The Broad Center, and its sometimes controversial effort to train school district leaders, moves from L.A. to Yale with $100 million gift.
So, I spend a long time trying to set up PESOS for individual silos on IFTTT, specifically Facebook and Instagram, because they are terrible. I’ve got it currently set up to publish my initial post, but no back feed support yet. Also, this is going to wordpress, but it shouldn’t matter (in theor...
Chef Yumi Chiba has spent her career trying to figure out one of sushi's most illusive specialities at her restaurant Anago no Uotake, Japan.
How butter, sugar, and salt create a near-perfect pastry experience
[Note: This recipe was first published on this site in 2005, when few people had heard of this pastry. I’ve reworked it substantially to make individual pastries (shown above), and that recipe is in my book, L’appart.] Is there anything more fabulous than something created through the wonder and miracle of caramelization?
Anyone who uses iPhoto probably remembers your first thrill of plugging in your digital camera and magically, with no effort at all, having your photos automatically downloaded for you. Then they're neatly filed on your computer so you can view, cut, or paste your memories until your heart's content. It's great for the first few times, but once you've hit a certain number of photos,
Andy Clark left Massachusetts in 1994 and wormed his way into one of the iconic bakeries of Boulder, Colorado. After that, he spent 15 years running bakeries for Whole Foods Market. All the while, he was squirreling away ideas and thinking of his own place, where he could focus on 30 great loaves a day, instead of 30,000 for The Man. The result is Moxie Bread Co in Louisville, Colorado, as warm and welcoming a place as I have ever had the pleasure to visit. We talked about bread, and grain, and about creating a welcoming experience. Oh, and perhaps the most decadent pastry I have ever tasted.
That pastry is the kouign amann, an impossibly delicious amalgam of yeasted dough, butter and sugar that comes originally from Brittany in northern France. All the write-ups of Moxie agreed that their kouign amann was out of the world, and I was somewhat miffed that I had never heard of the things.
Now that I have …
Notes
- Huge thanks to Andrew Calabrese for making the introductions and the arrangements. What a great day.
- Also to our family and friends in Colorado for their friendship and hospitality.
- Moxie Bread Co is, of course, online.
- To learn more about kouign amann, I turned first to David Lebovitz, for a recipe and some alleged history.
- Eater turned to David Lebovitz too, for its informative piece about The Obscure French Pastry Making it Big in America.
- There’s apparently even a National Kouign Amann Day, on 20 June. If I can find one, I’ll be eating it.
For the lost, here’s a short segment from BBS with a quick introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S179EYnsGwM
Today’s guest, Michael Victor, has spent the past 16 years living in Laos and getting to know its farming systems and its food. To some extent, that’s become a personal interest. But it is also a professional interest that grew out of his work with farmers and development agencies in Laos. Most recently, he’s been working with The Agro-biodiversity Initiative, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The idea is to make use of agricultural biodiversity in a sustainable way to reduce poverty and improve the livelihoods of people in upland regions. One thing the project has done is to collect all the information it can about agricultural biodiversity and make it available online. When Michael visited Rome recently, I grabbed the chance to find out more about Lao food and diversity.
Notes
- The Pha Khao Lao website is available in English and Lao.
- I think that the restaurant Michael mentioned is Thip Khao in Washington DC. Duly noted for next time. Any reports gladly received.
- I seem to be way behind the times on riverweed. A couple of years ago even BBC Good Food had tried it. (Scroll down.)
- Banner photograph by Periodismo Itinerante from Flickr
I keep thinking of new and creative ways to use Huffduffer. If you haven’t heard of it, or used it, let me explain what it does. It’s a service that creates a personal podcast feed out of audio links you add to it.
While most of my readers will see all of my Huffduffer activity here on my own site, you can also follow all of my audio bookmarking there as well if you wish.
We’re in danger, I think, of treating everything as if it’s some measure of our productivity. Number of steps taken, emails replied-to, articles read, podcasts listened-to. While accomplishing things — or just plain getting our work done — is important, it’s also important that not everything go in that bucket. The life where everything is measured is not really a full life: we need room for the un-measured, the not-obsessed-about, the casual, the fun-for-fun’s sake.
For all of you waiting with bated breath! ALife 2020 Keynote Speaker Announcement #2: Melanie Mitchell @MelMitchell1 Who is a living legend in Complex Systems & has a brand new book out, "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans." http://vermontcomplexsystems.org/events/ALIFE-2020/ #Alife2020 pic.twitter.com/WIRQbuuZ2G
— ALIFE Conference 2020 (@ALifeConf) December 3, 2019