Brian Carlo

What’s for dinner: Crispy, sticky chicken thighs with smashed baby potatoes and tomatoes.

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:58:44 -0500

What’s for dinner: Crispy, sticky chicken thighs with smashed baby potatoes and tomatoes.

What’s for dinner: Corn muffins.

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:42:00 -0500

What’s for dinner: Corn muffins.

What’s for dinner: Meatloaf. That’s it.

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:24:00 -0500

What’s for dinner: Meatloaf. That’s it.

What's for dinner: White beans two ways. 1. With tuna, capers, lemon and dill. 2. With crab, chili and fennel fronds.

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:39:00 -0500

What’s for dinner: Braised osso buco with brussels sprouts; milk chocolate mousse trifle with...

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:03:00 -0500

What’s for dinner: Braised osso buco with brussels sprouts; milk chocolate mousse trifle with Madeira ganache and whipped crème fraiche.

What’s for Valentine’s Day dinner: Roast rack of lamb with a Dijon mustard crust and...

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:38:00 -0500

What’s for Valentine’s Day dinner: Roast rack of lamb with a Dijon mustard crust and steamed asparagus.

What’s for dinner: Seared sea scallops with wine, butter, shallots and toasted sesame seeds.

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:38:00 -0500

What’s for dinner: Seared sea scallops with wine, butter, shallots and toasted sesame seeds.

What’s for dinner: Dad’s sauce with homemade meatballs and spaghetti.

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:37:00 -0500

What’s for dinner: Dad’s sauce with homemade meatballs and spaghetti.

Sad Day For Food Writers And Readers

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:53:20 -0400

It appears Conde Nast is shutting down Gourmet. My dad’s had a subscription for as long as I can remember, and the publication was instrumental to my love for journalism, food and a combination thereof.

Dad carefully clipped and photocopied Gourmet articles of note for decades. I took some with me to London when I worked there in the summer of 2005 and to Thailand when I backpacked up and down its coasts in the summer of 2006. They’ve essentially planned my parents’ vacations since long before I was born — including an epic monthlong trip to Italy while my mom was seven months’ pregnant with me. Later this month, they’re returning there for a week in Venice; it’s fitting that Gourmet is still playing an integral role in their itinerary.

Anyhow, I can see why a food magazine with a focus on writing vs. recipes would be abandoned. My girlfriend got me a subscription to Conde Nast’s other title, Bon Appetit (which will remain in print), for my birthday, and I find it pretty useful as a home cook. But Gourmet’s meditations on fine food will be hard to replace. RIP.

http://woofertime.com

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:42:00 -0400

http://woofertime.com

Google Editing: 'The Sky's The Limit'

Thu, 28 May 2009 20:03:23 -0400

Google Editing: 'The Sky's The Limit'

It Springs Eternal

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:11:24 -0400

Whenever I get down about the business of journalism I come across things that re-inspire me.

Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger

Best Disney Movie Of The '70s

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:17:40 -0500

… by far is the animated Robin Hood. I had it on VHS growing up and probably wore out the tape.

Ever wondered what it’d sound like translated into 13 languages? Wonder no longer.

via Neatorama

Best Meal I Had Last Weekend

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:41:00 -0500

the website.

the menu.

above: pastel azteca

Life Imitates Art. Sort Of. It’s no secret that I think “The Wire” is the best...

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:24:00 -0500

Life Imitates Art. Sort Of.

It’s no secret that I think “The Wire” is the best television ever made. I’ve been rewatching it (again) as another one of my roommates has gotten hooked on the series. Which is why I was delighted to read about “Vancouver’s Radical New Approach To Drugs: Let Junkies Be Junkies.” Sounds awfully similar to Hamsterdam from “The Wire,” fictional areas of inner city West Baltimore filled with vacant houses where dealers were corralled away from the neighborhoods they were destroying and allowed to freely distribute drugs. All as long as they kept in the “free zones.”

In reality, what Vancouver is trying in response to drug addicts is far more groundbreaking and involved. Sure, they’ve decriminalized marijuana. But they’ve also set up sites where addicts can get free, clean paraphernalia, shoot up with the help of medical staff, and in some cases even get free drugs themselves. Any fan of “The Wire” has to respect an alternative approach to the war on drugs here in the U.S. Still, reading about the Vancouver police’s role in all this, I couldn’t help but think of Bunny Colvin getting chewed out at Comstat after telling his bosses he had effectively legalized drugs.

