Mmm…Tastes Like Google
Three things found while Googling Charlie Ayers, author of the new cookbook Food 2.0: Secrets from the Chef Who Fed Google (DK, $25):
*An interview with the Scotsman in which Ayers describes a 10-course tasting menu at Ken Oringer’s Clio as the best meal of his life: “It included a liquid Parmesan ravioli, which was like eating Parmesan-scented air. It was out of this world.”
*A blog entry by a slightly dotty amateur chef that uses 25 photographs, including a picture of what two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce looks like, to show how to make Ayers’s Google Hot Sauce.
Three things found while Googling Charlie Ayers, author of the new cookbook Food 2.0: Secrets from the Chef Who Fed Google (DK, $25):
*An interview with the Scotsman in which Ayers describes a 10-course tasting menu at Ken Oringer’s Clio as the best meal of his life: “It included a liquid Parmesan ravioli, which was like eating Parmesan-scented air. It was out of this world.”
*A blog entry by a slightly dotty amateur chef that uses 25 photographs, including a picture of what two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce looks like, to show how to make Ayers’s Google Hot Sauce.
June 26, 6-9 p.m.
At some point, everyone’s attended the kind of gathering where food figures prominently, but isn’t really the focus (and, consequently, isn’t very good). I’m talking wedding receptions, dinner theaters, transatlantic flights—the kind of “chicken or beef?” food service that prompts people like me to pre-eat in anticipation of mushy pasta and chewy steak.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a food snob at heart. Nothing whets my appetite more than the prospect of taking a delicately crafted plateful of precious farm-fresh, heirloom, artisanal morsels and scarfing it down in seconds. If the menu includes the first and last name of the farmer/forager/clamdigger who personally wrested said ingredient, hours earlier, out of the soil/forest/swamp, so much the better. To my mind, 
We’re all aware that a recession is upon us. It’s affected the real estate we buy and (can’t) sell, the gas we pump into our cars, and alas, the already overpriced food we sling into our reusable shopping bags at Whole Foods. Somehow, that weekly ritual of discreetly tossing rotted bags of lettuce and freezer-burned chicken into the community trash receptacle on my floor seems like an even bigger waste now than when I was paying a few dollars less for groceries.
June 18-22, 10 a.m.-11 p.m.
I can never get enough strawberries. I start my day with a bowl of cereal with dried slices, and sometimes I have a peanut butter and strawberry-jam sandwich for lunch. There’s nothing better than strawberry shortcake for dessert.
In my cell phone address book, there are four buttons I push to get food (how do you say, behavioral conditioning?). They are: “Thai,” “Pizza,” “Indian,” and “Wndrsp.” Since I live in JP, that translates as Ban Chiang House, Same Old Place, Bukhara, and Wonderspice. With those four buttons, I’ve been able to avoid using my kitchen appliances for anything but reheating leftovers and hiding dirty dishes for months. Still, I’m always on the lookout for Button No. 5.
They… pay bills!
