Ken Haedrich made me brave when he wrote this book.

What do I mean by that?

I mean, this is the book that made me get over my phobia of piecrust, roll up my sleeves, get in the kitchen and make everyone some pie.

Haedrich’s calm, sensible, measured prose illuminates the process of making pies step-by-step; his writing is such that to a would-be pie baker, it is as if a treasured grandmother or beloved uncle is standing at your elbow, guiding you along in encouraging whispers.

Besides that, the book, which is a weighty tome 639 pages in length, is fun to read.

Each pie recipe has a story, and Haedrich delights in telling them all. Divided into chapters that cover pastries and crumb crusts, summer fruit pies, berry pies, apple pies, autumn pies, custard pies, little pies, icebox pies and ice cream pies, the book presents such a plethora of recipes, that even the most dedicated pie lover would have a hard time baking her way through them all. There is, quite literally, a recipe or two or three for everyone’s taste here, collected from around the US, with origins duly noted and logged.

I have only had the book for a little over a year, but already it is well-loved in the kitchen, as evidenced by the amount of stains and sticky pages left behind. There are so many tempting recipes in this book that I had a terrible time choosing just one to present with this review. Finally, considering the abundance of local strawberries and rhubarb that I have been seeing in the farmer’s market, I decided to make one of the several versions of strawberry-rhubarb pie: a late spring, early summer classic.

The one I chose had an innovative crust made in a skillet, with a crumb topping. I made the crust as written, though I was tempted to add some chopped almonds at least to the topping, but I did play with the filling a tiny bit. I added the zest of one lemon and some rosewater to the filling, to great effect.

But, really, every recipe I have used from this book has turned out well; the book is well worth the price of admission, and the time it takes to read through it. If you want to learn how to master the making of pies, this is the book for you.

Dolores’s Strawberry and Rhubarb Crumb Pie in a Skillet Crust

For the Crust:

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar (I used raw cane sugar)
3/4 cup butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Combine the flour and sugar in a bowl and set aside.

Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat; when it is melted, blend in the vanilla.

Turn off the heat and stir in the flour and sugar mixture; this may take some time, but be patient and keep stirring until you have a pan full of evenly mixed crumbles.

Transfer about two thirds of the crumbs to a 9 1/2 inch deep dish pie pan, and press them to the bottom and up the sides of the pan.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

For the Filling:

1 1/2 pounds fresh rhubarb stalks, trimmed of leaves and sliced crosswise 1/4 inch thick (They should come out to be about 4 cups of slices)
2 cups hulled and sliced fresh strawberries
3/4 cup sugar (I used raw cane sugar)
zest and juice of one lemon
1/4- 1/2 all purpose flour (if your rhubarb stalks are small, use the larger amount of flour–if they are large, they are drier, use the smaller amount of flour)
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1-2 tablespoons rosewater (use smaller amount for a more subtle effect)

Mix together the filling ingredients and allow to stand for ten minutes.

When the oven is preheated, put the filling ingredients into the prepared bottom crust and level it carefully. Crumble the reserved crust mixture over the pie evenly, and press it down gently with your hand.

Place the pie in the center oven rack and bake for thirty minutes. Turn the pie 180 degress and turn the heat down to 325 degrees F. Close the oven and bake for another 40-50 minutes, until the topping is golden brown and the juices bubble thickly up around the edges of the crust.

Remove from oven, and allow to cool at least two hours before serving.

The pie turned out fantastically, and surprisingly, I liked the crust. It was sweeter than I tend to make my own more typical lard-butter pie crust, but it suited this very tart, very refreshing springtime fruit filling very well.

Now, I am wondering what would have happened if I had added some mulberries from our tree out front to the filling as well.

I guess there is only one way to find out–I will have to make another pie.

While the cover of this week’s (June 12th) issue of Time Magazine shows images from the war in Iraq, inside, there are a plethora of articles of interest to foodies everywhere.

