Horecaprofiel stadsdelen in Amsterdam en het gemiddeld besteedbaar inkomen per inwoner per jaar. (Amsterdamse horeca: opmars restaurants – O+S)

‘Rabbit with Hot Apple Jelly’

View from the Wing, Off to Roses, and diner at El Bulli:

“We were greeted warmly, of course, and then offered a visit to the kitchen. The chef came over and took photos with us while he clearly managed to continue to oversee the kitchen staff while visiting and greeting us. Kitchen had several rooms and we noticed perhaps three dozen cooks.”

Meer over ‘s wereld beste restaurant elBulli en chef Ferran Adrià: Meet the world’s best chef.

“Jean-Claude Vrinat, who died from lung cancer on Monday at the age of 71, was France’s greatest restaurateur, and his passing marks the end of a particular form of hospitality. Vrinat was the star attraction at his venerated Paris restaurant, Taillevent, but he was not its chef. Instead, he presided over the dining room and left the cooking to someone else (a very talented someone else, of course). In the era of globe-spanning celebrity chefs, this allocation of labor and limelight was nothing short of antediluvian. But having a chef tethered to the kitchen and a revered owner in the front of the house had its advantages: Taillevent commanded a loyalty like no other luxury restaurant in France, and Vrinat’s death has prompted an outpouring of grief, not just for the man but for the breed of restaurateur he represented.”

Extract 1/2: Consuming passion:

“That eating should be first and foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and destructive idea – destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. The scientists haven’t tested the hypothesis yet, but I’m willing to bet that when they do they’ll find an inverse correlation between the amount of time people spend worrying about nutrition and their health and happiness. This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by Anglo-Saxon nutritionists, who can’t fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than others on elaborately engineered low-fat diets. No people on earth, by contrast, worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than Americans – and no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems.”

Extract 2/2: How to get back to real food

“The first time I heard the advice to “just eat food” was in a speech by the nutritionist and author Joan Gussow, and it baffled me. Of course you should eat food – what else is there to eat? But Gussow, who grows much of her own food on a flood-prone finger of land jutting into the Hudson River, refuses to dignify most of the products for sale in the supermarket with that title. “In the 34 years I’ve been in the field of nutrition,” she said, “I have watched real food disappear from large areas of the supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating world.” Taking its place has been an unending stream of food-like substitutes – “products constructed largely around commerce and hope, supported by frighteningly little actual knowledge”.

Real food is still out there, however, still being grown and even occasionally sold in the supermarket. Here are a few rules of thumb to help you recognise it – and then make the most of it.”

In Defense of Food. An Eater’s Manifesto, Michael Pollan.

Morning Edition, ‘In Defense of Food’ Author Offers Advice for Health (interview):

“”Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

(…)

The implication of Pollan’s advice, however, is that what we’re eating now isn’t food.”

Slate, The Holy Church of Food:

“There’s always been a streak of the willfully impractical in Pollan’s worldview. Like the other great, radical writers whose subject is the death grip of the food industry—Joan Gussow, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser—he’s eloquent and persuasive; but come the revolution, he probably doesn’t belong on the tactics-and-logistics committee. What he likes best is spinning long, mesmerizing tales from his immense research, as he did in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book that made him a star. It’s a beautifully handled polemic against modern agribusiness until you get to the last chapter, the one that’s supposed to bring it all home.”

LA Times, ‘In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto’ by Michael Pollan

“The third section offers rules (rather, gentle suggestions) for how to “escape the Western diet.” Many are familiar, if you’ve spent any time paying attention to what you eat — for example, don’t eat packaged foods with lots of chemical ingredients. Some involve behavioral changes: Eat mostly plants, avoid supermarkets whenever possible, buy a freezer, “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” pay more to eat less and don’t buy food where you buy gas. Some are more about how we eat than what we eat — for example, do all your eating at a table, don’t eat alone, eat slowly.”

“Bilal omschrijft zijn keuken als een wereldkeuken. Naast Hollandse gehaktballen kun je hier terecht voor een groenteschotel met lamsvlees of een pasta . Knoflook en uien zijn de basis voor een goed gerecht. “Dat is gezond. En ik gebruik veel Turkse kruiden”, vertelt Bilal. Typisch Tante Til is bijvoorbeeld een Italiaanse lasagne met totaal andere ingrediënten en kruiden. “Zo kwam er hier eens een Italiaan die het bestelde. De volgende dag kwam hij terug en zei: dit is absoluut geen lasagne, maar dit is wel veel lekkerder dan lasagne.””

