By Faith Bahadurian Special Writer
Over a year ago, Lifestyle editor Michael Redmond suggested an In The Kitchen column about the foodie Web sites that I and my ITK colleague Pat Tanner like to visit. At the time, neither of us thought we spent enough time visiting such sites to make a go of it, but since then I’ve done more exploring, especially blogs, now that I have one of my own.
So, I present to you a totally subjective (and necessarily limited) rundown of some of my own most frequently visited sites, along with a few of Pat’s picks.
In my mind, there are two types of sites here: blogs, where one or more writers give expression to personal gastronomic proclivities (they usually invite reader comments), and sites that one visits for more general information, such as food or restaurant news, and recipes or information about ingredients. But the lines here are often blurred, the Internet is a big, messy place, with lots of “spillover” from one area to another. To me, that’s part of the charm, and it’s worth spending some “unstructured” time just exploring, if you can.
Pat reports she rarely visits some of the sites she did a year ago, but she does still check in with the Amateur Gourmet (www.amateurgourmet.com). She recommended his recent description of his meal at el Bulli, the world-famous restaurant in Spain, and I have to say that after reading this myself, she is so right. Not only is the post partly in a graphic novel format, it is side-splittingly funny.
We both rely on Chowhound (http:// chowhound.chow.com/ boards), Yelp (www.yelp.com), and Table Hopping with Rosie (at njmonthly.com) to keep up with restaurant developments. Pat says of Chowhound that their “devoted diners are often the first to know when a neighborhood spot opens or closes,” and of Rosie Saferstein’s site, “Table Hopping is, as ever, an invaluable source for NJ restaurant news.” Pat herself is sometimes the source of that news for the central and southern part of the state, and was also an editor for the latest Zagat New Jersey restaurant guide (www.zagat.com). Information on the northern New Jersey food and dining scene is found at http://njmg.typepad.com/ foodblog/, too, and I never miss Pat’s posts at the “New Jersey Life” blog (she is their restaurant reviewer), http:// newjerseylifemag.blogspot.com.
For research into recipes I just Google and see what comes up. Often the best version is at www.epicurious.com, which archives recipes from Gourmet and Bon Appétit. Other sites are www.allrecipes.com, and www.recipesource.com, the latter evolved from an old University of California, Berkeley, student’s site called SOAR that I used for years. I also find good information about ingredients at www.chefshop.com, which is really a shopping site, but with a lot of information on it. Someday I’m going to spring for their organic “garlic sampler,” with a dozen varieties from a specialty grower. Of course, the TV Food Network (www.foodnetwork.com/) is also the repository of many recipes, although my favorite cooking shows are on public television.
Wikipedia is quite helpful, although I always (as with any Web site) try to take it all in with a, er, grain of salt. For all kinds of food news, you can’t get more comprehensive than www.thefoodtimes.org (“all consuming news”), which pulls information from various news media. I also look things up on www.foodtimeline.org., a repository of food developments from prehistory to the present. Tiramisu? It became popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and reached its zenith in the ‘80s. (Somebody please tell local restaurateurs!)
I also visit various food pages on about.com for all sorts of information, and, like wikipedia.com, often link to their entries from my blog. Pat and I both read Kyle Phillips on the Italian food section (www.italian.about.com). He lives in Italy, so writes about the kind of food being eaten there (tiramisu, not so much), but sometimes with digressions into politics and weather, too. And Pat tipped me off to http://leitesculinaria.com/, a site developed by David Leite, a well-known culinary journalist.
On a more local level, I enjoy the posts about Italian (and other) food at http:// ciaochowlinda.blogspot.co m/, the well-written and photographed site of Princetonian Linda Prospero, a journalist who is active with Dorothea’s House in Princeton.
I am a total Mark Bittman fan (http:// bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/), and now he has his own talented follower (the nephew of a friend), Ben Fishner, cooking all the recipes from Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything,” at http:// bencookseverything.blogsp ot.com/. Can a movie be far behind?
Other sites I visit occasionally are www.slashfood.com, http:// waiterrant.net/ (I like the older posts about crazy restaurant customer experiences), http:// globalcookies.blogspot.com/ (cookies from every country), www.cakewreck.com (hilarious!), http:// creampuffsinvenice.ca/, www.101cookbooks.com/, www.davidlebovitz.com, and http:// orangette.blogspot.com. Many bloggers post links to their own favorite sites, so you could get caught up in that, too.
Last, but certainly not least, a faculty member at Princeton University recently tipped me off to rouxbe.com, a high-concept video course, backed by big investors, including Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. You can watch some parts for free, but if you want it all, you pay.
No celebrity chefs here, just sharp high-definition video instruction with the occasional British accent giving away its Vancouver location. A serious home cook could get hooked on the painstaking directions. In a section titled Dry-Heat Cooking Methods, the videos for Pan Frying comprise 8 parts, including over two minutes on just determining if the pan is hot enough (complete with scientific facts about how metal expands and contracts as it heats). Slightly longer is spent on how to add oil to the pan. For each method, there are tutorials on Goals, Topics, Practice, Quiz, and online Discussion. And I learned a new word, “sucs,” to describe the caramelized bits left in the pan when you pan fry (“fond” is not the right word, apparently). And after you learn how to pan fry, you can make the chicken Marsala recipe at http:// www.rouxbe.com/recipes/ 1544-chicken-marsala/text.
Read Faith Bahadurian’s blog at www.packetinsider.com/ blog/njspice (also www.twitter.com/njspice).
