Cookbook giveaway: Mod Mex

Mexican food is among my most favorite cuisines, and it's really hard to give up a cookbook with such delicious recipes for old favorites and new twists, but this week's offering is "Mod Mex: Cooking Vibrant Fiesta Flavors at Home" by Scott Linquist and Joanna Pruess. It has recipes from Dos Caminos Mexican Kitchen in New York.

I know this post is dated April 1, but it's no joke! The book is from Andrews McMeel Publishing, published October 1, 2007, 224 pages and has about 125 recipes. It's hardback and has lots of great photographs.

If you want this week's book, "Mod Mex," be the first to click the PayPal button (Buy Now) below, follow the directions to deposit a payment to my account, AND leave a comment at the end of this blog item with some way to contact you for your address or in case you were not the first one (I have only one copy of each book). I will send the book by Priority Mail. Offer good in the United States only at this time. You don't need a PayPal account, but you will need a credit card to pay with the button.

If this isn't the book for you, keep checking back on Fridays. I offer a different cookbook each week. I'll edit the post to indicate when a book is no longer available.

If you live in Charlottesville, you can save the money by coming to pick up the book. Be the first to leave a comment, with a way to contact you.

To give you an idea of the recipes in "Mod Mex," here is a sample recipe.

Wild Mushroom and Huitlacoche Sopes with Queso Fresco and Tomatillo Avocado Salsa

Makes 12 (2 ½-inch) sopes

The most difficult part of this delicious recipe is actually finding the huitlacoche (also spelled cuitlacoche). This corn fungus, also called "Mexican truffle" or "Mexican caviar," is greatly revered in Mexico. The kernels have a smoky-sweet flavor. It is best fresh or frozen, but it is also available canned from some online Mexican food suppliers. Your best option is to purchase it frozen, but even that may be hard to find. Otherwise, try a trip to Oaxaca in the fall! If you can’t find the mushrooms listed here, use portobellos or any combination of mushrooms that you like.

Ingredients
Sope dough (masa)
1¼ cups corn flour for tortillas
2 tablespoons lard or vegetable shortening
½ cup water
1 teaspoon kosher salt

Tomatillo-Avocado Salsa
½ ripe avocado peeled, seeded, and coarsely chopped
1 cup salsa verde

Mushroom-Huitlacoche Filling
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 cup mixed sliced mushrooms (such as shiitake, cremini, and oyster mushrooms, but any variety may be used)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ to 1 teaspoon ground arbol chile powder
½ cup huitlacoche
1 tablespoon chopped fresh epazote or a combination of flat-leaf parsley and oregano
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup crumbled queso fresco
¼ cup crema or sour cream
3 radishes, trimmed and cut into thin strips

Instructions
Make the Sopes: In a large bowl, mix together the corn flour, lard, water, and salt, and knead gently until the dough is smooth, about 3 minutes. Roll about 3 tablespoons of masa into a ball, and then flatten the ball using your thumb and the palm of your hand to form a 2½-inch-round disk, approximately ¼ inch thick. Repeat until you have 12 disks. Set aside while preparing the salsa and filling.

Make the salsa: In the jar of an electric blender, combine the avocado and salsa verde, and purée until smooth. Refrigerate until needed.

Make the filling: Heat ½ tablespoon of the oil in a large skillet over high heat until almost smoking. Add the mushrooms and ½ tablespoon of the butter and sauté until golden brown, 3 to 5 minutes, turning often. Transfer the mushrooms to a small bowl.

In the same pan over high heat, stir in the remaining ½ tablespoon of oil along with the onion, garlic, and remaining ½ tablespoon of butter. Reduce the heat to medium and sauté until the onion is golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Add the chile powder, huitlacoche, and epazote. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring often. Return the sautéed mushrooms to the pan and cook just to heat through. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Keep warm.

Heat a griddle or large skillet over medium heat. Add 2 or 3 masa disks and cook for 2 to 3 minutes on each side, turning once, just to firm them slightly. Remove the disks from the pan, let them cool slightly, and then gently pinch the edges to resemble a small tart shell. Return them to the griddle, and continue cooking for 5 minutes more. Remove, wrap in aluminum foil, and keep in a warm oven.

Spoon 1 tablespoon of Tomatillo-Avocado Salsa onto each sope, and then add 2 tablespoons of warm mushrooms. Top with 1 teaspoon of queso fresco, a dollop of crema, and a sprinkle of radishes. Serve warm.

—from MOD MEX, page 24 · Andrews McMeel Publishing

Convenience ... or flavor?

This headline was the main one on the cover of the Washington Post food section this week. It referred to watermelon (seedless mild ones vs. intensely flavored seeded ones), but it occurred to me that it could be the standard by which to judge all our food choices. Dietitians have been advocating intentional eating (along with 30 minutes of exercise a day) as necessary to keep a healthy weight. To paraphrase Michael Pollan: Eat food, not too much, and enjoy it more.

