Tag: book
These Cookbooks Are Pretentious, But With A Purpose

These Cookbooks Are Pretentious, But With A Purpose

By Daniel Neman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)

I’ll admit it, my first instinct was to laugh. Or at least to scoff.

Two cookbooks crossed my desk recently, and they were, individually and collectively, the most pretentious things I’ve ever seen. It is as if they were competing for some sort of international award for affectation, and they were both tied for first place with nothing else even remotely close.

The first is called Sea and Smoke: Flavors from the Untamed Pacific Northwest. It is a cookbook from the Willows Inn restaurant on Lummi Island, off the coast of Washington State near Canada, about 100 miles and a ferry ride north of Seattle. On the book’s cover is a picture of what appears to be a twig, some seaweed, a few leaves, a crab claw, a clam shell and a dried up, dead fish.

The second book is called Atelier Crenn: Metamorphosis of Taste. This is the cookbook of a San Francisco restaurant called Atelier Crenn. On the cover is a bird’s nest.

The book explains that the restaurant uses a bird’s nest as its logo “because it symbolizes the juncture of art and nature.” Me, when I see a bird’s nest on a cookbook, I think “I don’t want to eat that.”

The Sea and Smoke book is full of recipes such as A Porridge of Lovage Stems and A Stew of Stinging Nettles. One recipe takes clams, wraps them in halibut skins and then rolls them in powdered seaweed. Another pairs fermented turnips with “very aged duck” (you allow the duck carcass to age for a month, “using a damp towel to wipe off any white mold as it appears”).

These are recipes I am not going to make at home. These are recipes you are not going to make at home. These are recipes no one on earth is going to make at home.

It’s not just that they require ingredients that can be difficult to find, such as woodruff and caraflex cabbage and lamb marrow. Other unlikely ingredients you need to make yourself, such as smelt stock and rhubarb wine.

For me, the final straw is the chef-author’s recommendation that you always use eggs purchased from Riley Starks. Starks turns out to be the owner of the inn where the restaurant is located, so to get the appropriate eggs you would have to fly to Seattle, rent a car, drive more than 100 miles, take a ferry to the island, buy the eggs, take a ferry back to the mainland, drive more than 100 miles back to Seattle, stay overnight and catch a plane back home.

Total cost: About $520 — not counting the cost of the eggs — and that is with great deals on the plane and the car. Those had better be really spectacular eggs.

The other book, Atelier Crenn, is also full of recipes that no one, but no one, is ever going to make.

Take, for instance, the recipe for pintade, which is also known as guinea hen or guinea fowl. The pintade itself is cooked sous vide along with some cabbage chips dusted with nori powder (nori is a type of seaweed). It is served with preserved lemon puree, fermented baby leeks and an umeboshi glaze (umeboshi is a pickled Japanese plum). The recipe requires 32 ingredients and 45 separate steps.

That’s nothing. A recipe for something called Birth — a nest made from corn silk filled with corn “eggs” flavored with duck fat and garnished with dark chocolate branches — requires 38 ingredients and 51 steps.

Atelier Crenn is a bastion of molecular gastronomy, that branch of cooking in which science is used to take familiar foods and turn them into unfamiliar forms. It had a brief spasm of popularity a few years ago, but failed to catch on in most of the world, including St. Louis. When done right, it can be pricey.

At Atelier Crenn, each meal costs $220, plus drinks. And thinking about that is why I changed my mind about both books.

These cookbooks are not meant to be used for cooking. They serve rather as a snapshot of the current state of high cuisine and cooking techniques. They are representative of what the best culinary minds are producing, given unlimited budgets and access to ingredients.

Dominique Crenn, the chef-owner of Atelier Crenn, is a trail-blazing, up-and-coming chef; she was the first woman in North America to earn two Michelin stars. Blaine Wetzel of the Willows Inn has a couple of James Beard Awards under his youthful belt and has taken the notion of hyperlocal sourcing of foods to its logical extreme.