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, presents “Six Rules for Eating Wisely,” which includes the great advice to never eat anything that your great-grandmother would not recognize as food, while Margot Roosevelt tells readers about “The Grass-Fed Revolution,” enumerating the benefits to our health, the health of animals and the health of the environment, of eating pasture-raised beef.

For those who are interested in the issues of eating locally, Roosevelt also presents “The Lure of the 100-Mile Diet,” an article which features the philosophy of The Locavores, mentions the Eat Local Challenge Blog, and includes quotes and a photograph of myself (Barbara) of Tigers & Strawberries. (So, if you have had a burning desire to know what the heck I look like, run out and pick up the print edition of the magazine, which hits the stands tomorrow.)

But, wait, there’s more! An in-depth treatment of “The Magic of the Family Meal” by Nancy Gibbs digs into why family mealtimes are so important for kids, parents and society in general, and the ways in which busy modern families are working hard to create time to eat together. In a similar vein, Amanda Bower tells the story of two communities and how they changed school lunches from being bastions of fat, sugar and salt, into fresh food filled with nutrition in “Retooling SChool Lunches.” The question of what foods are best for just-weaned babies is discussed in Pamela Paul’s “Rethinking First Foods.”

Many people want to know “Is Teflon Risky?” and Michael Lemonick reveals some answers and suggests an old fashioned substitute for teflon– cast iron, while Sora Song’s “How Sweet It Isn’t” takes on the issue of artificial sweeteners and why they haven’t really helped Americans slim down. Speaking of slender, “2 Thin Chefs” by John Cloud looks at how Giada De Laurentis and Suzanne Goins stay skinny even while they work with tempting foodstuffs every day. Genetics and diet are paired in Christine Gorman’s “Does My Diet Fit My Genes?”

Finally, Jyoti Thottam presents a profile of how The Cheesecake Factory chain of restaurants is bringing ethnic foods, reworked to appeal to a broad range of palates to the tables of Middle America, and in doing so has changed how Americans eats in “Catering to the Melting Pot.”

As you can see, this week’s issue is just filled with fodder for thoughtful foodies, and it is well worth picking up the paper copy, just so you can pass it around to your friends and family who are sans-Internet (yes, there are a few of those folks out there) just so you can start some fun conversations.

Jane and Michael Stern have become giants in the world of American food; their travels up and down the highways and byways of the nation in search of delicious local specialties in the greasy-spoon diners, tearooms, truck stops and roadside cafes that grace the roadsides have become a mythic journey that Joseph Campbell himself would recognize as a heroic quest.

Finally, the James Beard Lifetime Achievement award winning authors of Roadfood, have brought us an autobiography that sheds some light on the hows and whys behind their obsessive desire to chronicle the best local small eateries in the US. Unsurprisingly, the book is a damned fun read, with the Sterns painting heroic portraits of a memorable cast of thousands, while often using their own foibles and phobias as comic relief.

Here, for example, we learn that Michael is the more adventurous eater, with Jane declining to partake of dishes that include suspicious ingredients such as organ meats. There are a few incidents, however, of horrendously stinky organ meat viands that are beyond even Michael’s prodigious abilities of ingestion, and which cause the normally obsessively cleanly and ecologically-capable Sterns to simply throw the entire mess out of the window of their car.

There are other horrific moments. The chapter entitled, “Twelve Meals a Day,” is one long narrative of agony; I am not surprised to hear that the Sterns eat so many times a day in order to cover the depth and breadth of the rural foods of the US, but I am still terrified at the thought of that many calories consumed in a day anyway. It makes my own stomach cringe and shudder in empathic agony; even at my own most gluttonous, such extended stints of professional eating are beyond my ken. The mere thought of twelve meals a day, some of them not stellar, takes much of the romance out of the thought of writing about roadfood.

I admit it; I must bow to the Stern’s superior ability to eat everything and still come back for more.

