Epifurious

Necessity is the Mother of Something or Other

Now looka here!  We finally have a search function!

Earlier this evening, I was reading Michael Ruhlman's blog entry about Chicken Caesar salads, and how their predominance in crummy restaurants is an indictment of the American palate and our prioritizing predictability over edibility, etc. Ulrike and I have had countless conversations about this topic, and I sort of remembered us talking about this in context of my business trip to Toronto, on which I took far too many meals at Accents, a perfunctory and depressing hotel bar/restaurant. 

I realized that there was no way to find out if this was or was not the case without clicking through the archives month by month, something I am far too lazy to do.  I half-heartedly attempted to use the "categories" function, and realized that this too was kinda jank and futile.  So now we have search.  Wasn't that a fun story?

In other news, look forward to posts about Pearl Oyster Bar, full-bodied Healdsburg reds, flour tortillas, an Astorian adventure, and Paula's Bataan Death March Party!  So much to talk about!

 

Dirty Minds Think Alike

I have a huge crush on the blog Brunchtastic.  The post on the demise of the Food Network alone is worth the price of admission, not to mention the wealth of other fantastic food-related screeds.  (I'd love to know what Brunchtastic thinks of that wretched new Simply Delicioso show.  Who is that woman??  She can't cook at all!) Brunchtastic is a tinderbox, a powder keg, a loose cannon--think of any other haretrigger (zing!) ordnance-related metaphor and you've got Brunchtastic.  Read it and weep!  Or laugh! Or nod in smiling agreement! Or feel kinda scared!

Vicarious Emigration!

I just got a very nice e-mail from Cristina, the author of Mexico Cooks, a blog I had never heard of but of which I am now fully enamored.  Check it out--half food-blog, half cultural travelogue, it's full of great pictures, recipes, and information about Mexican craft, music, and architecture.  It's delightfully didactic and thoroughly detailed.

Here's to the Diana Kennedy of the blogosphere! 

INTERACTIVE FEATURE!

I seem to have recently contracted the ever-annoying summer cold, which means that I am still at work (of course), but am taking a regimen of Dayquil and Airborne and Ricola and all kinds of other overpowering powders and potions that seem to do little to stem the tide of sneezes and coughs and moments of vertigo. Yay!

But this leads me to an interactive feature.  You see, when I get a sickness of the sinusoidal variety, the first thing I do is look for the nearest bowl of spicy soup--Tom Yum Gai, Pho Ga, heck, even a Soon-Tofu can do the trick (though the lack of noodles puts it in a distant third).  A fever-inducing illness will find me consuming massive quantities of saltines and stale 7Up (i think this some kind of primal reaction to fever requiring the quickest ingestion of glucose).  So yes!  Sick foods!  Strange cravings!  What are your preferred medicinal foods?  Share your secrets!

[See, it's interactive in that the post requires your input via the Comments feature of Epifurious.]

Please Feed the Animals

I'm going to come right out and say it:  we here at Epifurious are feeling lonely.  We type and eat and type and eat, day in and day out, so we can come up with funny/angry things to say about food.  It's not easy being so opinionated, so au courant, so damn insightful. 

We know you're reading Epifurious (finger pointing directly at you, yes YOU there! the one at the computer!).  Now's your turn to feed Epifurious.  Comment!  We'll respond cleverly.  Disagree!  We'll argue with you.  Concur!  We'll nit-pick. 

If you continue this awkward cold-shouldery thing, we'll lose our mojo and start churning out smug, patronizing prose describing weak and unmotivated recipes that are mere conglomerations of basic ingredients with minimal preparation and scant attention to flavor, and we'll be forced to make up for our lack of ingenuity with close-up, supersaturated pictures. 

Now you don't want that to happen, do ya?  So, chime on in! 

Aaaaaaaaand We're Back!

That's right! We just got back from an extended sojourn in Tuscany, where we discovered the most amazing rural villa.  As soon as we saw it, we knew it was our destiny to make it our home--the terraced, verdant grounds, the decaying manor house, gracious and ancient, the clementine tree shading the rustic, centuries-old rough-hewn stone picnic table.  We called it Bramasole...

Oh wait! That wasn't us! That was Dianne Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun! We've just been here in New York being lazy!

So wipe those tears from your eyes, because we're back!

Kindred Spirit, Old Soul, Blog-Lovers

I've been reading Haverchuk all day, with all too much enjoyment.  Their current series on old food photography is delightful, and covers a topic close to IFC's heart.

As a nice value-add, there's lots of nice prose stylin' and plenty of links to click and click.

A caveat: there IS an instance of macro photography on the front page, but I am grandly and magnanimously choosing not to take the bait.  this time.