Showing posts with label amuse bouche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amuse bouche. Show all posts

Friday, September 4, 2020

Amuse Bouche

 


.. the unsurpassed ingenuity of Chinese cooks in making delicious dishes out of everything under heaven, all the plants.., all the creatures, all their parts. These are legacies of scarcity. Yet truly great cuisine, food as high art, did not arise here; it arose from wealth. It was the province and the passion of the elite. Throughout history, gourmets and chefs tended to reach their heights in conditions of plenty, not need.


from The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones (2007). Very Highly Recommended.

Friday, August 28, 2020

Amuse Bouche

Find ..the men and women trying to make Skid Row a better place…
On Saturdays, have dinner provided by Jackets for Jesus. Before it gets cold, make sure you score a coat. On Sundays, get fed by one of the charities dishing out hot lunch or dinner along the Seventh or San Pedro. But don’t cycle back. Be honest. Don’t take more than your share.
Nearly a month outside and Ran got the rhythm of Skid Row.

from Wonder Valley by Ivy Pochada (2017). Very Highly Recommended.

Saturday, August 22, 2020

Amuse Bouche

He insisted that we mark the occasion of our first week on the job by indulging in the White House’s signature desert (sic), the Chocolate Freedom, a brownie cake that oozed hot fudge and was topped with vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup. That easy year - campaigning, resigning, marrying, getting pregnant, and relocating to DC - had been a whirlwind, and we were finally pausing to celebrate. We clinked our dessert spoons as if they were champagne glasses and luxuriated in the sudden calm.

from The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Saturday, August 15, 2020

Amuse Bouche

I often dropped by Albert’s house for one of his infamous BLT sandwiches, made with the best aromatic lightly toasted whole-grain bread, homemade mayonnaise, imported lean bacon, and organic tomatoes homegrown in special soil he had shipped in.
..October 1970, I called Albert to ask his advice on an addition I wanted to build on to my writing studio. When he answered, his voice sounded distant…. “Janis is dead, Janis died, so upsetting. This is unbelievably sad…”

from Testimony by Robbie Robertson (2016). Very Highly Recommended.

Friday, August 7, 2020

Amuse Bouche

“Artifice,” She wanted to make sure she heard him right.
“Artifice. Illusion. Food should be more than food; it should tease and provoke the mind. We have a lot of dishes..looking like one thing and turn out to be something else. The most obvious example would be a duck or fish that is actually vegetarian, created entirely from soy and gluten, but there are many other types.. We strive to fool the diner for a moment. It adds a layer of intellectual play to the meal. When it works, the gourmet is delighted.”

from The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones (2007). Very Highly Recommended.
(Photo: Baked white onion with cod skin, at lunch in Nerua, Bilbao 2012)

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Amuse Bouche

Thomas McNulty was accustomed on Pentecost eve to kill a suckling pig and hang it and allow it slowly to bleed its blood into a bucket. Then on the holy Monday up stepped the wizard Rosalee and made her blood pudding. And Lige lit the wood fire in the yard and ran a long iron spike through the pig and then he stood there like a sentry turning the spit.
Like a picket against the burning of the meat.
This was a joyous day even for those that didn't have joy inside them.

 from A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry (2020). Very Highly Recommended.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Amuse Bouche



“Let’s eat,’ I say. ‘Come on.’
I have prepared what I know Fonny likes: ribs and cornbread and rice, with gravy, and green peas. Fonny puts on the record player, low: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.
‘Maybe Tish can’t gain no weight,’ says Daniel, after a moment, ‘but you sure will. You folks mind if I drop by more often - say, around this time?’

from If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (1974). Very Highly Recommended.

Saturday, July 18, 2020

Amuse Bouche

Mr Sugrue, of Sussex and Kilfinane.

In Ockenden’s mahogany-lined bar… a wine list the thickness of a novel has two whole pages on Sussex, I order a glass of Sugrue’s Wiston Estate, which has a fine mousse and rapier-sharp acidity, its steely modernity a surprisingly good fit for these self-consciously retro surroundings: two sides of Englishness, and not an overcooked legume in sight. When we sit down for dinner, that acidity will cut beautifully through the oil of  home-smoked mackerel with beetroot and horseradish…

 from The Wandering Vine by Nina Caplan (2018). Very Highly Recommended.

Saturday, July 11, 2020

Amuse Bouche

There is also something between natural and commercial, and that is conventional wine making. Many wonderful wines are made this way, perhaps too controlled to be included in this book, more concerned about being “correct” than working within the parameters of natural, but please understand that not all “other” wines are industrial wines.

from Natural Wine for the People by Alice Feiring (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Saturday, July 4, 2020

Amuse Bouche

via Pixabay
Then came the larger dishes - stuffed Strasbourg tongues, with their red, varnished look, the colour of blood next to the pallor of the sausages and pigs’ trotters; strings of black pudding coiled like harmless snakes; andouilles piled up in twos and bursting with health; saucissons in little silver copes that made them look like choristers; pies, hot from the oven, with little banner-like tickets stuck in them; big hams, and great cuts of veal and pork, whose jelly was as limpid as crystallised sugar.

from The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola (1873). Translation by Brian Nelson (2007). Very Highly Recommended.