I think that the parts of the book that were the most fun were where the Sterns profiled the cooks, waitresses and customers who inhabit the little cafes, roadhouses and truck stops that form the setting of Two for the Road. These folks are the real heroes of the story, and the Sterns do not stint as they season their narrative with the peppery bits of wisdom from the “just plain folks” like the residents of Havanna, North Dakota, who came together and brought the Farmer’s Inn back to life after it closed by turning it into a co-op restaurant.

Two for the Road is a sweet little book that winds along the backroads of Jane and Michael Stern’s hearts, inscribing details of their mythic journey for all to share. It is definitely a great read, especially if you are planning on taking a roadtrip with family and friends this summer. I can think of nothing better to read in the backseat of a car, driving down the open road with the wind in your hair, than this memoir.

Of course, that is the point: it is the new national dish of Great Britain, not India.

That Collingham starts with this fact, and indeed, entitles the first chapter of her book, “Chicken Tikka Masala,” sets the tone for Curry. Some readers will be instantly put off by the obvious British slant given to the history and development of Indian food, and may indeed find it to be somewhat imperialistic in tone. I did not react to the book in this way, even though I disagree vociferously with the publisher’s assertion that it is the “first authoritative history of Indian food.” (For that honor, we must look to A. K. Achaya’s excellently researched and written Indian Food, which is curiously, also published by Oxford University Press.)

Or, you could do as I did, and read it to hear Narayan’s voice as an author whispering her memories into your heart, weaving them into the fabric of your being. Her story is like the scent of fenugreek, which lingers on the skin long after it has been ground, cooked and consumed: it slips into the reader’s consciousness, and takes the imagination unawares to unfamiliar places and times which become suddenly intimate, so deftly does she wield memory’s brush.

An artist, Narayan employs the eye of a painter and sculptor in examining her life, while she uses the language of the poet to describe it. Although her use of imagery is beautiful, she stares unflinchingly at the ugliness of life as well, though she somehow manages to imbue even disappointment with a fragile tenderness that is both as bitter as methi and sweet as rosewater.

Food, of course, is a recurring thread throughout the book, from the first chapter where she describes her ceremonial first feeding of rice and ghee at the Krishna temple, to the last, where she and her new husband sit in a hammock, eating bread and drinking wine together, perfectly contented. In between come descriptions of shared meals and snacks, cooking for feasts and preserving food for winter, all meticulously rendered in loving detail that begs the reader to step into the pages and participate in the ongoing scene.

It is a delightful confection of a book, but it is not devoid of substance. It holds the sum of Narayan’s human experience as a young woman in India and the United States, and it shows that an ordinary life, lived well, is a thing of poetry, a jewel, brighter than stars, and sweeter by far than any promise of glory.

I have not yet managed to try any of the recipes from the book, though I have to say that when I carried it up to pay for it at Borders, the clerk burst into a wide smile and said, “That is a wonderful book!” As she rang it up, she cheerfully continued, “My sister and I made every recipe from it, and they were all wonderful. It made the book that much more real for us.”

I can think of no more ringing endorsement for the recipes, or the book than her words, for indeed, Monsoon Diary, comes across as a narrative that is not about an exotic girl from a strange place. It is the real story of a real young woman, who really lived her youth fully, and was able to write it down such that it became a very real part of many different strangers’ lives.

It is, in short, a wonderful book.

Rating: 9

(allegedly serves 4–6)

Ingredients:

2 large cloves garlic, smashed and peeled
2 large sprigs thyme
2 strips orange zest (1” wide x 3-4” long)
2 bay leaves
¼ tsp allspice berries, crushed in mortar or with side of knife
¼ tsp black peppercorns
4 whole cloves
1 bottle (750 ml) hearty dry red wine (they suggest Zinfandel, I used Cabernet)
4-5 lbs meaty bone in short ribs, sliced English style (one bone per rib, thick meat)
1 ½ teaspoon kosher salt
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium to large yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 medium celery stalk, coarsely chopped
1 medium carrot, peeled and coarsely chopped
ground black pepper
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 cups beef or chicken broth
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

Marinating:
Prepare a sachet of garlic, thyme, orange zest, bay leaves, allspice berries, peppercorns and cloves in a tied square of cheesecloth. Pour wine in a medium saucepan, add the sachet, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Set aside to cool. Trim excess fat from the exterior of the short ribs, avoiding silverskin and any fat that holds the ribs onto the bone. Basically, just cut off the big lumps of fat on the outside – don’t go crazy trimming off every little bit of white. Put the ribs in a container where they can cuddle snugly in a single layer, season with salt, pour in marinade and sachet, cover with plastic and refrigerate 12–24 hours, turning once or twice.