Photo: jamon, borough market, by owenbooth

The New Yorker, Red, White, and Bleu. What do we eat when we eat meat?:

“Is it possible that meat is now openly enjoying a renaissance—that it’s finally cool to be a carnivore? If so, it has been a long time coming. Meat-eaters, having already ceded the moral ground to vegetarians (no one has ever really come up with a persuasive rejoinder to the claim that a warm-blooded, pain-feeling creature’s life shouldn’t be taken for your supper), have more recently had to accept that their diet is probably the source of much of the world’s heart disease and much of its obesity. That diet is also sustained by an industry that is just flat-out evil: the factory farms, the egregious economies of waste in fast food, the ghastly genetic manipulations of chickens and turkeys, the pigs raised in no-room-to-move confinement, the reckless use of antibiotics and growth hormones (as well as the frightful possible consequences—early breasting in children, difficult-to-defeat superbugs), the contamination of fields and rivers by noxious excrement runoffs from feedlots the size of small nations, the tricks and shortcuts adopted by supermarkets (cheap animals fattened on cheap grain, butchered by high-pressure hose, and packaged at their bloated maximum weight). And yet, at a time when things could not seem worse, there is a generation of people (in their forties or younger) who are thinking hard and philosophically about their food and are prepared to declare: Enough! I’m a meat-eater and proud of it!”

De recente Proefwerken van Johannes van Dam staan op kaart. Maar verwacht verder geen uitgebreid archief of een eigen rss-feed, het is slechts een knullige kaart in flash.

Meeuwig & Zn. Olijfolie Azijn Mosterd. (Foto: moosterbroek.)

“Elsevier vroeg 181 chefkoks waar zij hun boodschappen doen. Het resultaat: honderden adressen in heel Nederland voor vlees, vis, kaas, wijn, delicatessen, pâtisserie, groente, fruit en kookspullen.”

Elsevier: De beste winkels in Amsterdam. En de rest van Nederland. (via)

José Andrés

Time: My Last Supper

“For his last meal, Andrés would recreate a barbecue he once had in an old mill in Tazones, a village in Asturias (northern Spain). It consists of warm tortillas and potato omelets, piles of percebes (gooseneck barnacles), llámpares (snail-like mollusks), and centollos (gigantic spider crabs).”

Melanie Dunea, My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals / Portraits, Interviews, and Recipes

Wouter Klootwijk: “Ze zijn er nog steeds, eigenwijze ambulante aardappelhandelaren.”

Foodlog.nl is mijn nieuwe favoriete weblog.

Geestelijk Welbevinden

Verlichter van het zuiverste water: Richard Dawkins schreef The God Delusion en richtte dit jaar The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science op.

Internet

Vodcast: The Show van Ze Frank. Talent, humor, snelheid en verstand en een gezonde voorliefde voor poep. De aflevering van 04-28-06 had het allemaal.

Podcast: In Our Time, history of ideas. Melvyn Bragg spreekt 42 minuten lang in een hoog tempo met hooggeleerde gasten over één onderwerp.

Sites: VVork, Edge en Buienradar. Stuk voor stuk sites met een prima feed.

Shop: Allofmp3.com. De Rus is legaal in Rusland. De Rus verkoopt muziek zonder DRM.

Playlist 2006

Opera: Rigoletto, Verdi. (Maria Callas; Tito Gobbi; Giuseppe di Stefano.) `Ma tutto ora scompare, L’altare si rovesciò!’

Lied: Gute Nacht, Schubert (Winterreisse, Fischer-Dieskau/Barenboim)

Stuk: La Mer, Debussy (Herbert von Karajan/Berliner Philharmoniker)

En verder:

• Don’t Sweat The Technique – Eric B. and Rakim
• Mètché Dershé (When Am I Going to Reach There?) – Mulatu Astatqe
• Follow Me Home – Yonderboi
• Careful – Hot Chip
• I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ - Scissor Sisters
• Just For The Kick – Coldcut
• The Swimming Song – Loudon Wainwright III
• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Into My Arms
• Behind the mirror – Mathew Jonson
• Trapez ltd. 22 – Dominik Eulberg
• Walking Man – Zoe Keating
• Eargate - Annarchy, Dickster & Barker
• Soul Mekanik Invents: Ben-e-Lux / If u nu (Chicken Lips Dub) – Ian Pooley
• Drop Beat (Circulation Remix) – Deep Dish

Film en TV

Acteur: Johnny Depp, de beste acteur van zijn generatie, en die daarvoor en die daarna.

Natuur op tv: Planet Earth.

Politiek op tv: Beter als tv dan als politiek.

Sport en Spel

De man als man: Zinedine Zidane, soms rest een man niets dan de ander op zijn bek te slaan.