adam
Name: Sarah Wolf
Location: New Haven, Connecticut
Occupation: College student
URL: bulldogfood.wordpress.com
Favorite comfort food? Rice pudding. I ate almost nothing else when I had my wisdom teeth out and had to forcibly wean myself off it once my mouth healed.
Guilty pleasures? Cookie batter ice cream from Ashley’s in New Haven; cheesecake; chai tea lattes
Describe your perfect meal. That's such a difficult question. Right now I think my ideal summer dinner would be a salmon steak sauteed in olive oil and garlic, grilled fresh corn, and maybe some roasted zucchini and onions. Hmm... maybe I should make that this week.
What food won't you eat? Coffee and Coke are my least favorite foods, but really I will eat anything.
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Posted by The Serious Eats Team, June 19, 2008 at 3:45 PM
Editor's note: And so we continue the getting-to-know-you routine with the folks behind Serious Eats. Today, we give the treatment to SE intern Hannah Howard, who's with us for the summer. In addition to the extemporaneous blogging she's been doing on the site, she's jumped right in and has started an entertaining, heartfelt, and insightful column for us called Served, which gives readers the inside scoop on her job as a waiter. So without further ado, here's Hannah! —Adam
Name: Hannah Howard
Location: Upper Upper West Side, New York City
Occupation: Student and waiter
Favorite comfort food? Different pasta incarnations. At home, pasta with olive oil, garlic, red chile flakes, lots of black pepper, and pecorino. At Casellula, where I work, mac and cheese with caramelized onion and lardons. And greasy lo mein or pad thai, always.
Guilty pleasures? This list could be long! I love dessert. I love sweet and salty, chocolate and peanut butter. City Bakery chocolate chip cookies. Boardwalk fries with lots of salt and malt vinegar.
Describe your perfect meal. It's a jubilant affair with people who I love, cooking and eating excessive amounts of excessively delicious things late into the night.
What food won’t you eat? I'll try anything once!
What would you like to try but haven't yet? Street food in Singapore, Thailand, the Caribbean. And I want to eat at The French Laundry before I die.
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Posted by The Serious Eats Team, June 16, 2008 at 5:30 PM
Editor's note: I always love finding out more about the folks behind the websites I read. And more than a few of you must, too, because we've had a number of readers suggest doing "Meet & Eats" with the people of Serious Eats. We actually started doing this back in March with SE intern Emily Koh, and now we're going to pick up where we left off with SE intern Gordon Mark. Gordon is the man behind the awesome NYC Chinatown guides on Serious Eats New York, he's our resident video game guru, and he's the guy keeping you up to date on what to watch on food TV. So without further ado, here's Gordon! —Adam
Name: Gordon Mark
Location: Brooklyn Represent!
Occupation: Chuch website webmaster, intern at Serious Eats, procrastinator
URL: flickr.com/photos/weapong
Favorite comfort food? A cha siu bao (roast pork bun). It's quick, cheap, warm, and tasty. I bite into that and I'm comforted. Actually, baked goods in general are my comfort foods.
Guilty pleasures? Fatty food: Fat roast pork, pork rinds, yakitori chicken skins, or the fatty parts of a prime rib. They're sooo good and sooo unhealthy. It's a good thing I'm skinny—for now.
Describe your perfect meal. I think it would simply be a home-cooked dinner of dishes of beef and veggies with my family.
What food won't you eat? Shellfish. I don't have an allergy to them; I just don't like the taste.
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Posted by Ed Levine, June 12, 2008 at 3:00 PM
"Dale and I are totally cool, I've seen him four times in the last couple of weeks." —Lisa Fernandes, 'Top Chef' finalist
So how do you feel now after the finale of Top Chef Chicago? It's over and done, and I'm totally cool with that. I met some awesome people, I got to cook with some great chefs, and overall I had a great time.
What was the hardest thing about being on the show? The hardest thing to deal with was being in seclusion, with no outside contact with the real world. In the reality TV world, you have to get permission to go to the bathroom, to have a cigarette, to do anything. It's like you're a little kid. And they don't even turn your mic off when you go the bathroom.