The marinating was quite easy. None of the quantities are really very important. Regarding the wine, if you watch the Food Network, any chef will tell you that you shouldn’t cook with wine you don’t drink at home. This advice is all well and good, but there is no way I’m pouring a $15 bottle of wine into a saucepan, boiling it, and pouring it over meat as a marinade. My rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drink, even if there were a wine shortage and it were the last wine on earth. If you are financially situated such that you can cook with the Chateau Fantastique de Magnifique, live it up. I used a $10 magnum of Walnut Crest Cabernet and it worked just fine.

Cooking:
Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and position a rack in the lower third of the oven. Remove the ribs from the marinade (reserve the marinade and sachet as you’ll need it later) and pat them dry. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a 5-6 quart Dutch oven over medium heat. Brown ribs a few at a time, so that they aren’t touching each other in the pot. Turn them with tongs until nicely browned, 3–4 minutes per side. Don’t be impatient, this takes a while but adds great flavor. Once all the ribs are browned, pour off and discard the majority of the fat (but not any of the little crispy bits) and add the remaining tablespoon of oil, over medium heat. Add the onions, celery and carrot, season with salt and pepper, and cook for about 8 minutes, until browned in spots (give them a stir every once in a while). Add the tomato paste and cook for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Add half of the reserved marinade, increase the heat to high, and boil for 2-4 minutes until reduced by half. Add the remaining marinade and reduce again by half. Add broth and vinegar and boil for 3 minutes. Return the ribs to the pot, along with any accumulated juices and the sachet. Crumple a piece of parchment paper, smooth it out again, and lay it over the top of the put with the edges of the paper hanging off the sides. Put the lid on the pot and transfer to the oven.

At this point I need to diverge from the recipe and disclose some things. I doubled this recipe, which caused all kinds of excitement. Everything went fairly smoothly (although the browning took forever) until I prepared to put the ribs in the oven. I do not have, nor could I lift, a 10–12 pound Dutch oven. I stuffed the ribs in my 5 quart Dutch oven, with a few extras, in a low lidded casserole pan on the side. As a result, my ribs were piled high in the pot and nowhere near the single layer recommended in the recipe. After about a half hour, I noticed all sorts of hissing and smoking noises coming from the oven. The sauce was bubbling up over the sides of the pots and burning on the oven floor. I quickly lined a sheet pan with foil and placed it under the pots, which seemed to solve the burning and smoking, if not the hissing and dripping.

The recipe instructs to braise the ribs until fork tender and the meat is pulling off the bone, about 2.5 hours, and to turn the short ribs every 45 minutes. I disagree entirely. If you go in there and harass your short ribs every 45 minutes, the meat will fall off the bone in protest and you’ll have a big pile of bare bones sitting in a meaty stew. Just leave them alone or, if a few are poking out of the sauce, just give them a little shove back in. My second concern is the cooking time; I cooked my ribs for 3½ hours, turning the heat down from 300 to 275 for the last 45 minutes. The best way to know if they’re done is by sight and feel. The meat should be soft and just about ready to jump off the bone, and all the fat should be melted away. Once they’re finished, transfer them to a serving dish and cover them with foil to keep warm.

Making the Sauce:
Strain the braising liquid through a fine sieve and let it rest until the fat rises to the top. Scoop off as much fat as possible; you should be left with about 1 cup of sauce. I found the sauce to be far too thin for my liking, so I simmered it in a small saucepan to reduce. Even after that, it was still a bit thin. Next time I might try a little flour or cornstarch roux to thicken it further.

