cookiesinheaven

Labels: NPR, Public Radio, radio

on NPR's Fresh Air this evening. "Grant Achatz, the Chef Who Lost His Sense of Taste."

In 2007, Achatz lost his own ability to taste. He was diagnosed with stage 4 tongue cancer, which metastasized to both sides of his neck. His surgeons told him they were going to cut out his tongue and replace it with muscle from another part of his body. With the surgery, Achatz only had a 50 percent chance of surviving beyond two years. But, he says, he was even more afraid of losing his ability to taste and eat.

"I lived my whole life in the kitchen," he says. "Not only that, but it's the passion, it's the love for cooking and food. It's dictated my entire life — every aspect of it. So, in some ways, the thought of not being able to do that anymore radically affects your life."

Achatz found a clinical trial at the University of Chicago that agreed to treat him with radiation and chemotherapy. The radiation treatments burned his tongue, shed the lining of his esophagus — and completely destroyed his taste buds.

"It was very strange to not be able to discern any flavor at all," he says. "It's funny because, clearly, you know you have to eat to live. But even knowing that, for me, there was no reason to eat. I had no interest in eating whatsoever. I would put something in my mouth — say a vanilla milkshake — and it tasted like nothing."

Labels: celebrity chefs, Interview, NPR

Labels: comedy, NPR, YouTube

My Nepenthe weaves together stories and tales about the famous California restaurant perched on the majestic cliffs of Big Sur. It celebrates the magic and history of place through food and the Fassett family who started Nepenthe.

(Mark your calendars for a book signing with the Author, Romney Steele - December 7, 2009 @ 7:00)

"My New Orleans" will change the way you look at New Orleans cooking and the way you see World-famous chef John Besh. It's 16 chapters of culture, history, essay and insight, and pure goodness. Besh tells us the story of his New Orleans by the season and by the dish. Archival, four-color, location photography along with ingredient information make the Big Easy easy to tackle in home kitchens. Cooks will salivate over the 200 recipes that honor and celebrate everything New Orleans.

..A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to Cafe Reconcile, a New Orleans-based non-profit organization dedicated to providing at-risk youth an opportunity to learn life and interpersonal skills, and operational training for successful entry into the hospitality and restaurant industries.

Crescent City Farmers' Market Cookbook

Poppy Tooker tells the story of the Crescent City Farmers Market through her distinctly New Orleans voice as one of a local food preservationist, Slow Food New Orleans founder, and longtime market collaborator. With a market tradition dating back to the late 1600s, the story of the rise and decline of New Orleansa city markets prior to the creation of the Crescent City Farmers Market is both educational and entertaining. Tooker recalls whimsical and wacky market events with both prose and archival photography.

Ad Hoc at Home

In the book every home cook has been waiting for, the revered Thomas Keller turns his imagination to the American comfort foods closest to his heart—flaky biscuits, chicken pot pies, New England clam bakes, and cherry pies so delicious and redolent of childhood that they give Proust's madeleines a run for their money. Keller, whose restaurants The French Laundry in Yountville, California, and Per Se in New York have revolutionized American haute cuisine, is equally adept at turning out simpler fare.

Melissa Gray is National Public Radio's Cake Lady. Every Monday she brings a cake to the office for her colleagues at NPR to enjoy. Hundreds of Mondays (and cakes) later, Melissa has lots of cake-making tips to share. With more than 50 recipes for the cakes that have been dreamed of and drooled over for a lifetime. (Listen to the NPR story about the book...here.)

You might be happy when you walk into a store and see a potential Christmas gift at a deep discount. But the American Booksellers Association is not, accusing three giant retailers of "predatory pricing." They've asked the Justice Department to investigate.

The group fears these "book wars" could close the book on many small, independent stores, - CBS News

Labels: Big Sur, Books, cakes, Chaucer's, Cookbooks, New Orleans, NPR

Among the Defense Department's many responsibilities — fighting two wars, looking out for 3 million employees, and so forth — is producing a weekly cooking show.

Every week, on the Pentagon Channel, the military's best chefs battle it out on The Grill Sergeants.