Did we get to see the real you on Top Chef? Top Chef is reality-show reality, it's selective reality by definition. The cameras are running 24 hours a day, but they only show a tiny part of what they film. The producers often focus on a small part of someone's personality because they're trying to make the best reality show they can. I understand that. It doesn't mean that all of us on the show are going to like everything they show. But that's part of the deal.
Do you regret anything you said on the show? Of course. I'm a human being. I say stupid things, like we all do. But I try to never look back or to live my life being full of regrets. I definitely learned from my mistakes.
How do you feel about the blogosphere? I'm like everybody else, I think. I find it difficult to read negative comments about myself. But I don't want to focus on the negativity. I didn't mean to offend anybody, and I'm sorry if I did. I totally overreacted. [Major spoiler after the jump.]
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Posted by Robyn Lee, March 31, 2008 at 12:00 PM
From online food show Cooking Up a Story comes this four-part interview and lecture with Michael Pollan during which he talks about eating real food instead of their imitations, the ideology of understanding food solely through its nutrients, learning how to eat from culture instead of science, and "voting with your fork" to influence food producers to make better food.
Each video is about 10 minutes long, but it's worth making the time to watch them. Check them out, after the jump. [via Culinate]
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Posted by Robyn Lee, March 28, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Get inside the mind of chef and restaurant owner Thomas Keller by watching his recent interview on Charlie Rose. It's 22 minutes long, but the most celebrated chef in America should have a lot to say—about his restaurants, his love for roast chicken, his greatest inspiration, and more. [Thanks, dvchurch!]
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Posted by Adam Kuban, March 11, 2008 at 9:35 AM
Gothamist interviews Village Voice restaurant critic Robert Sietsema just ahead of his Choice Eats food festival tonight:
You recently wrote a cover story for the Voice about how bogus Iron Chef is. What are some of the responses you’ve gotten to that article? I was delighted by the responses, especially the thoughtful flames—but some flamers went off their nut, either because they really love the Iron Chef, or because they have a vested (and often undisguised) interest in the show or the network. The funniest responses came from crybaby Iron Chef judges.... I approached the taping as an interested occasional watcher of the show, and I really assumed it was some sort of contest, no matter how manipulated. The argument that everyone knows TV is fake doesn’t hold water. What would you say if you learned every NBA game was fixed, and that the players had carefully rehearsed the sequence of plays—including ball turnovers—according to a script?
Related: Iron Cheffing (and Judging) Are Legit (If Imperfect)
Posted by Robyn Lee, March 7, 2008 at 3:30 PM
Our intern Emily Koh comes into our office regularly to help round up food-related news and cool stuff on the Internet (which is tough; have you seen how big the Internet is?) along with anything else we force nicely ask her to do, such as translate anything written in Japanese or Korean. Get to know Emily's food loves, desires, and hatreds in this week's Meet & Eat!
Name: Emily Koh
Location: New York City
Occupation: Student
URL: flickr.com/photos/meltingnoise
Favorite comfort food?
Carb-y breakfast foods. Milk and cereal with sliced bananas, toast with peanut butter and honey, oatmeal with blueberries and almonds...I could go on and on and on. As you can tell, breakfast is my favorite meal of the day, whether it's at 8 a.m. or 8 p.m.
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Posted by Robyn Lee, March 7, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, goes on the The Colbert Report to talk about the origins of General Tso's chicken. She also learns that Stephen Colbert eats an entire apple pie every day.
Watch the interview after the jump.
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Posted by Robyn Lee, March 4, 2008 at 3:45 PM
American rapper Coolio recently expanded his résumé to include "cooking show host" with his web show Cookin with Coolio. As the "ghetto gourmet," he aims to "use foods that poor people can afford" in his recipes, which he demonstrates with his inimitable Coolio-style.