I served the short ribs piled over Israeli couscous (just a little bigger than the couscous I normally use). The couscous took about 10 minutes to make, and soaked up the flavors and sauce from the meat. Mashed potatoes would also be a terrific side dish.

One caution though – the six of us consumed the entire doubled batch of short ribs. I thought we had a few left over, but after dessert I spied one of the dinner guests in the kitchen hunched over a platter licking the last few bones clean. You may want to make more than you think you’ll need.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that a study done by the Union of Concerned Scientists has found that the composition of meat and milk of pasture-fed cows to be quite different from cows that are kept in feedlots or barns and fed corn.

The study is the first to synthesize the information gleaned from most of the English-language research into the issue of grass-fed beef (25 individual studies were chosen for analysis)where amounts of total fats, saturated fats, omega-3 fatty acids, and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in both pasture-raised and conventionally raised beef and dairy cattle were compared side by side. The report also combines analyses on the nutritional, environmental, and public health benefits of grass-based farming techniques.

The study found that grass fed beef and milk contained higher levels of Omega-3 fatty acids–beneficial fats that help lower the risk of heart disease, may protect the body from cancer and have been shown in a few studies to have positive benefits for suffers of bipolar disorder.

The total amount of fat in grass-fed beef is also lower than that in corn-fed beef, which also enhances its healthfulness. This also, however, changes the way the meat tastes and forces the cook to adopt different cooking techniques, in order to avoid drying it out.

I grew up on cattle that was raised on grass, with some supplemental feeding of corn. When my grandfather chose a steer to be butchered, he would leave it on grass, in its own yard, but also give it feed supplements in the form of dried corn, molasses, and cornstalks, in order to “fatten him up,” as Grandpa would say. As a result, I was used to meat that was notwhere nearly as fatty as the beef available in the grocery store from animals which were exclusively fed corn.

Grandpa always told me, “That stuff has too much fat–it doesn’t taste like beef anymore. You want a good tasting animal, then you have to have good pasture with plenty of grass and clover for him to eat, and then give him just a bit of grain near the end to put a little extra fat on him. But they need to be outside, in the field, walking around foraging, to get a good-tasting steer.”

When it comes to cooking grass-fed beef, here are a few tips:

Marinate the meat with a flavorful liquid, and with roasts, use wet-cooking methods (braising) vs. dry cooking methods (roasting or grilling). If you do use a dry cooking method such as roasting, baste the meat frequently with your marinade. For steaks, if you put them on the grill, understand that lean meat cooks faster than fatty meat, so adjust your usual grilling times accordingly. Also, most chefs and farmers who raise pastured beef suggest that you not cook a grass-fed steak past medium; I personally prefer it around rare to medium-rare.

To my taste, grass-fed beef is superior to corn or grain-fed beef. I like the stronger “beefier” flavor of pasture-raised animals, and I also like the fact that these animals themselves are healthier, requiring the use of fewer antibiotics than those which are fed grain. This makes a lot of sense; cattle are ruminants which evolved to graze on grasslands, not eat grain. Their bodies are made to digest grass for which they forage, not to stand in crowded feedlots, being fed grain and other substances.

There is one other benefit to grass-fed cattle that is stated neither in the Washington Post article nor the study: the likelihood of a cow who was raised completely on grass or raised on grass and “finished” on organic corn (the method my Grandpa used) having BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is highly unlikely. Since BSE most likely came about from giving cows feed rendered from other animals, a grass-fed cow is not a likely vector of infection.

Considering the recent finding of another cow with BSE in Alabama, I cannot help but think that grass-fed and organic beef will continue to rise in popularity in the United States.

To find out more about pasture-raised beef and to find farmers in your area, check out these links:

Eat Wild! has a lot of information on thier site on the ecological and health benefits of pasture raised animals, as well as a search function to help you find local producers of grass-fed meat.

