Paper Palate

Recently, I was up in Montreal for a film festival, and in between screenings of Canadian zombie films and experimental CGI, my girlfriend and I zipped up to the Marché Jean-Talon to shop for a bit of lunch. The marché is a farmer’s market on steroids, a massive sprawl of produce tables, boulangeries and […]

As I mentioned in my bio, before my mother sent me into the wilderness that is post adolescent life; she provided me with three recipes — how to roast a chicken, how to make a stock from the carcass and how to make a chicken and rice porridge from the leftovers. While I no […]

It was an early Saturday evening in the midst of summer and I was at a gas station somewhere in North Carolina, filling up my car. However, as it was dinner time, my car wasn’t the only one running on empty, and I felt a great hunger coming on. I was in an […]

It is a strange cliche of my life that, whenever I mention to some fellow that I’m Filipino, I will usually be told two things: 1) the women of my country are smokingly hot, 2) the women of my country are fine, fine cooks. It’s usually guys who tell me this, and I’ve […]

Within culinary circles, The Larousse Gastronomique occupies the same position that the Oxford Dictionary does for the literary. It is the reference for all matters of Western European cookery, centuries of culinary knowledge codified by the likes of Careme and Escoffier into a volume that approaches subject matter like Bechamel and legumes […]

Over the weekend, I had gone down to New York City to visit relatives, and had a chance to catch Michael Hoffmann’s Eden as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. The film centers on the trials and travails of Gregor, a rotund German chef who, while plucking the feathers from a duck, introduces himself […]

I am typically not one to buy celebrity cookbooks. Celebrity has a way of ruining quality, as the recognition of excellence eventually gives way to the need to sustain fame by appealing to the lowest common denominator. I usually buy books based on the quality of the recipes and not on the personality […]

For some of us, cooking is a little like magic. We don’t particularly know why stuff happens, we just know that it does. Pour a certain volume of chicken stock in a saucepan with arborio rice, and keep it heated for a certain amount of time and you get risotto. Use long […]

When a cookbook tells us to saute onions until golden, some of us ask, “well, define ‘golden’.” Is it like the pale yellow that overcomes a onion after a minute in a hot pan? Is it the deeper yellow with singed edges? Are the singed edges ok? Is it supposed to […]

So, let’s say that you want to learn how to cook. Up until this point, cooking has been a mystical, impermeable process — a magical chemistry that happens on your parent’s stove or behind a restaurant swing door. Or perhaps you already know how to cook, but still view it as a dreadful, […]