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The Ten Most Recent Posts By Matthew Amster-Burton
From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, April 28, 2008 at 11:30 AM
If you're into gadgets and looking to make your own baby purees, Williams-Sonoma is now selling the Beaba Babycook.
Pronounced "Bay-OBB-uh," the device has been popular for several years in Europe and is now available in the US. There's a video on the Williams-Sonoma site showing how it works. It's basically a mini-chopper than can steam food before you puree it. The industrial design is tops—with chubby curves and lime-green trim, it looks like a dollhouse accessory, albeit with a sharp blade.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, April 7, 2008 at 11:30 AM
When I heard the Georgian Room, Seattle's fanciest hotel restaurant, would be holding an etiquette class for 8- to 13-year-olds, I had one question for instructor (and Georgian Room maitre d') Tony D'Agostino: are any kids going to come to the class on their own accord?
Not likely, he admitted. "How many kids go, 'Mom, I want to go learn etiquette?'" D'Agostino said. "It's right up with the adult classes, though. You go around the table and ask, 'Why are you here?' The husbands go, 'My wife is bringing me.'"
So how do you keep a captive and potentially unruly audience entertained? In a word, snacks. And not those cucumber sandwiches, either. The tiered tea trays will hold scones and clotted cream, peanut butter sandwiches, ham and cheese sandwiches (crustless, of course), and chocolate chip cookies. To drink, kids will get a choice of hot chocolate with whipped cream and mini-marshmallows, or herb tea. This doesn't sound like much of a choice to me.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, March 24, 2008 at 11:00 AM
What is it about taco trucks? Does anybody not love them, aside from competing Mexican restaurant owners? Do four-year-olds love taco trucks?
I decided to find out. I took my four-year-old daughter, Iris, to Tacos El Asadero this week, and I think it's fair to say Tacos El Asadero is now her favorite place in the entire world.
El Asadero is Seattle's best-known taco truck—a bus, actually, where you can sit inside and enjoy your taco, mulita, or torta while staring through filmy old bus windows. We stepped inside and ordered several tacos at $1 each. Iris's favorite was the lengua, tender braised beef tongue. She entertained other customers by singing, "Lengua, lengua, lengua," to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Then she stole one of my tortillas and created her own taco with a mix of lengua, carnitas, and carne asada. "I'm eating a real taco!" she declared, dropping meat on the floor of the bus.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, March 17, 2008 at 10:30 AM
My daughter Iris, 4, always used to be interested in helping out with cooking, but lately she's gotten bored. Maybe I told her one too many times to measure the sugar, not eat it. But I think I have a new ploy.
Iris loves fish, and mackerel is her favorite. We typically buy frozen mackerel fillets at the Asian supermarket. Last time, however, Iris pointed out that they sell whole mackerel and suggested we buy that instead. I obliged. When we got home, I flipped through Mark Bittman's Fish, trying to figure out how to clean and cook a whole mackerel.
"Hey Iris," I called. She was in the living room watching TV. "I'm going to clean this fish. Want to help?"
"No."
"There'll be fish guts."
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From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, March 14, 2008 at 8:30 AM
What's the best culinary dictionary? Sharon Tyler Herbst's Food Lover's Companion? Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food? Michael Ruhlman's Elements of Cooking?
Forget those upstarts. Only Jessup Whitehead's book will tell you this:
Ox-gall: Used for cleaning carpets. May be obtained of the butcher.
The Steward's Handbook and Guide to Party Catering was written at the turn of the 20th century. It is hilarious, illuminating, and sometimes incomprehensible. Best of all, it's in the public domain, and the 1903 version is free for download from Google Books. (I found it while Googling "popcorn popped in lard.")
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From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, March 10, 2008 at 10:00 AM
©iStockphoto.com/hidesy
Iris and I were walking home from school the other day and I suggested we watch a movie in the afternoon. "We should get some popcorn," Iris said. I agreed. We stopped at the drugstore, where I looked for the familiar bag of Jolly Time. No dice—it was all microwave bags. I managed to find one "natural" brand containing no artificial butter flavor, and it was good enough to get me through Duck Tales: The Movie.