Local Harvest is another clearinghouse for finding locally produced agricultural products, including meat, dairy, vegetables, honey, and wool. They also have listings of CSA’s, farmer’s markets and food co-ops across the US.

For one thing, rabbit, though I have eaten it only a couple of times and cooked it only once, is one of my favorite meats of all time, so of course it got my juices going. For another thing, the article contained a wealth of recipes, including one that sounds pretty much like the unforgettable dish I ate at a tiny, very lovely little Italian restaurant in Boston (do I remember the name–no–this is why I don’t review restaurants, but I sure do remember the dish): Rabbit Ragu With Pappardelle.

Finally, it is an article obviously meant to spread the gospel on the fact that rabbit is good food that should be more widely available and eaten throughout the US. Unfortunately, it suffers from various image issues; to some it is “poor people food” right up there with raccoon and possum (raccoon is nasty; I cannot speak from personal experience on possum, but I know what they eat and it doesn’t make me want to eat them), while others simply cannot stomach the idea of eating something as cute, fluffly and cuddly as a bunny. To the latter folks, I usually point out that I have known domesticated rabbits to attack people and other animals, including dogs. They are not all cute little cuddlers, and their teeth and claws are plenty sharp enough to inflict painful wounds. I also offer as evidence that rabbits can be vicious the incident where President Jimmy Carter was attacked by a crazed rabbit who tried to climb aboard the president’s fishing boat and bite him. President Carter fought off the wicked lagomorph with a paddle, and then had pictures taken to prove that it was indeed a rabbit who jumped him. (Perhaps the wild bunny had been trained as an assassin by a terrorist organization; more likely, it had a wild hare up it’s…nevermind.)

Poverty food, cuteness and politics aside, rabbit meat is very good, and good for you. Nutritionally speaking, it is low in fat, and high in protein; a 100 gram serving is 58% protein and 12% saturated fat, and while it is most often compared to chicken, it has a fuller, more rich flavor without being gamey or tough. It is a tender, fine-textured meat that is simple to cook, though I will give my opinion that, compared with chicken, it is difficult to debone. Therefore, I suggest to all first-time cooks that not only do they keep in mind that rabbit is a low-fat meat, meaning it will dry out if you cook it too long without sufficient moisture, it is also best cooked on the bone. Bones can be removed after cooking for some preparations, while in others, such as fried rabbit, it is not only acceptable, but desirable to serve it on the bone.

The only problem that remains is how and where to find rabbit meat to cook; it is not widely available in grocery stores, though it is possible in some areas to find it in the frozen meat section. I have had good luck finding it at North Market Poultry and Game in Columbus, Ohio, but of course, that doesn’t help people anywhere else in the country. Small farmers are typically producers of good quality domestic rabbit meat; check your local farmer’s markets.

Or, use the Internet to do the searching for you, and look up rabbit meat on Local Harvest or Eat Wild, two websites that list local farmers and their products in order to get the word out to consumers on where to purchase sustainable, organically produced foods in their areas. Local Harvest lists 202 rabbit meat producers across the country.

If all else fails, you can mail order frozen rabbit from Ardeng Rabbit Meat in South Carolina. The meat itself is priced fairly, but the shipping prices are likely quite steep.

What does one do with rabbit once one has obtained it?

The New York Times article lists two classic European traditional recipes for rabbit, and one variant on Southern US fried rabbit: the afformentioned Rabbit Ragu with Pappardelle, Café des Fédérations’s Rabbit With Mustard Sauce (Lapin a la Moutarde), and Fried Milk-Brined Rabbit and Roasted Morel Salad.

In order to offer a bit more cultural variety, I’d like to add a recipe that I made from Fuchsia Dunlop’s excellent Sichuan cookbook, Land of Plenty: Rabbit with Sichuan Pepper. The addition of Sichuan peppercorn to the mild, yet rich rabbit meat is amazing, and I cannot help but think that anyone who loved authentic Chinese food would love this dish. Just be forewarned that boning out the rabbit meat is a bit time consuming, and it may be worthwhile to just leave the bones in and cut the meat into chunks, bone and all with a cleaver as the author suggested, but which I did not do.

