August 5, 2007
eGullet
First off, YAY! Posting to my blog straight from Word worked. It has some awesome options, it spell checks, and it looks like I’m doing actual work. Muahaha.
More importantly, I’d like to say a few words about eGullet. Not only because most of my blog hits come from the link in my signature there but because it’s become a resource I simply can not cook without.
On Friday night we had a few friends over for dinner. Nothing fancy, just burgers and brats on the grill. The fancy part was dessert – homemade ice cream. Now I’d been interested in making ice cream for a while but as I’m usually pretending to be on a diet, it seemed a bad habit to pick up. Then I found a good deal on a Cuisinart ice cream maker, convinced myself that I would make lots of fruity sorbets, and took the plunge. And I have made sorbet! Err . . . twice.
It seemed silly to just make vanilla ice cream with this new technology but I was stumped on other recipes. In comes eGullet Pastry & Baking forum and a post simply entitled “The Perfect Scoop.” Sure enough it was a post dedicated to and named after a new ice cream book by David Lebovitz. Here were the recipes I’d been hoping for! Not only were eGullet members posting photos, experiences, and tips but the author was popping in from time to time to as well. I mean really, haven’t you ever wished you could ask an author just what they meant or to clarify something? Well thanks to the power of eGullet, you often can! And thanks to that thread, my friends dined on Malted Milk, Salted Butter Caramel, and Chocolate ice cream. And it was good. Damn good.
I am continually amazed at the amount of help one can get on eGullet, whether by searching for an old topic, starting a new one, or following along with the eGullet Culinary Institute. Whether you’re having trouble with Mac & Cheese or want to try your hand at cooking foie gras, someone there can help. Even more importantly, they will offer help without making you feel like an idiot. That’s a rare skill in the real world and even more precious online. I have turned to them for support on melting cheese, cooking wild boar, and even just poaching eggs. For some reason I find it easier to follow the detailed instruction to create a gourmet meal than to just instinctively know how to make a few basics. I made my mom a wild boar ragu over homemade pasta and yet I have to look up how to bake a potato and how to hard boil an egg. One of my more infamous cooking attempts a few years ago ended up with me calling my mom to find out what a sauce pan was. I’m not proud of that.
My relationship with food is a strange one. I am constantly battling my weight in an attempt to lose my [28-year-old] baby fat. And yet I want to experience flavors and food that excite me. My mom thinks I spend too much of my life thinking about food, I argue that most of my weight was gained when I *didn’t* think about food. I didn’t have to think to eat McDonald’s and Kraft Mac & Cheese every night. But if reading a book like “How to Pick a Peach” (which I discovered on eGullet in a post by its author) makes picking out good fresh produce easier, then damn it, I want to think about my food. And because of that, I have ten bags of fresh, local sweet corn in my freezer to pull out and enjoy in the middle of winter.
When I think about food, read about food, and learn about food it makes me want to pay attention to what I’m eating. Not how many calories it has but where it came from, why I’m eating it, and what it tastes like. What it REALLY tastes like. Therein I think will lie the secret of my struggle with food. Less of something that tastes more can be as or more satisfying than a lot of something that hardly tastes at all. Bad sentence, good thought.
I still remember how I found eGullet. It popped up as a search result when I was trying to find local restaurant supply stores. I couldn’t believe that such a mundane search had found me such a great resource. I still can’t believe it but I thank my lucky stars it did!
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