But the next day, I bought a bag of the old-fashioned stuff and popped it on the stove. Iris hung out by the edge of the kitchen, afraid of flying kernels and the clatter of the pot lid. When it was ready, I poured it into a bowl and salted it liberally. The improvement over microwave popcorn was obvious, and while we crunched it, I speculated about why oil-popped corn is superior and came up with three ideas.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, February 18, 2008 at 10:00 AM
My daughter Iris's preschool is, like so many these days, a nut-free zone. Often Iris will come home and, after a morning of nut deprivation, eat a big bowl of toasted pecans.
Before she started preschool, her standard lunch was the same as every other non-nut-allergic kid's: peanut butter and jelly. I did my best to choose a good quality jam and bread (the Innkeeper's brand multigrain bread from Costco is delicious), but it was your basic PB&J. This wouldn't fly under preschool rules. So I've fumbled with various leftovers and other sandwiches, and fallen back on deli ham more often than I'd like to admit. (I've tasted "soynut butter," recommended in the preschool handbook, and could not in good conscience serve it to anybody with taste buds.)
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From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, January 28, 2008 at 10:00 AM
My father came over the other day to help me replace a bathroom faucet. It took four hours, two trips to the hardware store, and one trip to a French restaurant for lunch (croque-monsieur, baked eggs with gruyère). When we were done, we turned on the water and exchanged many high-fives. While washing my hands with the sparkling new faucet, I realized that the experience was a lot like cooking.
I've been teaching my daughter to cook, and it's gotten me thinking about why I cook. Iris, age 4, has been working on her stirring and flipping techniques. She's poured a whole bowl of beaten eggs onto the rug and made a very odd-looking pancake. And she loves it.
It bothers me when people say that everyone should learn to cook. Cooking doesn't make you a better person—just look at Marco Pierre White or Gordon Ramsay. Cooking doesn't make you more environmentally conscious or a good parent. For me—and most Serious Eaters, I bet—it's a form of entertainment.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, January 7, 2008 at 2:00 PM
At a recent playdate, the subject of hot dogs came up, and I heard one mom say that, okay, she does let her child eat hot dogs, but only the "nitrate-free" kind from Whole Foods. I didn't say anything, but the portion of my brain devoted to ruthless debunkings lit up.
Last year, you'll recall, Ed Levine took Consumer Reports to task for naming Hebrew National skinless franks the top dog. I'm with Ed: franks with natural casings are better. (You can read the CR report at Consumer Reports.)
But there was this tasty tidbit in the report:
While the three uncured franks might boast of "no added nitrates," our testing found that Applegate Farms, Coleman Natural, and Whole Ranch contained nitrates and nitrites at levels comparable to many of the cured models.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, December 12, 2007 at 3:30 PM
A visitor from the future has landed on my refrigerator door. Its name is SmartShopper. It's an electronic shopping list, and catalogs like Sur La Table and The Sharper Image are pushing it this holiday season. And if your idea of fun is getting into a screaming fight with your fridge, I highly recommend you pick one up.
SmartShopper is about the size of a Big Grab of chips and weighs a pound. It's solidly built, takes four AAs, and sticks firmly to our refrigerator. It has a built-in thermal printer. And it's easy to use. Just press the blue "Record" button and say what you want to add to your list. SmartShopper will present you with its three best interpretations of what you said. For example, earlier today I pressed the button and confidently intoned, "Yogurt." SmartShopper replied:
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The Ten Most Recent Comments By Matthew Amster-Burton
Responses to Comments by Matthew Amster-Burton
Website: http://www.rootsandgrubs.com/
Location: Seattle
About: I write for Serious Eats, the Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine, Culinate.com, and probably other places.
Favorite foods: phad thai dan dan noodles brussels sprouts
Last bite on earth: The skulls of my enemies.