Although he only has three recipes up so far, each one is for a different audience: Coolio Caprese Salad is to please the ladies, Fork Steak & Heavenly Ghettalian Garlic Bread is for broke college students, and Spinach Even Your Kids Will Eat is for kids who won't eat their vegetables. Check out his latest video each Wednesday to see what he comes up with next.
Serious Eats asked Coolio a few food-related questions to get a look at the culinary part of his mind. Check out our Q&A after the jump.
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If you're interested in learning about baked goods from around the world, check out NPR's interview with Greg Patent, author of A Baker's Odyssey
, his cookbook that features the recipes of immigrants from over 30 countries. During the interview he makes his grandma's recipe for cheese sambouseks, "the Iraqi version of empanaditas." [Thanks to Jeffrey for the heads up.]
Posted by Emily Stone, January 9, 2008 at 2:00 PM
In November, Serious Eats ran my optimistic interview with Seneca Klassen of Bittersweet, who described the cacao-growing industry as "fundamentally organic." It wasn't long before Sam Madell—a spirited bean-to-bar chocolate producer at Tava in Australia—sent us an intricate, itemized response, dismissing Seneca's take on the situation as "blatant misinformation."
"For your information," Sam wrote, "a wide range of pesticides—many of which are banned in Europe because they are unsafe—are used on cocoa trees and beans in many countries, including Ecuador, Venezuela, and Ghana, as well as the USA, where highly toxic methyl bromide is used on cocoa beans in storage."
I thought it would be a good idea to ring in the new year with a new take on organics in the chocolate industry. Herein is the gospel according to Sam.
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Salon interviews Alice Waters, hitting subjects including her new cookbook, The Art of Simple Food
, the pleasure of shopping at the farmer's market and cooking at home, how the rest of the country can eat seasonally, and her disappointment with the presidential candidates' lack of attention to food policy.
Posted by Robyn Lee, October 25, 2007 at 4:45 PM
Although you may have gotten the impression that my brain is bursting with macaron knowledge, the information I know is just an insignificant crumb compared to the macaron database stored in Dorie Greenspan's head. Her culinary prowess encompasses seemingly all things sugary and delicious, as seen in her library of publications, which focuses on three of the most mouthwatering topics in the world: baking, chocolate, and Paris. Knowing that she had worked extensively with the macaron king Pierre Hermé and written two of his recipe books, there was no question that she was the perfect macaron specialist for me to talk to.
How did the macaron craze begin? What in God's name caused me to having a giggly conversation (the giggling was just on my end of the phone, by the way) about a sandwich cookie? According to Dorie, I could partially blame it on Hermé. She explained that when Hermé opened his shop in Paris in 2001, he was the first person to hold a show for his seasonal desserts in a somewhat unconventional style.
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Posted by Ed Levine, September 28, 2007 at 7:39 AM
The folks at the Food Network arranged a zillion drive-by phone interviews Wednesday for Alton Brown, the host of The Next Iron Chef, a show premiering next Sunday, October 7, at 9 p.m. ET. The Next Iron Chef has eight first-class chefs competing to join the ranks of permanent Iron Chefs Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, Cat Cora, and Masaharu Morimoto. From the promos it looks more like Top Chef and less like Iron Chef. There are challenges and curves thrown at the competitors, and they are judged, of course, by how they respond.
We here at Serious Eats think that Alton Brown is smart and funny, knows and loves food, and, unlike many television personalities, actually has the ability to laugh at himself. A better combination of qualities for a food show host would be hard to find. There's another reason we like Brown. He likes Serious Eats a lot, says he trusts (even relies on) what he sees on it, and logs on daily when he's not on the road. We like him, he likes us, it's a beautiful thing.
So we decided to take the opportunity to do one of these drive-by interviews knowing it's hard to have a real substantive conversation in the alloted time. But Alton, not surprisingly, gets right to the point and is a master of the sound bite. He also promised to sit down with us later on for a longer, more serious Serious Eats interview.
So without further ado, the Alton Brown Drive-By Interview, after the jump.