Preparation is a key to the enjoyment. If you keep that in mind, you've won half the battle our culture is fighting against. We rush, rush to get more done, cutting every corner we can find. The food industry has responded to this, preparing and processing our food so we can get in our mouths quickly. Yet while we are cutting the time it takes to put together our dinners, the industry is cutting corners as well to make a profit.

Good chefs fight against processed foods. No wonder we love to eat out at a good restaurant. The food is spectacularly attractive and tastes great.

And that's why books by chefs sell well. We've eaten it, we want to fix it. Unfortunately, most of the recipes in a chef's cookbook involve intense preparation. And why not? That's what the minimum-wage minions in the kitchen do (besides the dishes... which add up to a substantial number for many of these recipes). And on top of that, some just don't translate well to the home kitchen. I knew from experience that adapting family recipes to feed a hundred or more people takes a lot of tweaking, especially with the spices. And what I learned testing cookbooks over the years is that many chefs find great cookbook writers and testers to produce their works, but others rush to press without adequately testing whether the recipes, even when followed to the letter, will turn out well for their readers.

Good recipes don't need a lot of ingredients to taste great, but the simpler the recipe, the better your ingredients need to be. If you don't enjoy food prep, start with recipes that call for five ingredients or less. Work up from there. Pay attention to how fresh the pepper is as you cut into it to dice it (a good tipoff is the condition of the stem; if the tip is black and shriveled, it's been off the vine for some time), how little flavor the pithy parts contribute (cut them out and throw them into the compost pile),  how a smaller dice exposes more of the surface to flavor the dish. Don't enjoy cutting onions? Goggles work well, but chilling the onion or putting a slice of bread in your mouth before taking out your knife sometimes works as well. Does that garlic that keeps jumping out from under your knife need to be minced? Position the side of your chef knife on top of the clove and give it a good whack with your free fist. Then mince the crushed garlic.

Embrace the prep. If you think of it as the essential element of getting better food into your body, you will value it as much as you value your time. It's when you don't value it that it becomes mere scut work. Cultivate sacredness in your daily meal preparation, and your meals - and your body - will rejoice.

The Child is the mother to the pan

From the Los Angeles Times comes this somewhat predictable aftershock of the film "Julie and Julia":

Celebrated TV chef Julia Child served retailers a healthy helping of business this weekend as moviegoers rushed to snatch up cookbooks, buy biographies and even sign up for French cooking classes.
The surprise surge came as the Meryl Streep film "Julie & Julia," based in part on Child's life, opened in theaters over the weekend. It ranked No. 2 at the box office in the U.S. and Canada and pulled in $20 million.
By Sunday, Pasadena bookstore Vroman's sold out of the first volume of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The tome, which Child co-authored and plays a central role in the film, is credited with introducing French cuisine to the American mainstream.
"Julia's Kitchen Wisdom" began flying off shelves last week, as did several of Child's baking books and her autobiography "My Life in France," Vroman's book department manager Justin Junge said.
The bookstore even cobbled together a display table featuring guides to Paris and "all the cookbooks we could get our hands on," Junge said.
"It's all been selling like hot cakes," Junge said. "And it will carry on for quite some time. Julia Child has always been a great seller."
The Barnes & Noble store in downtown Pasadena also had a special table for Child's books but was sold out of the first volume of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" Sunday. The classic was first published nearly 50 years ago and was No. 1 on Amazon's most popular list on Monday.

Suitcase full of surprises

Good news - The Sacramento Bee sent me home with a suitcase full of cookbooks, so I'm going to get started on testing them right away and will be reviewing them soon. Some of the titles: The Scandinavian Cookbook, The Adaptable Table, Cooking Green, Real Cajun and Falling Cloudberries. I'm getting hungry just looking at them.

But today, here are some tidbits I've collected over the past few days from my reading while in airports.

• Over the past couple of years, 100-calorie snack packs have soared in popularity as a convenient way to control portion size. But sales are falling and, according the Mintel Global New Products Database, new launches of 100-calorie packs have slowed. What isn't known is if anyone lost weight by snacking. I'm betting the answer is no.
  
  
• A piece on NPR over the weekend says that ordinary farmers — the people who grow the lion's share of what America eats — have largely been left out of the mainstream media debate over "Food Inc.," a documentary film about the modern agricultural industry. The movie argues that large-scale agriculture produces inexpensive meat and vegetables, but imposes high costs on the environment and Americans' health.
  
  
• Is your favorite chef touting avocados? If so, he or she may be getting a little gift from the California Avocado Commission. The Packer, an industry journal, notes that the commission's Artisan Chef program has 14 chefs in California, Georgia, Florida, New York, Texas and Illinois. To see a full list of who's on the avocado dole, go to www.avocado.org.