Let’s hope Vancouver’s plan doesn’t descend into chaos like Hamsterdam.

via the Ideas blog.

BONUS COVERAGE: Check out another link from the Ideas blog to the New Scientist, which explains why our tendency to go to war, and why males tend to form bonds together to hate other groups of males, might be an evolutionary response. This explains why all my college buddies and I hate Duke and Carolina so much.

Movie Trailers Won't Ever Be The Same

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:42:22 -0400

Don LaFontaine, the man behind the chilling voice in various movie trailers and commercials, died Monday, his agent said. He was 68.

"If they ever decided to form their own autonomous state it’d be more populous than India and..."

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:31:57 -0400

“If they ever decided to form their own autonomous state it’d be more populous than India and China combined.”

- Wallpaper magazine, on the 30th anniversary of LEGO’s minifigure — those cute, little yellow dudes — via nytimes’ Ideas blog

Whoa, 2020 Is Only 12 Years Away

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:37:09 -0400

And look how cool Shanghai (maybe) will look by then! I’ve always been a sucker for maps of all kinds and, by extension, cool scale models like the one seen above. Neatorama pulls together some Flickr snapshots of this cooler than cool scale projection of what the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum believes China’s largest city will look like in 2020.

Any time I see one of these cool scale models I stop and stare for entirely too much time. Wake Forest has one (I think it’s in Benson University Center now?), and so does the library at the University of Hartford, where I taught this spring. And who could forget that cool model of Revolutionary Boston that lit up and made noises that they had up in the sadly now-defunct observation deck at the John Hancock Tower?

Some People Hate The Word "Moist." I Hate ...

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:11:12 -0400

… the word “mouthfeel.” It just gets under my skin. For the way it sounds. For the combination of two fairly intimate words in a way that just seems unnatural and creepy. But most important, for what it stands for.

I’ve often grouped people who harp on the texture of food into two camps: picky or pompous. There’s nothing worse than someone who refuses to eat something that tastes delicious because they “don’t like the texture.” It’s the classic cop-out for the unadventurous. But it’s also a classic crutch for food writers (and other gourmets, or wine connoisseurs) who can’t do their jobs well. It’s a real shame, because discussing the texture of food can be really fun. I wish I didn’t have such a hangup about it.

So it was kind of surprising that a Gourmet blog post, “The Mouthfeel Wheel,” could generate something of value. This texture wheel for wine tasters is actually kind of neat. Maybe I’ll get over my distaste for texture discussions yet. (But I still refuse to say “mouthfeel.” Urgh.)

P.S. Other tasty bites recently from Gourmet:

The perfect burger might have more to do with size than you might realize. I had a similar thought this weekend when I was grilling burgers and couldn’t tear off the right size leaf of lettuce.
New study shows link between fructose and the “surprising speed” of fat buildup. Yet another reason to hate corn products.
Mexican breakfast in Denver. Yet another reason to plan my first trip there.

'The Economics Of Free' Win Again

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:48:46 -0400

It’s been difficult to get a straight analysis of Radiohead’s groundbreaking, pay-what-you-want-online record release strategy for its latest effort, In Rainbows. Lots of winking and nodding and declining to comment.

But Wired gives a nice breakdown of a new British study of how torrent downloads affected the sanctioned downloads at the band’s official site. The verdict? First, there’s a jillion tech-savvy Radiohead fans out there. Second and more important, especially for the music business on the whole:

“The hard lesson to the music business here is that it must license venues for music acquisition that fans prefer to file sharing networks or otherwise make the toleration of file sharing part of their business plans. If even Radiohead’s freely available album was torrented 2.3 million times in the first three and a half weeks, how can more traditional offerings successfully clamp-down on file sharing? They can’t, pure and simple.”

Ouch.

Even when an album is basically free, it boils down to what venue a downloader is more comfortable with. That often means illegal torrent sites. This reminds me of Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame’s upcoming book, “FREE.” Here’s a great intro to some of its principles, also from Wired.