Three Cheers for Miss Leah Chase & Dookie Chase

here is a link to Miss Leah's delicious cookbooks http://www.ecookbooks.com/search.aspx?searchterm=leah+chase&x=10&y=7

If you can make some chicken as good as Miss Leah....call me!

Why Whille you don't seem to be enjoying yourself!

Why Whille you don't seem to be enjoying yourself!
No Uncle, Im having a miserable time
Auntie told me to eat as much as I wanted and I can't !

Happy Birthday Julia Child

In celebration of August 15th, also known as Julia Child's birthday, a party was given in her honor last night in Tucson Arizona. The menu
needed to be worthy. Boeuf Bourginon might seem like an obvious choice of entree to some to celebrate and honor the original French Chef. After all, it was Julia Child who introduced a developing gourmet nation to it. Boeuf is now being newly rediscovered as a "star" dish by the original Star Chef(www.starchefs.com). With its star turn and attendant hoopla surrounding the marvelously wrought movie Julie & Julia corralling our culinary cultural consciousness, I am frankly surprised not to have seen the savory winey french beef stew in the now ubiquitous "red carpet" footage from the film's premier. The stew as much a star as Streep or Adams themselves. I can see the shot of a French cast enamel dutch oven carried by a kitchen wench in oven mits
stopping to answer the shouts from the papparazzi along the velvet ropeline edge. Boeuf! Boeuf! Look this way! Click! Click!Click! As the obliging wench turns and gently tilts the slightly steaming stew pot just so, in order that a perfect picture can be captured and zipped around the planet for all to see and be inspired by. And to try to make at home. Hooray. It would be the sort of exalted and ridiculous attention that might just have delighted Julia. Because, this great dish deserves such attention and rediscovery.

But during this otherwise dull, depressional summer of unseasonable rainy & cool temperatures all along the eastern shore. Our comfort food craving might reasonably be drawn to such fabulous, warming, fulfilling, hearty fare. I mean, who craves piping hot beef stew in the midst of a heat wave? Summer 2009 has been perfect Boeuf weather. The movie has also stimulated our Beouf fantasies and cravings. So simple beef stew with wine or Beouf Bourgignon it shall be for our celebration.

Though let me say there is very little that is purely simple about crafting a Beouf from Mastering the Art of French Cooking(www.ecookbooks.com). Like all simple things, it is actually very hard to do well. Let alone perfectly. But Julia gives us a fighting chance with mostly precise direction and near fool-proof description. Assumptions for 21st centure culinary duncery notwithstanding ( ie; browning to a non-browning experienced cook).

But this is not the eastern shore, and it is the wild west and it has been hot. And so on a really hot Tucson night, during the dog days of what has felt like the longest hottest summer in recent memory, Boeuf Bourgignon seemed a most unlikely menu choice for a table full of VIP guests from the worlds of food, science, medicine & entrepreneurship. Yet the circumstances of this unique moment in time, including our cultural clamoring for comfort, and collective thoughts of Julia made our desert dinner decision a no-brainer.

So I dove in, like Julie Powell and a multi-generational sorority of women before me to make the now world famous version of this classic stew. Good wine, grass fed beef from Montana thanks to Bryant Family Farm Beef (www.bryantfamilyfarm.com), purveyors to the US Culinary Olympic team, perfect mushrooms, European butter.Check. The result was a grand success according to all those at table. But the most gratifying moment came when I recalled my own time with Julia and how she would have loved the fact that wonderful friends came together for a swim in the Arizona twilight, with joyful music playing and twinkling stars complying in the perfect desert sky. She would have loved that we toasted her and used her recipe and that it turned out per her instructions in Mastering. That the recipe for boeuf works and triumphs, even in the hands of a passionate serventless amateur cook-housewife like myself, would cause her to raise a glass in our honor right back. Happy Birthday Julia and Thank You. Bon Appetit!

Drink Biograph Whiskey ...

Drink Biograph Whiskey and see moving pictures

Boston Medical Center Culinary Apothecary in Action

We have been talking for a decade or more about how food is our first and best medicine. Medical schools do not devote enough time to the importance of food. Nutrition science is one things, but translating Nutrition Speak into Food Speak is another matter. Congratulations to the Boston Medical Center for getting it! 3 Cheers.
Now lets get one of these in every community in America!