Rabbit with Sichuan Pepper

Ingredients:

1 1/4 pound rabbit meat, deboned if you are crazy like me, and cut into 1/2 inch cubes
3 scallions, white parts only, thickly sliced on the diagonal
1/2″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and smashed with the side of a cleaver
1 tablespoon Shao Hsing wine
1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
2 1/2 tablespoons peanut oil
8-12 Tien Tsin dried chiles, snipped in half, with most of the seeds removed
1 teaspoon freshly ground Sichuan peppercorns
2 teaspoons dark soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon raw sugar
2 heads Shanghai bok choi, rinsed, trimmed and cut into 1″ chunks (optional)
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Method:

Toss rabbit meat with the scallions, ginger, wine and cornstarch. Allow to sit and marinate at least thirty minutes, although, I think a couple of hours is better.

Heat wok until it smokes, add peanut oil. Toss in the chiles and ground Sichuan peppercorns, and stir, frying until very fragrant–about thirty seconds (This is one of those times that if you have a vent hood, you really need to use it. The hot chile oil is nothing to play with onces it becomes aerosolized.)

Add the rabbit and the marinade–watch out for splatters from the wine. Spread out into a single layer on the bottom of the wok and allow to brown on the bottom before starting to stir fry–about forty-five seconds to a minute. Then stir fry like mad. When most of the pink is gone, add the soy sauce and sugar, and stir and fry to create a thick sauce. If any of the marinade has begun to stick to the bottom of the wok, use the soy sauce to deglaze.

Add the bok choi, if you are using it and the broth. Stir and fry until the bok choi is crisp-tender, and the sauce has reduced and clings thickly to the meat and greens.

Remove from heat and add the sesame oil and stir it in well before pouring contents of wok into a warmed serving plate.

Serve with -lots- of steamed rice; the dish is spicy! Note: The amounts on the chiles and Sichuan peppercorns can be adjusted down to the diners’ tastes. For those who are not used to such spicy fare, I would suggest using 4 whole chiles, and 1/2 teaspoon ground Sichuan peppercorns.

Washington Post writer Jane Mengenhauser entertained me last week with a list of recent culinary slang terms or coined words that she has come across in the media and on the ‘Net, with definitions and citations as to where she has seen the term used most recently.

Some of the terms are really silly ones, like “afishianado” for a chef who enjoys cooking seafood, or “breastaurant” as a euphemism for places like “Hooters” that feature scantily clad waitresses. (And here, I was hoping it meant a restaurant that was friendly toward breast-feeding Moms–oh, well. I mean, why would “Hooters” need a euphemism–the name says it all to me.)

Others are clever and useful, like, “flexitarian” for a person who is mostly a vegetarian but who now and again indulges in some sort of meat. “Out-Saucing,” meant to indicate the use of a canned, powdered or frozen sauce mix, is equally cute and funny, two indicators that point to its origin in an old Shoe comic.

Still others are unwieldy and inelegant constructions that are meant to sound professional, but end up sounding more like a little kid mangling Greek. Witness “paleocuisineology” an attempt to convey “food anthropology” in one polysyllabic mouthful. Just call it food anthropology, for goodness’ sake. Please. “Cuisineology” just sounds and looks made-up; however this hasn’t stopped several universities from granting degrees in the discipline, which combines food science with culinary training. A “Cusineologist” is a chef/food scientist.

She did leave out a few obvious coined food-related terms that have been in the media recently–“freegan” is an obvious one, though perhaps she didn’t want to give the dumpster-diving anarchists anymore media legitimacy than they already have enjoyed. A freegan is a person who chooses to subsist off of the food products discarded by restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses, though some hard-core freegans will also snag the food left on other diner’s plates in restaurants.

