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A longer post is coming soon but I’m too excited to keep it to myself: my celery dessert is finally here. It’s celery cheesecake with celeriac ice cream and candied grapes dipped in peanuts and white chocolate. This is a terrible picture, but it took so many experiments to get this here that I’m putting it out for the world to see.

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More on the celery cheesecake soon!

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I’ve been selling signed cookbooks from the Dirt Candy site for a few months now, but I’ve always been the only person who signed them…until now. Ryan Dunlavey is the award-winning cartoonist who drew the Dirt Candy cookbook, and we’ve managed to lure him out of his Brooklyn Beard Cave using a combination of Reese’s Pieces and bits of dry cheese. Then we captured him with nets and tranquilizer darts and forced him to sign 40 cookbooks before releasing him, unharmed, back into the wild.

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Now, for a limited time only, we’ve got 40 cookbooks for sale featuring my signature and Ryan’s Panda signature.

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It really looks like this!

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These are for sale for the same low, low price of $19. Act now! Buy a cookbook, get a panda!

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One thing I love about Japan are its food characters. Everyone has encountered Anpanman, the superhero made of bread, at some point.

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But right now I’m loving the Tofu Oyako brought out by the Devilrobot design group. Described as “cute but toxic” he’s a tiny little guy with a block of tofu for a head.

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Why don’t we have these ultra-cute food characters over here? Why must I go to Japan to fully anthropomorphize my tofu? It’s a crime, is what it is.

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Welcome back to the Lady Chef Stampede. This week, I’m talking about a chef who single-handedly kept alive an entire history of food, but who has received almost no credit. There’s very little about her that I can find in English, but it’s time that everyone celebrated the Lady Chef Supreme, Li Li. But to understand what she did, you have to know about her great-grandfather, Li Shunqing.

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Read the rest of this entry »

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Over the last couple of weeks, Anthony Bourdain has taken to Twitter to question whether or not naming a woman “Best Female Chef” is an insult or not. He wonders, shouldn’t they just be called “Best Chef?” On the one hand, sure, that would be nice if we lived in a world that was totally equal, but unfortunately that’s not the world we live in. So I thought I’d put together this quick post for him to show why I think women do need to be singled out.

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Female chefs are ignored by the press. I don’t know why but, as Eric Ripert points out in Anthony Bourdain’s Twitter feed, 1/3 of his line cooks are women. I know lots of female chefs. If I had to guess, I would put the number around 30 – 40% of people in kitchens are women. But the press pays a disproportionate amount of attention to men. As a result, women get less awards:

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- In six years, 126 James Beard Awards have been given out. 22 of them have gone to women.

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- Since 2000, Food & Wine has recognized 110 of the Best New Chefs in America. Only 16 of them have been women. This year, as in previous years, 1 out of the 10 chefs they recognized was a woman.

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- When Food & Wine announced their People’s Choice Awards, letting readers vote on nominated chefs from across the country, they listed 107 chefs people could vote for. 11 of them were women. In the Great Lakes region, the Southwest, the New York Area, the Gulf Coast, and the Mid-Atlantic they couldn’t find a single woman to nominate.

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- The San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants has never had a restaurant owned by a woman in the number one spot. I’m not even sure if there have ever been more than 1 woman at a time in the top ten.

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Maybe women suck. Maybe they’re just not good enough. Or, maybe, the press gives a disproportionate amount of attention to men and so those are the chefs that overworked and deadline-oppressed nomination committees and food writers focus on.

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I think the press have created a vicious cycle where women (who by Eric Ripert’s rough estimate make up about 30% of his kitchen staff, and who make up about 90% of mine) get ignored by the press, and the more they get ignored the more they get left off nomination lists. The less awards they win the more ignored they are. And this has an impact on investors. If I had money to put into a restaurant, I’d go for a male chef because they will get more press, and more award nominations, and that drives business. A female chef simply won’t.

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Just my two cents, put here full of numbers and facts.

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It’s nice to know that the Dirt Candy Cookbook isn’t going to be the only comic book with recipes and food out there. Lucy Knisley is a cartoonist who’s been doing a bunch of the recipe comics over at Saveur online. I recently found out she has a graphic novel memoir with recipes coming out this week and I got my hands on a copy of it.

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Read the rest of this entry »

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This is not a joke: tomorrow is the first day of my favorite time of year, Solo Diner’s Week! From April 2 – 6, Dirt Candy is celebrating folks who like to eat out with their favorite person in the world: themselves.

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This biggest bummer about eating alone is that you never get to order enough food. I always like to try a bunch of different things when I eat out, so I try to go with a lot of people so I can pick off their plates, but when you’re dining alone you don’t have this option. So for this week only I’m doing a prix fixe for solo diners:

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- $48 gets you -

- a mini-order of hush puppies
- a choice of any of the four appetizers
- a choice of any two entrees (each entree will be a mini-version of itself)
- a choice of desserts
- coffee or tea
- a half-glass of wine
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So come on down. Bring a book, bring a stuffed animal, or just bring a mirror and gaze at your own reflection longingly while you eat. Because this week it’s all about you, Solo Diners.