Their books take us to their restaurants if we can’t go ourselves and show us what the state of the art of cooking is like right now.

©2015 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Nana B. Agwei (via Flickr)

Hillary Clinton Book Tour Offers A Campaign Preview

Hillary Clinton Book Tour Offers A Campaign Preview

By Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times

The world may have to wait until 2015 for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decision on whether she runs again for president, but the last 48 hours have offered a preview in miniature of what that campaign would look like — with all its advantages and burdens.

With Tuesday’s splashy publication of her new memoir, “Hard Choices,” Clinton demonstrated the unprecedented attention she would draw, with wall-to-wall coverage on every television network in which she tossed off zingers and parried unwanted questions.

Hours before she breezed onto the set of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” breathless fans were lined up for blocks around a bookstore in New York’s Union Square (some having waited since Monday) in hopes of getting orange wristbands that would give them a chance to have their copies signed in person.

But the downside of the heavy scrutiny was also apparent. The former secretary of State was drilled in television interviews on the Benghazi, Libya, controversy, which threatens to shadow her potential bid for office, as she was pressed repeatedly to admit that she had made a mistake leading up to the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound, in which four Americans, including an ambassador, were killed.

And she was already cleaning up a clumsy assertion in a prime-time ABC special that aired Monday that she and her husband, President Bill Clinton, were “dead broke” when they left the White House and had struggled to come up with the money for multiple mortgages and their daughter’s education. Although they had incurred millions in legal fees, each also is a bestselling author, and Bill received a pension and Hillary a U.S. Senate salary.

“Let me just clarify that I fully appreciate how hard life is for so many Americans today,” Clinton told ABC’s Robin Roberts, after Republican critics had disseminated photographs of the Clintons’ five-bedroom house on D.C.’s Embassy Row and their spread in Chappaqua, N.Y. “It’s an issue that I’ve worked on and cared about my entire adult life.” And, as the video below shows, Clinton again had to clarify what she meant by her comments when speaking to her old pal and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Pushing back against Republican attempts to paint her as out of touch, Clinton detailed how both she and her husband had worked multiple jobs to pay off student loans, and said her husband’s experience growing up poor had made him a “hard worker.”

“We have a life experience that is clearly different, in very dramatic ways, from many Americans, but we also have gone through some of the same challenges,” she said on ABC.

Her misstep also illustrated what even her allies have said for months: After four years largely outside the political fray, Clinton needs practice. And the practice that the book tour can offer may be even more important since she has essentially frozen out Democratic rivals, whose challenges might otherwise have helped her sharpen her arguments.

With Clinton’s announcement months off, her memoir serves as a suggestion of what her campaign might emphasize. “Hard Choices” is an exhaustive account of her tenure as secretary of State, with colorful anecdotes that establish her gravitas, her foreign policy credentials and her command of issues around the world.

Early on, Clinton outlines what some have called the “Hillary Doctrine” when she writes that she combined elements of the traditional foreign policy approach of “hard power,” or military force, and the “soft power” of diplomacy. She defines her strategy as finding “the right combination of tools — diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural — for each situation.”

The administration’s approach to Iran, she writes, exemplified that style: using economic sanctions to cut Iran off from the global economy and using social media to communicate with Iranians as they pursued “old-fashioned shoe-leather diplomacy” to advance U.S. objectives.

By far the chapter that has drawn the most attention is Clinton’s account of the terrorist attack in Benghazi. She says the events unfolded in the “fog of war” and that the administration did everything it could to save U.S. personnel. But she disputes the notion that she should have seen cables requesting enhanced security in Libya. They were addressed to the secretary of State as a “procedural quirk,” she said.

“I’m not equipped to sit and look at blueprints to determine where the blast walls need to be or where the reinforcements need to be. That’s why we hire people who have that expertise,” Clinton told Diane Sawyer in the prime-time interview.

