Food Court Is Now In Session

While everybody else is paying way too much attention to Patrick Swayze’s death, I was sorry to hear that British celebrity chef Keith Floyd passed away yesterday as well. Floyd wasn’t terribly well-known in the U.S. compared to the more recent crop of British TV chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson, but his various series used to pop up on public television now and again. “Floyd on France” was probably the best of the bunch; sadly it isn’t available on video except on old VHS tapes from the 1990s, but perhaps the BBC will think better of it and re-do them on DVD. If his moment of popularity had been in the present time instead of the Prehistoric Age Before The Internet, I’m sure he’d be more popular with American audiences.

Venerable New York restaurant institution Cafe Des Artistes is closing its doors after 92 years of operation. A charming, old-fashioned place that was scandalous in its day for the paintings of nude women on the walls, it was a favorite of people like Woody Allen and Barbara Walters (who works right across the street at ABC). Never cutting edge or world-famous, it was one of those New York places that attracted people as a “special” place to go when you wanted to propose to your girlfriend or take Grandma out for an expensive birthday lunch. Bridget and I ate there years ago and got a big kick out of the punctilious service as well as the very lovely dining room. Its closing has been a bit overshadowed by the financial struggles of the similarly-venerable Tavern On The Green just a few blocks over in Central Park.

Starting to think about what to buy for the chef in your life for Christmas this year? This handsome meat-tenderizer ring could be just the ticket. Personally, I like the idea of being able to tenderize a tough piece of meat AND get out my latent aggressions all at the same time. Plus, it could come in very handy for having a “political discussion” with a nutjob teabagger, if you get my drift.

The Autumnal Equinox is less than a week away and the harvest season will be over before you know it, so the bounty of fresh summer vegetables will be going away soon too, leaving us to struggle through the cold months with eating canned and frozen vegetables. This recent Daily Mail article, though, puts forth the argument that frozen vegetables are sometimes even more nutritious than fresh vegetables, because the processing time from harvest to freezing is shorter than the amount of time fresh vegetables might sit in storage before making it to the supermarket shelves, losing their nutrients and their flavor along the way. Now that more and more supermarkets tell you the place-of-origin of their fresh foods, it’s easy to grasp that a particular vegetable might have been sitting around for weeks waiting to be transported from some far-flung destination like Chile, so I hope this isn’t a particularly stunning revelation to you. Of course, when you can get your veggies fresh from a local producer, the frozen stuff seems less appealing, but it’s worth keeping in mind when you’re shopping in the depths of February that the frozen food is actually BETTER than the fresh stuff from the other side of the world.

Some of you know that we had to bail at the last minute on attending the latest “Whole Hog Dinner” at Chef Tony Maws’ Craigie on Main in Cambridge, but my friend Jo and her young padawan were able to go without us and she shared the experience on her blog