You must watch this!

http://www.necn.com/Boston/Health/2009/07/30/Prescriptions-for-food/1248987457.html

Shall I be an Angel Daddy?

Shall I be an Angel Daddy?

Bon Appetit Editrix Barbara Fairchild on Sunday Brunch 7/19

In the August Issue of Bon Appetit magazine the surface theme is fresh, light ideas for summer ( including a week of no-cook dinners (p.78)!) and the cover shot of the Ultimate Turkey Burger (p.48). In hot hazy hunger you might miss the most important news in the issue. In the Letter from the Editor, the incomparable Barbara Fairchild makes the case why Julia Child still matters. And in the month that marks what would have been Julia's 97th birthday ( August 15th) we are reintroduced to the impressive life's work of the woman to whom we all owe a cultural debt of gratitude. The one-and-only Julia Child. Barbara Fairchild knew Julia and spent treasured time in her company at table and in the kitchen. She saw firsthand the powerful, multi-generational impact Julia had. It was intense, universal and to Julia herself it was even a bit surprising.

On August 7th, Julie & Julia opens in theaters with the living legend Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as the one-of-a-kind Julie Powell upon whose inspirational blog and book the movie is based. I have my own Julie Powell & Julia Child connections including Trick-or-Treating at Julia Child's Cambridge home(I have long since forgotten what the Halloween candy given out was) and presenting Julie with her James Beard Award for her blogging in the early days of the blogosphere's notice from the venerable JBF. (Julie made the evening's most memorable acceptance speech: she cursed in utter shock at winning and then cursed again for being so uncouth as to curse in front of the most assembled bold faced names in food, with me standing to the side on stage with the winner envelope in my hand) But that part of the movie was left on the cutting room floor ( I wonder who they got to play me?).

While I was fortunate to know Julia Child, I am equally fortunate to know Barbara Fairchild. I see many similarities in these 2 great women. Like Julia, Barbara is unfailingly generous, gracious and seemingly surprised by the anonymous and suddenly in person gratitude of cooks everywhere and the scope of her inspiration to legions of young ( and like me not so young ) women in the food media business. Of course we all have to thank Julia, but we have to thank Barbara as well. Thank you for inspiring us all and challenging us to do ever-better work. For raising the bar one step ahead of our booming culinary culture and for making that world seem ( and be) accessible for so many of us. Actually that is exactly the lesson Julia would have been most proud of, and it is clear that Barbara Fairchild was paying attention and taking notes during those sessions with Julia. Julia was generous with her time and teaching because she wanted us all to have a place at the table and for that table to get broader and longer for us all. At Bon Appetit Barbara makes it possible for us to participate (as Julia wished us to do) in the conversation. She makes us part of the culinary community. Like Jullia she is all about inclusion and genuine welcoming.

So join me this Sunday at 2pm pacific time where Bon Appetit Editor-in-Chief Barbara Fairchild generously makes time to visit with us and continue the conversation. We will celebrate the August issue and the idea of no-cook meals for dog-days of Tucson summer. Tucson's own El Guero Canelo is featured as one of the 10 Best Hot Dogs in the US. (p.26) and most importantly we will toast to the memory, legacy and Birthday of the legendary Julia Child. Her 90th birthday was celebrated in Washington D.C. and I was lucky to be among the guests at a small dinner at Ris Lacoste's 1789 Restaurant. But at a larger party at the Four Season's Hotel Patrick O'Connell and his crew from the Inn at Little Washington served up ( at Julia's request) cheeseburgers, french fries, and ice cream sundaes ( all favorites of the French Chef!). Of course these were the best cheeseburgers you ever ate. But it underscores how REAL Julia was. So this week when it seems way way way to hot to cook. Look to the pages of Bon Appetit and no-cook a dinner, or go to El Guero Canelo for a Sonoran Hot Dog, or to your favorite burger joint and have a humble hamburger or Hot Dog and enjoy it with gusto for Jullia. And with your second juicy bite thank Barbara Fairchild while you're at it.