Food news to satisfy your curious appetite!

In case you need it, here's a pretty good dim sum primer from an article in the SF Chronicle that also lists some of their choice Bay Area dim sum restaurants. If you don't know your har gau from your gai lan, check it out!
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Also from the SF Chronicle's "Kitchen Essentials" series, a list of Ten Pantry Essentials. The whole series of articles, which have included the "Top Ten Cooking Techniques" and a list of kitchen tools. In the essential pantry item list, I have to admit I might not have thought of using fish sauce in my Caesar dressing if I was out of anchovies. They also offer substitutes for their choices in case the ones the are pimping are hard to find. The whole series is a really great resource, and only reminds me of how pathetic the food section of our PDX paper, The Oregonian, is.
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From my fave cocktail columnist Jason Wilson in the Washington Post, a timely piece on Tiki cocktails, perfect for the warm weather ahead and its accompanying outdoor beverage enjoyment, with several recipes you can expect to see me post about.....soon! You can bet JW's Zombie and Mai Tai are both in my future this summer!!
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Is there no end to the fabulous food inspiration from Mark Bittman's Bitten Blog at the NY Times site? Greek nachos, anyone? Hell yes!
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I'm also dying to make food scientist Harold McGee's yogurt and crème fraiche. Two things you can easily buy at the store, but seem so much better (and interesting) if I make them in my own kitchen.
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Skirts, hangers, flatirons, flanks. In these leaner times it's time for leaner (and less expensive) cuts of cow. This article from the Los Angeles Times has some good tips on how to get your money's worth and cook 'em right so you won't even miss those more expensive New York's and rib eyes. Well, you still might miss them, but your wallet will feel better!

Less water, better pasta?

Another interesting article in the NYT by the man whose job I almost envy above all others, food scientist/guru Harold McGee. He is proposing, to the tsk-tsking of Italian grandmothers everywhere, that maybe we all could cut back on the amount of water we use to boil pasta. His experiments seem to point out that using as little as 1-1/2 quarts of water does just as good a job as the usual 4-6 quarts we all usually use. Now when he actually presented his findings to über-Italian cooking grandmothers Lidia Bastianich and Marcella Hazan they reacted with lukewarm enthusiasm. Still very interesting info contained herein, with the point that not only do you get good results, but the energy savings are not insignificant. A rather delicious way to burnish your "going green" cred.

Turning up...and understanding...the heat!

To food fanatics, the name Harold McGee tends to elicit fawning admiration. This for a man whose book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is usually considered the Holy Grail for innumerable restaurant chefs and home cooks who really want to get into the subject of where food comes from, what it is made of...I mean exactly what it is made of...and why it behaves the way it does when cooked. The whole sous vide/molecular gastronomy fad? It probably wouldn't exist if not for McGee. If FoodTV's Alton Brown is considered the irreverent teacher/scientist/prankster of the genre, then McGee would rightly be considered the Dean of Food University. His blog Curious Cook, and his regular NYT column of the same name, explores some of this territory in a, well, more user friendly way than in his in depth, sometimes exhausting book.

In Wednesday's NY Times he wrote a fascinating column on heat in the kitchen that touches on how heat works, cooks food, wastes energy, flavors food, etc. Every home cook should read this, as it is as fascinating as it is informative. Who would think to pre-soak dry pasta, turn steaks on the grill more often, because "steaks and chops cook more evenly on high grill heat — and faster as well — if you become a human rotisserie and turn them not once or twice but as often as you can stand to, even dozens of times, every 15 or 30 seconds." Or that most cooks are "...often aiming a fire hose of heat at targets that can only absorb a slow trickle, and that will be ruined if they absorb a drop too much." Every home chef will learn something from this short essay, and most likely come away a better cook for it.

image from New York Times