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Posted by Adam Roberts, September 18, 2007 at 10:00 AM
Editor's note: We've long been fans of David Kamp's work (author of The United States of Arugula and, now, along with Marion Rosenfeld, The Food Snob's Dictionary), so we turned loose Adam Roberts on him for a chat. What follows is the second part of a lengthy but entertaining interview. Here's Part One, if you missed it.
One of the things I found most fascinating in the book was the idea of objectivity and subjectivity and Giorgio DeLuca's discovery that food can be objectively good. How do you feel about that subject? Do you feel that good food can be objectively good or is it always a matter of taste?
People obviously have different preferences. But the idea that some food is good and some food isn't good—I kind of agree with DeLuca. It is kind of objective. I don't begrudge people their taste if they don't like Szechuan food. But the idea, or what DeLuca was saying, is that in America we're taught to be populist in a really dumb way. That there's good populism and bad populism. But to be populist in a dumb way is to say that Kraft Singles are just as good as Humboldt Fog. No, sorry, certain cheeses are much better than others. A really good chicken is much better than that dried-out Perdue stuff. It's one thing people are catching on to now is that you can actually care more about your food. There was almost a stigma to that for a while—it was an act of sedition to care too much about your food. It seemed un-American and oddly Frenchlike.
One issue that raises for me is the idea of class. If you can afford to get the best of everything, you can eat well, but if you can't afford it can you eat well?
Julia Child was someone who basically said you can just go to the supermarket and make all her recipes. And she's absolutely right that you can. You can do her recipes with cheap chicken. But that said, I think the very fact that farmers' markets are going way up in number and that your average chain supermarket, whether it's an A & P or a Wegman's, is slowly starting to resemble a Whole Foods or Dean and DeLuca in their produce and the quality of meat. It's an indication that Americans are changing. When you talk about the best of everything, I'm not talking about high-end foods like caviar or truffles. I'm talking about paying a little more for a better-quality chicken or a Niman Ranch steak instead of an agribusiness steak pumped full of hormones. That's not the best of everything, that's simply better quality. And, yes, that costs a bit more, but it cuts across class lines that people are embracing that kind of eating. That's what Michael Pollan argues. In other areas of our lives we care about quality—if we're buying a new DVD set, we'll pay $50 more because it's better quality. So why should it be that when it comes to what we're putting into our mouths and into our bodies that we'll buy the cheapest thing possible?
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Posted by Adam Roberts, September 17, 2007 at 11:00 AM
Editor's note: We've long been fans of David Kamp's work (author of The United States of Arugula and, now, along with Marion Rosenfeld, The Food Snob's Dictionary), so we turned loose Adam Roberts on him for a chat. What follows is the first part of a lengthy but entertaining interview. Read Part Two here.
Let's start with The United States of Arugula. How did the book come about?
I'm not a food writer by vocation, I'm more of a generalist culture writer for Vanity Fair and GQ. Basically, I love food: I found that it was my off-duty passion. Either cooking or shopping for food at markets or thinking about food and reading about food. Particularly, I noticed that when I was really in the unwinding mode, the thing that I found the most relaxing after a long, taxing day was doing food prep with some nice music on—shelling beans or trimming some haricots verts. And the other thing that I found incredibly relaxing is that moment when, if you're lucky, 30 to 45 minutes before you pass out in bed after an exhausting day, when you're actually reading in bed, I always found I was reading A. J. Libeling or M. F. K. Fisher. I realized this is something I want to write about more—how did we get to this point where we've gotten more savvy, more sophisticated, more knowledgeable about food than Americans from 20, 30, 40, and 50 years ago.
Were you always interested in food? Or did that happen later in life?
I come from a middle class family, but we were always a little more aware of food than others. I grew up in New Jersey, and my mom was a very good cook, and some of my earliest memories are—I was the youngest of three, so when the older two were in school, I was still in my toddler days, she would have Julia Child and Graham Kerr on all the time. Do you know who Graham Kerr is? You're young, I know.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, August 7, 2007 at 4:00 PM
There's a great interview with cocktail blogger Paul Clarke on Salon [Heads up: You'll have to wait out an ad to enter the site].
