Thursday, January 7, 2010

Poupée de Son...

I don't know why, but I can't stop listening to french music... specially France Gall!



 
Images: weheartit





... and it's weird, because France Gall never was one of my favourite french singers!

Anyway, remember what I told you a few days before about the buttons on my sidebar? Well, here's mine... who wants to share buttons?



The HTML code is: 
<a href="http://http//sahakiel.blogspot.com/"><img src="http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t69/Fairyofthenightmares/Blog/Botn04.jpg" /></a>



The button is 150x150 px... do you like it?

Ah, I'm so exited about our Berlin's trip...! If you've been there... have you got any advice for us? What clothes should we get there? Any recomendation (places, museums, shops)...?

Only one week!

It’s street food, stupid

January 7

Thank you for participating in my latest poll, which I think garnered some interesting results.

I asked what you expected to be the driving factors influencing trends in 2010, and I let you pick more than one response. So from 24 respondents I got 38 answers.

Most people ticked the economy, not surprisingly. But the next highest-scoring category was street foods. I wonder if that’s really a big trend or if the chefs who read this blog were simply really jazzed about the Culinary Institute of America’s recent World’s of Flavor conference, which covered the topic of street food.

I guess we’ll find out as the year unfolds.

Only four respondents ticked “flavor,” perhaps because it sounded vague or silly or obvious.

But according to research my colleagues and I either did or reported on for our upcoming January 11 “Forecasts & Trends” issue of Nation’s Restaurant News, the most important driving factor for customers deciding what to eat isn’t nutrition profile or convenience or even price, and it’s certainly not environmental concerns. It’s how the food tastes.

Indeed, long-term studies of consumer attitudes with regard to food indicate that flavor is more of a factor now than it was just a few years ago.

You can find the full results of my Food Writer's Diary poll below. For all the goodies in our Forecasts & Trends issue, you’re going to have to wait until Monday, and even then, I’m pretty sure some of the info will only be available to subscribers.

If you’re in the unfortunate position of not being an NRN subscriber, you can remedy that situation by clicking here.

The poll results are below, and a new poll is on your right. Enjoy it, and feel free to write in comments below.

Thank you.

What will be the driving factors influencing trends in 2010

The economy: 15 (62%)

Health concerns: 4 (16%)

Environmental concerns: 5 (20%)

Flavor: 4 (16%)

Trendy ethnic foods: 2 (8%)

Street foods: 7 (29%)

Pork belly: 1 (4%)

not fusion

January 7

Does anybody talk about fusion cuisine anymore? I’m pretty sure they don’t. I think it has gone the way of Continental cuisine.

But Susan Rike wasn’t taking any chances last night as she hosted a press dinner for a new client of hers, Favela Cubana.

The seven-month-old restaurant on the garden side of LaGuardia Place between Bleecker and West 3rd, right next to Rhong Tiam, serves Cuban food and Brazilian food, "but not fusion," Susan said as many as 150 times last night.

So Cuban ropa vieja sits right above Brazilian picanha ná chapa on the menu, but there's no picanha vieja, no mofongo feijoada.

That's not to say chef Oscar Santana — a French-trained chef from Mexico City — doesn't add his own flourishes. Of course he does. He's a chef.

His boss is Marco Britti, an Italian, from Naples, whose background is in drumming. He was Marc Anthony’s drummer, he was the drummer for Jennifer Lopez' album Rebirth, and he’s currently the drummer in a band called Shadows Lie.

Given the popularity of Italian and Mexican food in the United States, you might wonder why Britti and Santana would commit themselves to cuisines that, like all “ethnic” cuisines except for Chinese, are less popular than Italian and Mexican.

Britti kind of shrugged when I asked him that, but, well, a person has to follow his dreams.

Even though people don’t talk about fusion cuisine anymore, they do cook it. I mean, really, all cuisine is fusion. No culture is so isolated that it doesn't have dialogue, as the anthropologists say, with other cultures. All cuisines evolve, and in the melting pot of New York there’s no reason why practitioners of one cuisine can’t learn from practitioners of others.

Besides, you can’t be 100 percent “authentic,” whatever that means, anywhere other than where a dish originated. Basil in the United States tastes different from Italian basil, for example, so a caprese salad here can’t be completely "authentic." I’m sure passion fruit in Brasil has a zing that it doesn’t have here. That’s just the way it goes.

Many chefs still cook fusion food proudly, even though they don’t call it that anymore. I'm thinking of Anita Lo's chicken and Thai basil dumplings at Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, or Chris Cheung’s liquid foie gras bao or crispy short rib gold coins with truffle-sriracha foam at China 1.

Fusion food shouldn’t be feared, only bad fusion food should be, and, really, that’s true of food generally, isn’t it?

Anyway, this is what we ate and drank at Favela Cubana:

bolinho de bacalhau (salt cod croquettes)
fish empanadas
orange-basil mojitos

Cuban dishes:
Ropa vieja (braised beef with olives, onions and peppers)
Picadillo Habana (ground turkey, onions, peppers, garlic, cumin, paprika, olives)
black beans and rice

Brazilian dishes
Camarão a balana (sautéed shrimp with roasted peppers, onions and tomatoes)
Bacalhau (more salt cod, this time sautéed and served with black olives, mashed potatoes and tomatoes)
yellow rice and coconut milk sauce

2008 Bodegas Lurton Torrontes (Argentina)

2008 Barco Viejo Merlot (Chile)

Panna cotta de maracuja (that’s Portuguese for passion fruit)
Flan (topped by Oscar with caramelized sugar)

Copacabana: Cachaça, passion fruit, lemon juice and chile flakes

The white death!

Newsflash! The White Death has hit Cincinnati! That would be the Cincy code word for SNOW! I almost burst out laughing this morning when I got a call from my school saying that the snow was moving across state lines from Indiana and that Richmond was getting a ton of snow, so they were closing school! Not that I am complaining, but after getting those two phone calls I couldn't go back to sleep, so I've been up since about 6:45! So much for sleeping in I guess!

So it is actually snowing now, the roads are pretty much covered with a fine dust, but we are suppose to get 3-5 inches or 2-4 or who knows maybe 6 by the time this is all done! haha

I do have to work from home today, progress reports are due this week so I need to get those finished so I can print them off and hopefully get them to school tomorrow.

Knowing Cincinnati though we will be closed down the rest of the week!