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Making new dishes at Dirt Candy is the part of my job that I love and hate. I love it because it’s making new dishes and as a chef this is what I do. I hate it because I dread making something that everyone hates or, even worse, something that isn’t as good as I know it should be. Even worse, as I make more and more dishes, I have to keep pushing myself further and further so that I don’t repeat something I’ve already done. Which leads me to the new parsnip dish.

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Haven’t I done parsnip gnocchi before? Why on earth is this on the menu again? The short answer: it’s not.

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Read the rest of this entry »

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Today’s Lady Chef is living the dream in a really different way. A home cook who blew up big, she wound up making enough money to support her children and grandchildren by doing that most un-chef-y thing of all: she sold out.

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Growing up the daughter of a union Teamster in Arizona, sometimes living in a tent city, Rosaura Castro was only 16 when she married Pedro Guerrero, a clothing store clerk. She wasn’t much of a cook, he didn’t have much money, but they both dreamed of bigger things. She learned to cook out of necessity and eventually became a famous home cook in the area, with her tamales singled out for particular attention.

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Rosita and Pedro at their wedding

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Always trying to figure out a way to make some extra money, her husband had noticed that on holidays and at street fairs, white people were mobbing even the grungiest Mexican food stalls. The street stalls barely made an effort to look appealing, and he wondered how much more money they could make if they a) looked clean and, b) actually served good food.  A year after his revelation, Pedro and Rosita (Rosaura’s nickname) put his idea in action, serving her tamales at a festival in Arizona, wearing clean white aprons and their best clothes. To underline the appearance of cleanliness they wrapped every single tamale in a white paper napkin. Priced at double the going rate (10 cents) they sold 600 tamales in a day.

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Despite this first flush of success, it took them more than 20 years of planning, scrimping, and saving to try it again, but that didn’t stop them from dreaming. In 1925, Pedro registered the name of their company, Rosita, and even drew the logo:

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But it wasn’t until 1945 that they found the right business partners for their dream of turning Mexican home cooking into a big business. One was Ann Petrie, who owned two restaurants in Mesa, the other was an accountant. Armed with Rosita’s recipes, they started to turn out tortillas, sauces, beans, and frozen foods, selling them to grocery stores across the region. In the late 50′s a trademark dust-up resulted in them having to change their name to Rosarita, but by then they had an audience and after conquering the Southwest, the brand went national. In 1961, Beatrice Foods was impressed by their figures and bought them out. Today, Rosarita Brand Foods is owned by ConAgra.

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An early Rosita factory

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On the one hand, we’re all conditioned to think of this kind of selling out as evil, another step down the path to hell where all food is industrial food and small businesspeople don’t stand a chance. But, in large part, selling out to a larger company is why so many small businesses are started in the first place. Cashing in the way they did allowed Rosita herself, and her daughters, and her granddaughters, to enjoy a life far better than she did. When you spend part of your childhood living in a tent city, making a better life for your children must be one of your biggest dreams. And if the only tools at your disposal are tortillas and an oven, then who can blame you for cooking your way out of that particular hole?

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As you can probably tell by my earlier posts on How to Be a Chef and Should You Go to Cooking School? I really believe that other people should be exposed to my opinions on a regular basis. And who better to beat over the head with my club-like wisdom than a bunch of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, soft-skinned, hopeful cooking school students? Which is why I’m really excited that Johnson & Wales in Charlotte, NC has chosen me to be their Distinguished Visiting Chef this year.

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I’ll be down there from Saturday through Monday, March 23 – 25, to warp young minds, crush their hopes, and kill their dreams. I’ll also be doing cooking demos. They use a lot more diplomatic language than I do, so here’s what they say:

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The Distinguished Visiting Chef Program was established in 1979 to honor outstanding culinarians and to provide an expanded learning experience for culinary and pastry arts students. Each year the College of Culinary Arts of Johnson & Wales University honors experts in the field of culinary arts by inviting internationally recognized chefs from the United States and abroad to visit the University and share their knowledge with the students. Drawing on their expertise, these individuals pass on valuable information acquired over the years as they lecture and demonstrate to Johnson & Wales University students.

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Which basically means: warp, crush, kill.

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Actually, I’m kind of excited. I feel like a lot of kids are coming out of cooking school the way I did: totally unprepared for the real world. I’m hoping that by vaccinating them with a little bit of reality poison now, they’ll be better able to resist its corrosive effects in the future. Also, they set up a scholarship in my name, which is kind of nice except that I can’t apply for it. Which is too bad, because with my name on it, I thought I’d be a shoo-in to win. Instead, someone named Brandon Lopez got the scholarship, to which I say: Congratulations, Brandon. And you owe me a 20% kickback.

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I had no idea Johnson & Wales looked like Mordor.

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So when you’re going about your day on March 24 and 25 just realize that I’ll be down in North Carolina, attending a fancy dress party in my own honor, killing the weak, and luring the strong into being my future employees. Thanks, Johnson & Wales!

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