Here’s another entry from The Zodiac Cookbook.

Taurus: April 21-May21. Its symbol is the Bull, and its element is Fire. The Emerald is its birthstone, and Friday is the luckiest day of the week.

The Taurean is a person of high achievement but great innate modesty. You are persistent and persevering, and a great admirer of things of the past. you hoard your mother’s and your grandmother’s recipes and set great store by family dishes which you cook for all holidays and family celebrations. Should a recipe fail, you will not abandon it, but will try it again and at once! The Taurean enjoys the good things of life and should guard against eating or drinking to excess. You love sweet desserts: the richer, the better! And a box of candy can be our downfall! Since your love for color is marked, you will create colorful combinations of foods and interesting menus. The Taurean is born under the money sign, and expensive food and drink are especially to your liking!

With your sensitivity to the arts, you provide a pleasant background for your dinner parties.

Here are a few favorite dessert recipes which will suit your sweet tooth!

Sandra Lee type recipes for lemon ice-box cake, choco soufflé, carrot cake deluxe and surprise pies are listed.

Women like chocolate? That’s crazy talk.

One of my best friends and awesome comfort food cook, Joe, got me “The Zodiac Cookbook” for Xmas. It’s a little digest sized, 60-page, picture-less and smelly book for superstitious housewives from 1969. Here’s my food horoscope:

Scorpio

October 24-November 22. Its symbol is the Scorpion, and its element is Water. Topaz is its birthstone, and Tuesday is the luckiest day of the week.

Determination, persistence, and concentration are the qualities to be found in a Scorpion, and when carried into the kitchen, these make for an able homemaker and cook. But truth to tell, Scorpio is not usually found in the kitchen, but rather out in the world on the larger fields of battle. Keenly intuitive, you are at great advantage in mental skirmishes, and although secretive yourself, you have a vast talent for making your adversary reveal more than she intends to. Scorpio likes to play with idea of money, and the power which it will bring her, and often will hide small sums in the cookie jar against a rainy day! The Scorpion quivers with controlled energy, and potential power. The drive for power is intense and is at its best when directed towards the love of humanity. You enjoy good restaurants and finely prepared, elegant foods, so eat out whenever you can! The following are some of your favorite foods, with recipes provided, but we don’t expect you to cook them yourself!

Followed by recipes for paella, sweet and pungent shrimp and mussles mariniere.

Translation: You could cook, but you can’t because you are too busy being a catty housewife who hordes her money to spend on restaurants.

This book is awesome. I’ll be posting more.

If only one day in the future, Perdue could teach me how to roast a chicken. Now where’d I leave that jar of cash for my marijuana cigarettes?

We bake cakes whenever a staff member at The Restaurant has a birthday. (Except mine, which fell on a closed day, but I bring it up all the time that I am offended I didn’t get my creme brulee cake in the shape of buttocks.) So last week it was one of the servers birthdays and he mentioned that he wanted a chocolate bacon cake. And I was to bake it. So my chefs brought in some cookbooks and I selected the World War II Chocolate Mayo Cake from America’s Test Kitchen: America’s Best Lost Recipes.

It sounds pretty gross, but makes sense when you think about it–mayo is made up of egg yolks and oil (plus a shitload of stablizing chemicals and preservatives if you use the store bought kind) . The advantage of using mayo in a cake? Super moisture. Moist like whoa. So moist that you don’t need milk with it. And no, it doesn’t taste like mayo.
Below you will find the recipe, which I fucked with a little.

Crap you need:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder (I’m not quite sure what this means as I don’t really like chocoalte and I don’t bake – I used whatever we had at The Restaurant)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup mayonnaise (I used Hellman’s Real Mayo)
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (please use real bourbon vanilla extract so your cake doesn’t taste like fake ass)
• 1 cup water

How we do:

1. Adjust oven rack to the middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9-inch baking pan (they recommend square, I used round). Sift flour, cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda in medium bowl.

2. Stir the mayonnaise, granulated sugar, and vanilla together in a large bowl until smooth. Add the water and stir until combined. Whisk in the flour mixture until incorporated. (I used the Kitchen Aid for this.) Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes. Cool completely in the pan, at least 45 minutes.

The frosting we used was a sour cream and sugar mix that I wasn’t too crazy about. We smoke our own bacon, so we took a hunk of it, sliced it, cooked it down and then candied it with some sugar and decorated the cake with it.

If I had to make it again, I’d reserve the fat rendered from the bacon and make the icing with that. Or even add it to the cake batter.

Maybe you like your cake a la mode? Here’s a recipe for candied bacon ice cream.

I didn’t have time to take a photo of it, so here’s a photo of someone else’s bacon cake:

I dub thee The Cartman Cake.

This book is a lot better than “The Apprentice” that’s on NBC. First of all, there’s no yelling because you are reading it to yourself. Unless you are one of those dumb people who I went to junior high with who have to move their mouths when they read and who are probably grandparents by now. Also, there are no sycophants with dillusions of grandeur. Instead, it’s about an adorable happy-go-lucky Frenchman who loves America. And it’s got recipes in between chapters. Oh, yeah, the guy can cook, too.

Pros: Recipes, America, HoJo’s, the French word for shower is douche

Cons: Donald Trump, babies having babies

ChewFood Grade: B+

Chef Pepin’s partner was never accused of having a fetish for spitting on hookers. I’m just sayin’sall.

This is an addendum to my previous post about MSG.