Paul is a contributor here on Serious Eats, so we all read it with particular enthusiasm. And it was nice getting to know Paul a little better through the piece. His enthusiasm and knowledge of the subject really come through:
On your blog, you list everything in your liquor cabinet. It's quite an extensive collection—including over 17 types of rye, 12 types of brandy and 29 types of rum. Where do you keep it all? By last fall, I had overtaken all the top shelves in the kitchen, so my wife graciously gave me the hall closet, which is pretty big. I put in shelves and I thought: It will take me forever to fill that up. But I did it pretty quickly.
Paul's blog can be found here: The Cocktail Chronicles.
Posted by Robyn Lee, July 27, 2007 at 11:30 AM
Through her blog Dessert Comes First, Lori Baltazar not only smothers you with her passionate photo-laden odes to all things sugary and decadent, but in my opinion provides some of the best content for the Filipino Tourist Board...unbeknownst to them. If you've never thought about visiting Manila before, you may change your mind after discovering the city's best chocolate cakes, mango torte, gelato, oatmeal cookies, and—trust me—roughly a million other things that you'd want to eat. Unfortunately, you have to be in Manila to take advantage of Lori's recommendations. Get to know Lori in this week's Meet & Eat and maybe you'll be inspired to get a plane ticket to Manila. One-way.
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Posted by Robyn Lee, July 13, 2007 at 12:00 PM
If you're not familiar with Deb's food blog, Smitten Kitchen, you're missing out on an excellent source of recipes, encompassing all kinds of cuisines from chicken empanadas to Vietnamese roast pork to gâteau de crêpes. Even if you hadn't been planning to cook something, the desire will inevitably kick in after staring at her vibrant photographs that smack your face right into the belly of a dish. Get to know Deb in this week's Meet & Eat.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, April 26, 2007 at 3:00 PM
The blog Baking and Books interviews baking cookbook author Dorie Greenspan, with thoughtful questions on baking itself and, interestingly, on the process of writing a cookbook (Greenspan has knocked out nine of them):
When you begin working on a new book what comes first: the recipes or the concept?
I’ve never thought about a book project this way. Hmmm. Of course, it’s always about the food, so I would have to say that the food (probably not recipes, per se) comes first. Yes, the food comes first! (Thanks for letting me work this out.) But for me, food is always in a context—it’s about people, places, occasions, cultures, traditions and ingredients, of course—so I’ve never really thought about what comes first; the recipes and the concept are intimately entwined.
Also worth clicking through for: a delicious-sounding recipe for Greenspan's "Corniest Corn Muffins" at the end of the interview.
[Thanks to Serious Eats reader NaomiKatt for the tip!]
Posted by The Serious Eats Team, March 23, 2007 at 8:00 AM
You might not know Ben Trott, but you're probably familiar with his work. Along with his wife, Mena, Ben created Movable Type, the blogging system that Serious Eats uses to bring you food info each day. As cofounder of Six Apart, Ben and his colleagues are also responsible for TypePad, Vox, and LiveJournal.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, March 9, 2007 at 7:20 AM
We've been having a great time getting to know Robyn Lee, our intern here at Serious Eats. We thought you'd get a kick out of meeting her, too, so she's getting the treatment in this week's "Meet & Eat" Q&A.
Robyn blogs about food at The Girl Who Ate Everything, a site that is ... well ... you'll just have to click over there for yourself and get a load of what goes on: TONS of desert, LOL-funny writing filled with unique verbiage such as AGRHGARGHRH!! and ZOMG!, and beautiful, hunger-inducing photos.
Apart from helping out with graphics, site design, and whatever crazy stuff we throw at her, Robyn will be blogging for us from Paris in the coming week, as she visits the City of Lights for spring break. Look for her words and photos in the Required Eating section. And so, without further ado, here's Robyn!
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