Secrets chefs keep under their toques

Smart Money magazine this week has an amusing article by Jason Kephart, "10 things celebrity chefs won't tell you." If you want to read it in full, which will require you to view 10 separate pages with lots of animated ads, click here. But here are a summary and excerpts that will give you the gist of the story.

1. "I’m a celebrity first and a chef second."

Rachael Ray, the Babe Ruth of celebrity chefs, has ridden her culinary fame to a daytime talk show and her own magazine. Without marketing, you can’t be a celebrity chef.

2. "There’s absolutely no reason to buy my cookbook." 

This isn't exactly true. You can get more of Bobby Flay's recipes on the Food Network's recipe database than in any of his cookbooks, but will they work for the home cook? Maybe, but maybe not. If you decide to pick a recipe off the Web, be sure you know the source. When I worked for The Sacramento Bee, every recipe I included in my cookbook reviews was tested in my kitchen, and if it didn't work out the first time, I went through and tested it again. The New York Times had a story a few years ago that 60 percent of recipes in cookbooks were never tested. I'm sure the number has gone up, and they may not be as tested in newspapers, either, given the staff cuts at most print outlets.

3. "Just because I have a cooking show doesn’t mean I’m a chef." "It’s not necessary that there are professional chefs on the Food Network,’ says Anthony Bourdain, "Kitchen Confidential" author and a celebrity chef in his own right. "But what they really need are good cooks, and they have precious few of those." 

Foodies, take heart. PBS has been taking in Food Network’castoffs, including respected chefs Ming Tsai, Mario Batali, and Sara Moulton.

4. Sex sells, even with foodies. 

A growing number of chefs are making mouths water for reasons other than their culinary acumen. Actress and model Padma Lakshmi, for one, has gone from guest-starring on "Star Trek: Enterprise" to hosting the popular reality show "Top Chef."
Rachael Ray forged new ground for nonmodel chefs when she appeared in the October 2003 issue of FHM in a skimpy outfit, seductively licking chocolate off a spoon. How did other women chefs react to the sexy spread? "It didn’t hurt her career any," says Cat Cora, an FHM veteran herself, who has joined Nigella Lawson and Giada De Laurentiis in ditching traditional cooking togs for tight sweaters with plunging necklines.

5. "I’m addicted to porn - food porn, that is." It’s crucial the food look great on-screen. Food stylists ...

often shop for ingredients, prepare, and even cook the dish, all the while making sure it’s ready for its close-up.

6. "The dishes I make on TV don’t always work so great at home . . ."

Sue Gordon, a New Jersey cooking instructor, is a big fan of the Food Network. ‘I’m always looking for what they’ll teach me,’ she says. Unfortunately, when she tried to duplicate the sweet-potato gnocchi she watched Giada DeLaurentiis make on Everyday Italian, she learned the age-old lesson that looks aren’t everything. ‘It was so sticky, I had to keep adding flour,’ Gordon says. ‘The amounts were completely wrong.’ (A spokesperson for DeLaurentiis declined to comment.)
Often it’s a matter of translation. A chef might take a recipe for, say, 24 servings and divide it by four’but then fail to adjust the cooking’time properly. These slight variations can make a huge difference, according to Ellen Brown, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cooking Substitutions. Also, home cooking and professional cooking are entirely different; even the equipment varies. ‘It’s like getting advice from a race-car driver on how to commute to work,’ Kimball says. ‘It’s two different skill sets.’

7. ‘. . . and sometimes they’re just plain gross.’ 

Take the Red Bean Beach Salad that Ingrid Hoffmann made on the beach-picnic episode of Simply Delicioso, for example. Users’ reviews on the FoodNetwork.com’s recipe board slammed the dish for its strange, unappetizing combination of beans and sweet pickles. (A spokesperson for Hoffmann declined to comment.)

8. ‘It might be my restaurant, but that doesn’t mean I cook there.’

A recent ad campaign for the city of Las Vegas used a commercial featuring Emeril Lagasse, Mario’Batali, and Wolfgang Puck, promising that in Vegas you would visit three celebrity chefs in three days. What the ad didn’t mention is that you’ve got a better chance of hitting the jackpot at keno than you do eating food that’s actually been cooked by your favorite celebrity chef at one of his many restaurants.

9. ‘My show is one long commercial for my cookbooks.’

Celebrity’chefs have a stranglehold on the bestseller list, which is proving tough to break. The top five cookbooks of 2006, and four of the top 20 in 2007, belonged to Food Network personalities, according to Simba Information, a Stamford, Conn., market research firm.

10. ‘Bottom line: My celebrity status is great for business.’
It’s a fact that a spot on TV most often translates into increased traffic to that chef's restaurant.

But as Tom Colicchio says he once told a graduating class at the Culinary Institute of America, ‘If you got into this business to be the next Emeril, you should apologize to your parents for wasting their money.’