Sgt. First Class Brad Turner is the original grill sergeant and the star of the show. - NPR All Things Considered

Labels: army, Cooking Shows, NPR

Hidden Kitchens, heard on NPR's Morning Edition, explores secret, unexpected, below-the-radar cooking across America. The Kitchen Sisters show how communities come together through food: midnight cabyard kitchens, prison rodeo kitchens, a secret civil rights kitchen, food traditions and rituals from across the country. The series inspired two books, Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes and More from NPR's Kitchen Sisters and Hidden Kitchens Texas. - UCSB Food Matters Series

Labels: Books, Food, Kitchen, NPR, stories, UCSB

October is high season for apples, which makes master baker Dorie Greenspan very happy.

In celebration of the season, the author of Baking: From My Home to Yours shares a recipe for tarte Tatin with Michele Norris. - NPR

Be forwarned...listening may induce drooling.

Did you know...

Tarte Tatin became a universal darling after the Tatin sisters, French innkeepers, famously forgot to line a pan with crust before they put in the apples and started baking. Rather than begin again, in a flash of thrift and ingenuity, they decided to put the crust on top and serve the tart upside down.

Labels: apples, Cookbooks, NPR

Aguas frescas (Spanish for "fresh waters") are a fresh juice drink whose popularity in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean has finally reached the U.S. Their irresistibly refreshing and simple combination of fruits, sugar and water make them the perfect antidote to the heat of summer or to complement a spicy meal. Jimmy Shaw, owner of the Loteria Grill (at the Farmer's Market) recently brought a sampling of aguas frescas to the Good Food studios, where he discussed his favorite flavors for this thirst-quenching drink.

Labels: Beverages, Los Angeles, Mexican, NPR

With her famed Berkeley, Calif., restaurant, Alice Waters helped give rise to a new cuisine based on locally grown, seasonal ingredients. Waters and her biographer discuss what has made the Chez Panisse such an offbeat and memorable place to eat for more than three decades.

Looking back, Waters would say it all began for her with a bowl of cafe au lait. As a student on a sojourn to Paris during the 1960s, Waters had never sipped anything so good. Soon, trips to the French countryside introduced her to the power and pleasure of local foods: mussels just off the boat, freshly pressed virgin olive oil.

Waters came back to Berkeley transformed. She hatched a plan to convert a run-down old house into an elegant bistro.

This little restaurant in an old house on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, California, was the dream of Alice's life, and tonight, August 28, 1971, was its opening night. She had named the restaurant in honor of Honoré Panisse, the most generous and life-loving character in Marcel Pagnol's film trilogy Marius, Fanny, and César. Alice wanted Chez Panisse to be an easygoing, unaffected gathering place, like César's Bar de la Marine on the Old Port of Marseille, where friends could laugh, argue, flirt, and drink wine for hours on end. At Chez Panisse, they could also have something simple and delicious to eat. - Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution.

Alice Waters didn't yet know Goines at this point, but he was precisely the kind of non–Ken doll she'd hoped to meet when, in January of 1964, she transferred— indeed, fled—up north from the University of California's Santa Barbara campus with three of her fellow disgruntled sisters at the Alpha Phi sorority. "The women we'd met in Santa Barbara were all lined up to get married when they were 22," says Eleanor Bertino, who roomed with Waters on both campuses and also had been her classmate for one year at Van Nuys High School, in Southern California. (Waters grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, but moved west with her family in 1961, her last year before college.) "We pledged the same sorority at Santa Barbara because it was the only way you could have a social life," says Bertino. "Very shortly, there were four of us who were like, Oh, my God—this is not for us. There had to be something more exciting and interesting than living in a sorority. Halfway through our sophomore year, we all transferred to Berkeley. None of us were politically involved, but we just liked the fact that there was activity going on up there. I mean, we were nice girls, not radical at all. I remember going to see an English teacher of mine before I left Santa Barbara, and she said, 'I'll send you brownies in jail.' I had no idea what she was talking about." - Vanity Fair

Labels: Alice Waters, Books, NPR, Organic