It’s amazing how much I learn while on the toilet. I was reading the MSG entry in “The Food Lover’s Tiptionary” just now. (Which is a reference book that I highly recommend to anyone who who takes cooking seriously - before you buy any cookbook or use any recipe, buy this book). Here’s what the entry said:

“The FDA doesn’t require a separate MSG listing when any of the following (MSG-laden) ingredients are present: hydrolyzed vegetable protein, hydrolyzed plant protein, Kombu extract, and natural flavoring seasoning.”

I was on the terlit, reading “Techniques of Healthy Cooking ” by The Culinary Institute of America and it had a page on MSG.

Apparently MSG (which has 1/3 the amount of sodium of salt and is more delicious - falling into the umami category of taste) is perfectly safe to eat in moderation. There have been dozens of studies and they found no link between moderate intake levels of MSG and any problems in normal, healthy individuals. But MSG never shook off the bad rep it got in the late 60’s. The book says that people who think they have an adverse reaction to it may have a food allergy to something else or some other medical condition (or maybe the chef did something awful to your food).

Lots of junk food products contain MSG, just look at the ingredient list on the back of a sack of Doritos for “monosodium glutamate”.

Bring on the delicious seasoning!

Today I got another book sent to me from a friend. “Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors” by Andrea Nguyen. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. So I was more than pleased to receive it. I’m actually surprised it’s taken Vietnamese food so long to catch on with Americans, considering that it’s French influenced (due to France’s colonization of the country from 1858 until 1954), based on fresh ingredients, generally healthy and visually appealing. This book is HUGE. It breaks down Vietnamese cooking and dishes so they are simple and not intimadating. In the beginning is a brief history lesson and in the back is a descriptive glossary for the exotic ingredients.

I haven’t met anyone who didn’t like pho or a banh mi. But there’s so much more to Vietnamese cuisine than those two.

I really miss my mom’s banh xeo - savory crepes made from rice flour, coconut and tumeric and stuffed with deliciousness like shrimp, chicken, mung beans, bean sprouts and julienned veggies and eaten with lettuce, mint, cucumbers and nuoc cham (seasoned fish sauce and rice vinegar dipping sauce). It was so very good that even though I haven’t had it in over seven years, I can still visualize it, photographically remember the base recipe and practically taste it - hot and cold and crispy and crunchy and soft and little sweet and a little spicy and a little salty all in one bite. It was quality. It’s hard to find banh xeo the way my mom made it in restaurants in NYC due to either regional variations or half-assed cooking. Some place will serve it soggy and floppy. Some are too oily. Some aren’t yellow enough. Most of them are stingy with the stuffing. I won’t randomly order it in restaurants without a referral because I’m scared of being disappointed. And being let down by food really bums me out.

Something I love about Vietnamese food is that’s it is unpretentious: There are no rules to eating it*. You don’t want hoisin sauce in your pho? No problem! You wanna eat with your hands? Go ahead! Slurp your broth? Of course! Whenever my mom would have her white friends over, they were polite and respectful of etiquette (like not eating until everyone is seated and until the host takes the first bite), but my mom would yell at them to dig in while she was still cooking. Eat all you want and get as messy as you want. How can you not get into that?

*The only thing my mom was strict about was how I held my chopsticks: Paupers, she said, held theirs lower down, closer to the food and royalty could manage them from the very top of the sticks.

The James Beard Foundation released its list of 2007 nominees. Among the categories is “Writing on Food”. Nominated is:

Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford (click on the link to read a review by Anthony Bourdain - who seems to be doing a lot of “guest” jobs lately)

The Omnivore’s Dilema: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

The United States of Arugula: How We Become a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp

Matt’s reading Heat right now and loves it. He says it’s fascinating and captivating. I’m half-way through Arugula and it’s extremely well written and informative (and if you don’t know who James Beard is, it’ll tell you). I’m up the part where Italian food starts to get gourmet and popular in New York. Omnivore is on my Amazon wish list. Maybe one day I will make a post that doesn’t mention Amazon.com.

Check out what I got in the mail this week!

My friend work in publishing and sent me all these free and advance copies of food books, including an illustrated knife skill book (for both right and left handed people).

I’m a happy kid.

A hundred bones is almost a weeks worth of groceries for Matt and myself. It’s the bill of a decent restaurant for the two of us. It’s the cost of a good new chef’s knife. It’s the cost (including tip) of a night of drinking and charcuterie plate eating for the two of us at Brooklyn’s Spuyten Duyvil (best bar for beer connoisseurs in New York - it’s not arguable, it’s a fact).

My friend Joe, who will contribute to this blog, is also an avid cook. But he only owns one cookbook, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, which his parents gave to him and I don’t think he’s used it yet. He pretty much uses the internet for everything. (He prefers the member based recipes of AllRecipes whereas I prefer the celebrichefs of Food Network and more recently, as I’ve outgrown the Food Network, Epicurious and Cooking Light). But this brings up a good question: Are cookbooks now obsolete? Are they frivilous? Is it just a waste of money since you can find almost anything on the internet? I guess it all comes down to what you are willing to spend your money on - be it cookbooks or weed or a designer handbag or an Insane Clown Posse tattoo. I am a visual person and love looking at the photos in cookbooks. The food chapters of my French textbooks were always my favorite when I was younger and I even went as far as ripping out a food photo from one before returning at the end of seventh grade. I love going through a cookbook and tagging what dishes I would like to make. Hopefully I have chosen good cookbooks that won’t become passé. Like this beauty.

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