Posts Tagged ‘Food’
How to Cook Very Difficult Food
For Cooking Light Magazine It was while I was attempting to make “soil” that it occurred to me that my experiment with very difficult dinners might drive me insane. This is edible soil, from the cookbook by René Redzepi, chef at the world’s most buzzy restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen. Noma’s soil is sprinkled on a…
Read MoreAnna Lena
When Chef Michael Robbins auditioned for Top Chef Canada, he stressed in his audition video that he was an “extremely competitive person”, like a promise of what might come. All the more painful an irony that he ended up cut first, before even preparing a complete dish. That was a loss for the judges and show.…
Read MoreChicha
Continuing with my repost of restaurant reviews written for my friends at Vancouver Magazine… I confess that I’m torn about posting the bad ones. There have been a few. But I don’t know many food writers who enjoy speaking poorly of a place. And if you have to – because a place is pretentious or…
Read MoreThe Farmer’s Apprentice
I started as Food Critic over at VanMag last year. I’ll be posting my reviews here periodically after they’re published. Chef David Gunawan’s restaurant Farmer’s Apprentice was my first assignment on the job. He captures perfectly the inversion of culinary values in the foodie west over the course of the past 30 years or so.…
Read More1 Ordinary Cook, 35 Impossible Recipes: Outtakes from a week in the culinary trenches
My article about cooking incredibly difficult food from the most insane cookbooks of the year is running over at Cooking Light. 1 Ordinary Cook, 35 Impossible Recipes (“Can a home cook learn anything from the supercompmlicated cookbooks of the world’s most celebrated chefs? We asked Timothy Taylor to dive into the deep end and throw…
Read MoreCoffee and Coral Snakes: Batesian Mimicry at Work and Play
From Vancouver Magazine Fall Issue 2012 *** Note: I was inspired by the always-fascinating work of Eric Falkenstein (at Falkenblog) in my application of Batesian Mimicry to consumer behaviour. *** It will have escaped nobody’s notice that Vancouver is a top-ranked city in at least three categories. We’re always high on those “liveable city” lists.…
Read MoreThe Adventures of Generation F
From the November 2010 Issue of Cooking Light A couple of hours after setting foot in Brooklyn for the first time, I find the heart of the action. It’s 7 p.m. on a hot summer weeknight, and I’m hanging with a group of fashionable young people, all good-looking and under 30, who favor the uptown stylish…
Read MoreWillamette Wandering
It takes a while to reach the Willamette Valley in Oregon, but you’ll know it the moment you arrive. Out the interstate south of Portland, past King City and Sherwood, the strip malls and discount stores fall away and the fields open up to either side. Somewhere around Newberg – as the light grows golden…
Read MoreThey’re Everywhere
Holy stickers Batman. These things have hit Toronto, New York, Halifax… everywhere. Now they’ve reportedly crossed the pond. They’re going up in the UK now. Move over Banksy. Or whatever. I have no idea what this means.
Read MoreChef Mavro Interview 2010
For the essay series Global is the New Local published in EnRoute Magazine in September, October and December 2010, I visited Hawaii and ate my way around the island of Oahu. One of the best meals, of the trip and probably my life so far, was had at Chef Mavro’s, where extremely high-end does not mean pretentious.…
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