Hail to the chef!

It's official now: Cristeta Comerford is keeping her post as White House chef, just as I predicted (click here).

From a Los Angeles Times story this morning:

Despite some foodie salivating over the idea of a star wearing the chef's whites in Barack Obama's kitchen, the current White House chef is keeping her job. Michelle Obama says she and the White House chef have something in common, and she's looking forward to a collaboration.

"Cristeta Comerford brings such incredible talent to the White House operation and came very highly regarded from the Bush family," Obama said in a statement released last week by the president-elect's transition team. "Also the mom of a young daughter, I appreciate our shared perspective on the importance of healthy eating and healthy families."

Photograph: Ron Edmonds

Not everyone is a critic

Perhaps the title of this post should be "Not everyone is a GOOD food critic." I was reading a piece about French food critic François Simon in the New York Times, and was stopped by  Jean-Claude Ribaut's quote:

Mr. Simon also showers criticism on other French food critics, faulting them for identifying themselves in restaurants, cozying up to chefs and taking free meals and gifts. “It is much easier to turn into a courtesan, to be inside rather than outside the house of the chefs,” he said.

But other critics call his aloof approach sterile. “I want to get to know the chef, to understand what he feels, his frame of reference, his roots,” said Jean-Claude Ribaut, the longtime food critic at Le Monde. (Mr. Ribaut pays for his restaurant meals.) “I want to know if he grew up on a farm, if his father grew vegetables. If you go anonymously, you can’t ever have this kind of dialogue.”

Ribaut is simply wrong (although he does right by paying for his meals). The proper way to review a restaurant is to go incognito, so that you are treated like any other diner who walks through the door. Then, afterwards, you call the chef to discuss his or her background, anything that was amiss in the food or your dining experience, questions on techniques and ingredients, etc.

To read the full story on Simon, click here.

Photograph: Disney/Pixar

Gourmet gulch

Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet magazine, wants a high-profile chef in the White House who cooks delicious local food. That may be a fine sentiment for 6 to 8 months out of the year, but has she SEEN what's growing around DC at the moment? If it's local, and a vegetable, it's probably not fresh. That's not to say we shouldn't all strive for local first, but should it be a White House policy issue? I think not.

White House chef, cont.

I got a little excited when I saw Yahoo news promoting a story on the new White House chef, but after talking to several more people in the know, Associated Press reporter Holly Ramer didn't get much more information than I shared in my Nov. 15 item, "Who will cook for the Obamas?"

She did advance Alice Waters as a celebrity chef consideration, and quoted the Culinary Institute of America's Tim Ryan making the point that like the Kennedys, the Obama White House can send a message to the nation with the choice of a chef with an agenda.

The Dallas Morning News (where I worked in the early '80s) had this item this morning:

Walter Scheib, the White House executive chef for Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, believes there's a 90 percent chance the new administration will stick with his successor, Cristeta Comerford. He also said a celebrity hire, as hinted on food and political blogs, wouldn't work. "You have to be a person who has a real heart of service, and it can't be someone who needs to see themselves on camera," Mr. Scheib said.

Who'll cook for the Obamas?

The changing of the guard at the White House may include the chef -- but not necessarily.

Cristeta Comerford, 45, a naturalized citizen originally from the Philippines, is the first female executive chef in the White House. Comerford, who started her career in the United States at the Sheraton near Chicago's O'Hare Airport, had worked in the White House kitchen for 10 years before being named to the post in August 2005. At the time of the appointment, Bonnie Moore, a former assistant chef at the Inn at Little Washington who is president of Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, a national group that had urged Mrs. Bush to name a woman, said naming Comerford to the position "sends a message around the world. Women make up more than 50 percent of food service workers, but hold less than 4 percent of the top jobs. And this is the top job."

Usually, the chefs are not replaced just because of a change in the Oval Office. The first White House executive chef, Rene Verdon, was brought in by the Kennedys to class up the fare; he was promptly fired by Johnson because he wouldn't provide the new president's Texas favorites.

Although the Obamas ate plenty of fried stuff and pizza on the campaign trail, that's not their favored mode of eating.

"Apparently he is not into carbs," said Denver chef Daniel Young, who cooked for Obama at the Democratic National Convention. "I made lots of fresh, healthy foods."

Young was mentioned in a New York Daily News earlier this week as a possible pick for White House chef. Although Rick Bayless and Charlie Trotter have been mentioned as possible White House chefs, I’d lay money that it won’t be someone with an existing restaurant empire. Young or Art Smith, who has cooked for Oprah Winfrey, would be more likely -- although an up-and-coming chef, one who is a great cook and versatile menu planner who may not have yet made it onto the public radar, would get my vote. 

And don’t count out Comerford; why kick out a youngish, minority woman for a older white guy? Change? Maybe not the best policy in this case.