“Locavore” is another new food term that has seen a lot of use in the traditional media and in the blogosphere. Pertaining to a person who tries to consume as much food as possible from local sources, often within 100 miles of the locavore’s home. The term gained a great deal of use through the efforts of The Locavores website, and through the August Eat Local Challenge that took place last year where bloggers from around the globe ate locally for the entire month and blogged about it. A book on the experience is forthcoming. (This year’s eat local challenge is set for May.)

Of course, this got me to thinking of some words that I use that relate to food that perhaps deserve to be in wider useage.

A “foodophobe” is a person who has issues with food. Either they are very picky, very calorie conscious, they have an eating disorder (yes, I know how serious eating disorders are–I suffered from anorexia once), or they are just neurotic about food. For whatever reason, food induces anxiety and a whole range of unpleasant behaviors are exhibited as a result, from refusing to eat what is set before them, to picking food apart before eating it, to simply existing on a diet of air, water and saltine crackers.

I have known a few foodophobes in my life, and in fact, have been known to cure them. Constant temptation with lots of really good food will crack the toughest foodophobe in my exeperience.

“Sacrilicious” has to be my favorite food term, but I cannot claim credit for it; was my brother-in-law, Daniel is the progenitor of that particular word.

You see, my husband’s family are all Jewish, and they don’t keep kosher. And they all really like bacon. A lot. So, one day, when we were having breakfast and they were reveling in the wonderful smoky-chewiness of that particular batch of treyf (treyf is unclean or non-kosher food, for the non-Yiddish speakers out there) we were consuming, when Daniel uttered the classic line, “It’s sacrilicious, isn’t it?”

Indeed, it was. Even I, mere shiksa that I am, could see that the bacon was indeed sacrilicious.

The one food related term that is in wide use that I would very much like to get rid of is “foodie.” It sounds trivial, silly, trite and perky, all at the same time. As I write a food blog, cook all the time, went to culinary school and talk about food constantly, I cannot escape having this word applied to me, but I still dislike it intensely.

I just wonder what other word we could use to describe the food obsessed such as myself? (I am partial to “culinary nerd,” an appellation that was bestowed on me in culinary school by a fellow student, but I can see where others would dislike it as much as I hate foodie. Besides–it would be replacing one word with two, which is not elegant.)

So, does anyone else have any ideas for a word to replace “foodie?”

Cooking sous vide may be all the rage across the globe, but New York City health inspectors don’t care; over the past few weeks, they have told chefs to throw out food cooked and stored in the vacuum-sealed packages, they have ordered them to stop using the equipment to produce those packages and they have in some cases, handed out fines which start at $300.00

Why the fuss?

Health inspectors are concerned that anaerobic (capable of living in an oxygen-free environment) bacteria such as Clostridium botulinum and Listeria monocytogenes could thrive in improperly vacuum-packed food and cause a possibly fatal outbreak of foodborne illness. It is worth noting, however, that the use of the sous vide techniques have not been implicated in any such outbreak.

As a result, chefs around the city have been ordered to destroy thousands of dollars worth of food that is, in all likelihood, perfectly safe.

They are not allowed to cook using the sous vide technique until the health department comes up with a set of safety guidelines covering this new technology; the only way to gain an exception to this ruling is if the chef consults with a food scientist and has them draw up a HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) plan for the restaurant’s cooks to follow. Health inspectors hope to have a set of guidelines ready by June.

Many of the chefs affected by this ban have studied sous vide in Europe, among chefs who developed safety protocols for the use of the technology; however, after a New York Times Magazine story on the technique, health inspectors began watching its use in restaurant kitchens more closely.

Even though it is currently under fire in New York City restaurants, sous vide continues to be a culinary trend worth watching. Even home cooks are trying it (Thomas Keller is coming out with a sous vide cookbook soon), though some chefs caution that cooking sous vide is not to be attempted lightly by the amateur.

Shola Olunloyo of Studio Kitchen in Philedelphia noted, “There’s a depth of knowledge required regarding sanitation. The biggest issue is that one of the most dangerous food-borne illnesses, botulism, is an anaerobic bacteria and can survive in a vacuum.”