Food

The Importance of Manual Dexterity

Ingo Muschenetz — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 18:11:00 GMT

In watching a re-run of the original Iron Chef ("Tomato Battle") I watched the challenger Franco Canzoniere battle Kobe. The most fascinating aspect of these shows is the manual dexterity of the chefs. Certainly, they are gifted with creativity and spectacular palettes, but they are equally skilled in all of the fine techniques used in food preparation. If you only have an hour to cook a five course meal, the ability to chop onions quickly, efficiently, and with style becomes rather important. Here's a small video snippet illustrating the point:

Link to video

I'm okay with a knife, but nowhere near this level of dexterity

What is a Recipiki Anyway?

Ingo Muschenetz — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 21:48:00 GMT

I've wanted for some time to make a central place to store the recipes that I enjoyed and that were important to my family. Since I wasn't quite positive of the site structure I wanted, I decided to use a wiki to put the thing together. Enter the Recipiki. You can edit the index, add new recipes, and browse and print from there. It's not completed yet, but many of my favorites are already in. The only condition to adding a new recipe is that it has to be good. Something tasty. There's a link over in the right-hand navigation bar. Come on, go check it out now.

Iron Chef America

Ingo Muschenetz — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 21:08:00 GMT

I wanted to post on this earlier, but technical difficulties kept me from commenting before then. I love Iron Chef. I've watched it for 5-6 years now, and have long lamented it not appearing on any DVD set. So I was apprehensive when Food TV wanted to redo the show. I have great respect for Mario Batali and Wolfgang Puck, but really can't stand Bobby Flay. He's talented, but his ego just gets in the way.

With this in mind, I actually enjoyed the new series. It felt a little sterile, but Iron Chef went on for many years, so I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and see if it grows into something truly interesting. All I can hope is that every battle with Bobby Flay doesn't feature some form of tamales. I mean, I love tamales, but I'm curious if Bobby can do something besides southwest cusine. Trout was a major win for him in the secret ingredient department. I want to see him grimace like Chen did during “Yogurt Battle.” That was priceless.