Friday, June 26, 2020

Amuse Bouche

A young swan, neck curled and beak resting on her wing, lay on the gleaming silver. Surrounding the cygnet were medallions of meat soaked in black sauce……
‘My goodness, the talent of your cook. It looks still alive.”
We had never eaten swan before. Alice was showing her guests that she was as good as royal, heeded no churchman’s law, and neither should they.

from Her Kind by Niamh Boyce (2019). Highly Recommended.

Friday, June 19, 2020

Amuse Bouche

If he (Victor) squinted his eyes he could almost see the streets themselves, wind scoured and populous. The coopers on the quay, the rope works, the bakery, men selling milk from the tin, the honey-wagon from the abattoir. He thought about his parents meeting in an alley between the back-to-back houses, their two faces strange and animate.
But these were not his streets and he found himself drawn back to the night-time rides, with Willie Lambe driving, with few other cars on the streets and fewer people, and that sense that had created a city-wide fear…

from Resurrection Man by Eoin McNamee (1994). Highly Recommended. Available on BorrowBox

Friday, June 12, 2020

Amuse Bouche

“Can you pass the okra, please?” I ask.
My mother passes the okra.
“So," she pivots, seeing as her previous topic baited no one, “Ayoola said there is a cute doctor at your work.”
I drop the bowl of okra and it spills on the table - it is green and filmy, quickly seeping into the floral tablecloth.
“Korede!”
I dab at it with a cloth but I can barely hear her - my thoughts are eating my brain.

from My Sister The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (2018). Highly Recommended.

Photo via Pixabay

Saturday, June 6, 2020

Amuse Bouche

Throughout the winter of 1986, disgraced Chernobyl plant director Viktor Brukhanov remained in his KGB jail in Kiev, awaiting his impending trial. He was permitted no visitors, but once a month his wife, Valentina, could bring him a five-kilogram parcel of food, which she packed with sausages, cheese, and butter. … for a while, Valentina was allowed to bring him English-language newspapers, until their son wrote a furtive four-word message.. inside one of them: “I love you, Daddy.” Then that privilege..was revoked.

from Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Saturday, May 30, 2020

Amuse Bouche

When I started to work on the organisation and setup at Paris Saint-Germain, introducing a restaurant was one of my first priorities. I knew from my time in Milan how important it was for the players to have meals together, to help form a tighter unit. I wanted to bring the family environment I knew so well from Milan to Paris, and mealtimes are an important part of family life. This is how I like the culture of the club to be and I consider the family atmosphere fundamental to success.


from Quiet Leadership, winning hearts, minds and matches by Carlo Ancelotti (2016). Recommended.

Saturday, May 23, 2020

Amuse Bouche

via Pixabay

Large wedges of red melon on grass-green plates sat on the table in front of Wills and Salt. “First good melon of the season.” Salt fed Wills a bite.They ate with their fingers, slicing bits with table knives and sharing the saltshaker….
“Snitches are saying somebody heard somebody, you know how it goes, say that a guy, ‘DeWare,’ common spelling” - he rolled his eyes - “is the only name we have, supposed to be a crackhead, stays in The Homes, bragged about killing the rich white woman.”

from Out of the Blues by Trudy Nam Boyce (2016). Very Highly Recommended.

Friday, May 15, 2020

Amuse Bouche

Coolea in brine
The first permanent dairy school - and the first to take women students - was established at Munster in County Cork in 1880. An early example of that Irish county’s disproportionate influence on the fortunes of British and Irish cheese, it was well regarded enough to send cheesemaking teachers to the Cheshire Dairy Institute in Worleston in 1886 - predecessor of the Reaseheath Agricultural College, where Lucy Appleby would eventually go to hone her cheesemaking craft.

from A Cheese Monger’s History of the British Isles by Ned Palmer (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Friday, May 8, 2020

Amuse Bouche

Atomic Box Lunches!!
Via Pixabay
Even the most ominous force of the age, the atomic bomb, couldn’t darken the mood. When atomic testing began in the Nevada desert in 1951, Vegas turned it into just another tourist attraction: the hotels organised rooftop viewing parties and packed “atomic box lunches” for guests who wanted to make an outing of it. The radiation fears would come later; for now Vegas radiated only glamour, excitement, and good times.

Elvis in Vegas by Richard Zoglin (2019). Highly Recommended.

Saturday, May 2, 2020

Amuse Bouche

Over the next few months Victor visited him several times as a friend, and on two occasions as a doctor. Neruda would greet him in his indigenous poncho and beret, affable and as much a gourmand as ever, more than ready to share a sea bass baked in the oven and a bottle of Chilean wine and to talk… No longer was he the playful joker who dressed up to entertain his friends… … his heart was heavy. He was afraid for Chile.

from A Long Petal Of The Sea by Isabel Allende (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Saturday, April 25, 2020

Amuse Bouche

Pic via pixabay
Available via Borrowbox
They went for a coffee ..at the top of the museum’s observation tower. They sat there munching dry cheese sandwiches and looking down at the sun-drenched museum and the crowds growing in size with each moment that passed. Stockholm’s assembled pensioner corps seemed to be there, clutching lethal pieces of bread which would soon be transferred into monstrous, deadly lumps, responsible for the death of more seabirds than the country’s poachers combined.
Though that wasn’t exactly what Paul Helm and Jorge Chavez had on their minds. They were thinking about a murder.

from Europa Blues by Arne Dahl (2001). Very Highly Recommended.