Extreme chocolate and other culinary adventures

Habañero chocolates anyone? Or maybe you prefer yours beer-filled?

I was trying to find an article I read awhile back in the NY Times about Spain having the trendiest cuisine – make that cocina – in Europe, replacing France. (That has got to kill the French.) Instead I turned up a review of “extreme” chocolates in the Dallas Morning News (requires registration) recommended by Clay Gordon, "self-described chocolate critic and founder of Chocophile.com." Interesting concept, although I’m partial to the more traditional flavors. The ones that looked most interesting to me were #7, Cardamom Nougat (cocoa nibs with cardamom infused in Colombian varietal ganache with bittersweet exterior), and #19, Red Fire (dark chocolate with ancho-and-chipotle filling).

The Spanish connection in the chocolate article, by the way, was this: "The most unusual chocolate flavors are coming out of Spain.” Figures.

Spanish food has probably always been about fusion. Here’s an interesting page on Spain as a “culinary crossroads,” deriving foods and cooking methods from its melting pot of Arab (sugar, almonds, eggplant, apricot, cucumbers, lemons, oranges), Jewish and other European cultures, plus foods brought back from the New World (chili peppers, allspice, sweet potatoes, corn, string beans, pumpkin). They neglect to mention chocolate.

I did find an article in Slate that profiles the same Catalan chef as the Times article: Ferran Adrià, who serves “shrimp broth in a pipette, foie gras that has been frozen and ground to a powder, and a mushroom appetizer spritzed with a custom-made woody fragrance.” Don't try this at home.

More approachable Spanish food, both in the eating and in the cooking, can be found in a recent post at A Chef in My Kitchen. Donna’s tapas menu (all recipes from My Kitchen in Spain, which happens to be on my wish list) features tomato and pepper salad, deviled eggs with shrimp and olives, crispy potatoes with hot sauce, and a chicken sauté with garlic and sherry. There’s also a nice-looking dessert of lemony cheese custard squares, although my preference for Spanish dessert is always flan. Or maybe something chocolate, flavored with a little fruit, cinnamon or caramel…

2:18:45 PM      trackback [] 

Another perspective on the wardrobe malfunction

I had dinner with some girlfriends the other night and of course the Janet Jackson thing came up at some point. One friend was wondering why no one seemed to be talking about the general inappropriateness of the MTV-produced halftime show. Actually I have seen and heard a lot of that. I’m not for censorship and I dislike having moralists decide for the rest of us what we can see and hear. But there’s a time and a place. CBS was stupid to have MTV produce the halftime show because the Super Bowl is for everyone, families included. I can’t blame parents for objecting to having any more trash than there already is thrown in their kids’ faces. It’s not the sexuality so much as the commercializing, trivializing, exploitative, manipulative packaging of it that bothers me.

Judith Lewis offers an interesting perspective in the LA Weekly (found via Random Walks):

The less puritanical among us shake our heads for other reasons — we wonder why, four days after, a glimpse of a hood-ornamented nipple warrants in-depth coverage in every section of the Los Angeles Times; why the FCC will spend tax dollars investigating so-called “indecency” and not the free-speech-chilling effects of media consolidation; why it was Janet’s breast, and not general depravity, that persuaded parents in Laguna Beach that MTV should no longer infiltrate their high schools. Rarely does it occur to any of us that this outrage might be a healthy reaction to the systematic depreciation of an enchanting aesthetic feature peculiar to human females.

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830)

Judith Lewis: “Marianne in Delacroix’s day was a symbol of freedom and fairness, a woman warrior on the democratic front. Back then, women carried on their chests nothing less than mighty mounds of power.” Indeed. Although I must say "mighty" is not a word that's ever been remotely used in association with my chest.

9:54:38 AM      trackback []