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Best bangs for your bubbly buck

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:10:00 +0000

We're thrilled to bring you the wine wisdom of Steven Kolpan, the chair of wine studies at the Culinary Institute of America, who will be stopping by regularly with words on what to drink. Today, he'll help you get ready to party on New Year's. What you'll wear is still up to you. (To hear Steven taste and discuss these and other affordable sparklers, go here.)

It's been a year of thrilling highs and long lows, so let's begin 2010 celebrating in classic style. I propose a toast to better days ahead, remembering the words of Napoleon: "In victory, you deserve Champagne, in defeat you need it."

Sausage balls and old turkey for Christmas

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

We asked members of our Kitchen Cabinet to briefly share some of their holiday memories with us, and we're sharing them with you all this week. Tonight or tomorrow, perhaps, many of you will be rushing around your kitchens, stressed about the food you're going to serve. So take a moment with our Cabinet members to remind you that, regardless of what's on the plate, the table and who's around it are what matters.

From John T. Edge, director, Southern Foodways Alliance:

Sausage balls, made with Bisquick, rat trap cheddar, Jim Dandy country sausage, a little cayenne, and a little more sage: That's what the holiday season tastes like here, in Oxford, Miss. On my birthday, Dec. 22, Blair, my wife, makes a gross of the little orbs, shovels them in brown paper bags, and transports them to City Grocery, my buddy John Currence's bar.

Over the course of an extended happy hour debauch, I work the floor, offering sausage balls to all comers, while my friends alternate between pulls of whiskey, bites of balls, and inhalations of hot dogs, capped with Blair's chocolate-and-red wine-goosed chili. As the night goes on, the pot of chili disappears, the grease-splotched bags threaten collapse, and so do I.

Chef’s night in

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:01:00 +0000

We asked members of our Kitchen Cabinet to briefly share some of their holiday memories with us, and we're sharing them with you all this week. Today, two chefs spend the holidays pretty much alone, and that's alright by them.

From Michael Laiskonis, executive pastry chef, Le Bernardin:

It was a turning point in some way, 15 years ago, when I separated the holidays of youth with the ones I experience now. It was my first Christmas season as a young cook, deep, as we call it, in the shit.

There are busy days in the hospitality industry that are like hard sprints, Valentine's Day or Mother's Day, but the weeks that fall between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve comprise one long, grueling marathon. As waiters and cooks we subconsciously plan for the "season" all year long, but it's always still a little shocking when it hits.

I was a baker at a small outfit in the outlying suburbs of Detroit. We were producing around the clock for over two weeks. By Christmas Eve, it was all flying out of the shop as fast as we could fill the cases. I was feeling that deep, to-the-bone kind of tired, surviving only on what little adrenaline I could summon until we finally locked the doors at 4 p.m.

A rapscallion’s holiday

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:01:00 +0000

We asked members of our Kitchen Cabinet to briefly share some of their holiday memories with us, and we're sharing them with you all this week. Today we're celebrating with fabulous foods, be they wholesomely found or more ill-gotten.

From Clark Wolf, food and restaurant consultant:

It was the indulgent start to an excessive decade: 1980, and who knew that wild arugula and padded shoulders were just round the corner? So nice that only one of those endured.

We were working to open a new outpost of the legendary Oakville Grocery, and a small group of us gathered in a Napa Valley farmhouse to rob the very larder we were stocking.

I’d arranged for geese to be raised for us nearby, secured major quantities of Italian white truffles, and gathered quail eggs and a slab of illegally imported foie gras large enough to clog international arteries.

We rendered the duck, gathering and straining the fat so we could pan fry sourdough crostini, scramble the quail eggs (kept overnight in a jar with the truffles to absorb their aroma) to go on top, then gilded that lily with a slash of foie gras and generous scrapings of more white truffle.

Latke scandals and papaya salad battles

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

We asked members of our Kitchen Cabinet to briefly share some of their strongest holiday memories with us, and we'll share them with you all this week. Today, our resident wine experts talk about looking into their holiday kitchens and staring into the abyss.

From Steven Kolpan, professor and chairman of wine studies at the Culinary Institute of America:

Twenty-five years ago, when I was not yet a JewBu (a Jew listing toward Buddhism, a bubbaleh for Buddha), I celebrated Hanukkah with a latke party fraught with scandal and miracle.

Getting the Champagne was easy, but making the latkes was hard. I wanted them to be thin, almost crepe-like, but a thin potato batter fried in a very hot Griswold is a recipe for burning. I added more potato, more matzo meal, more onions and more eggs to bind it together, and soon the latke batter just laid there in a lump.

Cash and gumption: Food nonprofits to support

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

Alissa Novoselick's story of how $40 and some gumption planted a school garden that created a community made me think about food-related nonprofits in general, spread across the country, working on an enormous range of issues. Hunger is the most obvious one, but how about helping immigrant women to build small businesses out of their home cooking? Or helping abused kids find love and hope by teaching them to grow food and care for animals? Or telling the stories of American food traditions that may not last another generation?

We asked our Kitchen Cabinet and other friends in the field to suggest their favorite organizations, and just some of the most compelling, most effective ones are below. Browse the list for groups working in your area, or for groups tackling issues that matter to you, though of course many of these organizations' work bridges our categories.

Please consider supporting them this holiday season (and beyond) and please let us know about your favorite organizations in the comments.

Opening our Kitchen Cabinet

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:01:00 +0000

Introducing the Salon Kitchen Cabinet: an esteemed group of brilliant chefs, cooks, wine and beer experts, explorers, historians, and at least one dude who cuts up cows and pigs for a living.

They are some of the most thoughtful, creative, smart and skilled people I know, and they’re here to help us answer your questions, whether you want to know how to fix your shoe-tough pie crust or you want to know about the philosophical implications of butter versus Crisco. (Send us your questions here!)

But, in the spirit of Salon, I also envision this group as more than that. I see it as a gathering of minds giving critical perspectives on larger questions of how food and drink work in the creative, social, political and environmental realms. We’ll be chatting with them frequently, and I hope you’ll join in.

So put your hands together and please welcome:

Amanda Cohen, chef-owner, Dirt Candy

Anna Lappe, co-founder, Small Planet Institute

Ann Cashion, chef-owner, Johnny’s Half Shell