Pressed by Sawyer on whether Americans were waiting for a statement from her on Benghazi that begins with “I should have … “ Clinton crisply cut off that line of inquiry. “I take responsibility. But I was not making security decisions,” she said.

Although Clinton’s book does not delve into the details of her marriage the way her first memoir did, the issue clearly continues to be a topic of fascination with the public.

In her interview with Sawyer, she testified to the strength of her marriage and dismissed the re-emergence of her husband’s one-time paramour, former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

“I am 100 percent in the camp that says forgiveness is mostly about the forgiver. I know too many people, having now lived as long as I have, who can never get over it,” Clinton said.

The former first lady added that Lewinsky was free to say what she pleased and that she hoped she would “construct a life that she finds meaning and satisfaction in.”

Clinton seemed to almost dare her rivals to continue using the topic against her as political ammunition. When told by Sawyer that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul had called it “fair game,” Clinton coolly replied that “if he decides to run, he’ll be fair game, too, for everybody.”

That steeliness is, in part, what has inspired the loyalty of supporters like Holly Vichers of New York, who lined up at 6:30 a.m. to get her copy of “Hard Choices” signed and hopes to see Clinton as the next president.

“You need someone up there who’s not afraid to take on the world,” she said.

AFP Photo
Video via NDN

Snowden Relaxed, Jocular On Revelations, Book Says

Snowden Relaxed, Jocular On Revelations, Book Says

Washington (AFP) – Edward Snowden was “profoundly at peace” with his decision to leak national security documents, and even joked about the consequences, journalist Glenn Greenwald says in a new book.

“I call the bottom bunk at Gitmo,” Snowden joked, referring to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, says the book to be released Tuesday, excerpts of which were published Monday in The Guardian.

Greenwald, recounting the series of discussions last year in Hong Kong when the former National Security Agency contractor decided to reveal his identity, said Snowden appeared to sleep soundly and was “completely refreshed the next day” despite the tension.

“Snowden had seemed unbothered” by the prospect of facing U.S. prosecution for releasing the classified materials on NSA surveillance programs, Greenwald wrote, adding that “a giddy gallows humor crept into our dealings.”

“When we asked him about his ability to sleep so well under the circumstances, Snowden said that he felt profoundly at peace with what he had done and so the nights were easy,” said Greenwald, who met with Snowden in Hong Kong with Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill.

“‘I figure I have very few days left with a comfortable pillow,'” he joked, ‘so I might as well enjoy them.'”

Greenwald also described maneuvers that allowed Snowden to avoid a throng of journalists in Hong Kong looking for him after the video in which he revealed his identity was released on The Guardian website.

He wrote that two human rights lawyers arrived at the hotel where Snowden and three journalists were staying to assist Snowden, but that Greenwald had to find a way to get him away without confronting the horde of media.

Snowden said he had a way to make himself “unrecognizable” but they needed a way to get him away without being followed, Greenwald wrote.

“We came up with a plan: I would walk out of the hotel room with (Guardian lawyer Gill) Phillips and go down to the lobby to lure the reporters, still waiting outside our door, to follow me,” the journalist wrote.

Snowden was waiting with the two human rights lawyers, waiting for word that the coast was clear.

“The ruse worked,” said the excerpt. “After 30 minutes of chatting with Phillips in a shopping center attached to the hotel, I went back up to my room and anxiously called one of the lawyers on his mobile phone.”

Snowden and the two lawyers got out through the hotel just before a group of journalists started swarming the lobby, according to the book. Greenwald was not apprised of Snowden’s exact whereabouts, and only later learned that he had gone to Moscow.

Greenwald said he wanted to return to his home in Brazil, and was preparing to fly through New York “just to make the point that I could and would,” but that a lawyer advised him against changing planes in the United States.

“You’ve just enabled the biggest national security leak in U.S. history and gone all over TV with the most defiant message possible,” the lawyer told him.

The book, “No Place to Hide,” is being released in Britain by Hamish Hamilton and in the United States by Metropolitan Books.

AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan

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