Want to know what I think of _The Sneaky Chef_ and _Deceptively Delicious_? Raymond Sokolov has it covered:
> Very few childhood bedwetters go off to college with rubber sheets. Picky eaters also mature, into omnivores. Judging by the crowds at restaurants I visit, they grow up into beef-cheek-gobbling yuppies with a yen for lemongrass ice cream.
Gourmet magazine debuted their new web site at [Gourmet.com](http://www.gourmet.com/) last week. There’s Francis Lam writing about Yunnan ham, Michael Pollan on food and science, and me on taking Iris to a steakhouse.
I’m going to be writing often for the new Gourmet. In addition to the steakhouse column, I wrote a review of Txori, a new Seattle tapas bar. Aside from Seattle restaurants, my focuses will be vegetables and Asian food. If you have any questions about these topics that you’d like to see answered in Gourmet, let me know. Or maybe there’s some Asian recipe or weird vegetable you want to dare me to cook.
It’s a real kick to be writing for them. Looking at the list of contributors, I feel like the dumbest guy in Mensa.
This month on Culinate, I’m getting sweet on you:
> But caramel is nothing more than melted sugar heated until it browns. It’s actually quite easy to make, and it’s versatile, inexpensive, and fun. Want to impress your guests? You can crack open a $100 jar of caviar — or caramelize a few cents’ worth of sugar and serve homemade caramel sauce.
Don’t you hate it when Wikipedia outsmarts you?
Occasionally when I want a snack, I make myself a corn tortilla quesadilla. It’s always better in my imagination than in reality. I always make them the same way: two 6-inch corn tortillas with cheese in the middle. If I cook it in a lot of fat, it gets crisp and greasy. If I cook it in little or no fat, it’s not greasy, but the tortillas stay limp.
So I Googled. Naturally, the Wikipedia page for “quesadilla” came right up, and I learned that one type of quesadilla is:
> Corn tortilla based cheese tacos
> A corn tortilla thrown on a griddle to cook, then flipped and sprinkled with grated melting cheese such as Queso Chihuahua or Monterey Jack. Once the cheese melts it gets a smear of guacamole and is folded and served.
I heated a cast-iron pan and went right to it. I skipped the guacamole. It was great. You need two of them for a proper snack, but they’re quick. Perhaps the rest of you already make your corn quesadillas this way and are wondering what I was doing fooling around with two tortillas. I wonder that myself.
Does this sound familiar to you? You’re watching a TV show or movie, and a character holds out a wooden spoon of tomato sauce and says, “Taste this.” It’s probably a man, because tomato sauce is the only thing men can cook on TV. (Excluding Food TV, obviously.)
It happened on the episode of My So-Called Life that Laurie and I watched the other night. (We got the box set for Christmas.)
Has anybody ever done this sauce-tasting thing in real life? It sounds messy. Then on last night’s episode, someone tasted a soup and said, “This needs something.” I’ve never heard that, either. These are the food equivalents of the woman sweeping the entire shelf of pregnancy tests into her cart. (We just saw _Juno,_ too.)
Any other favorite TV food cliches you want to share?