Rachael Ray

I probably shouldn’t write anything about coffee. I am not a coffee expert. I don’t go to “cuppings.” I don’t care at all about espresso (which is to coffee nerds what cleavage is to regular nerds.) Oliver Strand, the country’s leading coffee writer, still talks about how I put Sweet n Low in a $20 cup of Esmerelda. I know this much, though: coffee has gotten a lot better. And it’s not hard to get on board the so-called “third wave” of coffee drinking. I had the good luck to marry a woman who lived in San Francisco and was steeped (if you will forgive the term) in coffee culture. I also eat out a lot, and I am friends with [...]...

I recently had occasion to cook a whole flock of roast chickens. I don’t know exactly why; it probably had something to do with Danit’s mentioning that she wanted it. The dish had been relatively unwelcome in my household, though not in my gastrointestinal tract. My wife is a sensitive sort, who feels bad for animals and hates any meat that looks recognizably like one. (She almost wept at Pat Lafrieda’s head-on steer roast at Meatopia. She even feels bad for lobsters. So I was surprised when she expressed a desire to eat roast chicken, a dish that not only offended her morals, but also her tastes: the biggest issue in our otherwise harmonious union derives from her inexplicable dislike for [...]...

Danit just told me, as I was making her pancakes, that I never have made her pancakes before. My heart just sunk. The second I gave her the pancakes I sat down to write this post. I have batter on the back of my hand. It’s funny, really, the kind of emotional disconnect there is between people who cook and people who eat. To us it’s all emotion, control, and projected appetites, mixed in with tenderness and nurturing love. To the person you hand it to, it might be all those things as well. Or it might just be a plate of food. Have you ever cooked something for someone who said they were hungry, and who then let the food [...]...

Deli men, like fate and the distant stars, cause me profound frustration. They are agents as beyond my control as any cosmic force, working indifferently, just a few feet away where I can’t get at them. The deli man does everything wrong. He shoves cold lumps of hard butter on toast, if he bothers to toast the bread at all. He slaps the greasy bacon down on umelted, waxy cheese. He takes a sandwich with a crisp roll and wraps it up in five layers of wax paper, foil, and plastic. (They love to wrap things up. Wrapping things up is the high point of the deli man’s routine.). How often I have seethed impotently at the deli case, glowering [...]...

A long-standing dream of mine came true this week: Steak n Shake, the greatest of American hamburger restaurants, opened up in New York City. I got to spend some time with Ken Faulkner, the VP o f Operations, and was again flabbergasted at how hard it is to make hamburgers well. A few weeks earlier, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Tom Ryan, the head of Smashburger. Ryan is the CEO, but is essentially Ken Faulkner’s opposite number, the true author of the hamburger at each place. What both have in common is a commitment to making hamburger the best and hardest way, which is to cook them, quickly, on a flat metal surface, and serve them fresh. You [...]...

Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that, more than one full week into the new year, I have not made good on my New Year’s resolution. You know, the one where I said I was going to cook better for my wife, and make things besides meat sauce? I have actually managed to do worse! I didn’t even make meat sauce! I reheated meat sauce, not once but twice; ordered Chinese food despite her express protestations, and my sure knowledge that she absolutely loathes the stuff; and finished up by making myself meat sauce that she couldn’t eat when she was fasting. So all that was bad. But on the other hand, I have started making my Italian tuna salad again. Which [...]...

The week before Christmas is traditionally a time of recovery and relaxation, but not for me. I’m worked up. I cooked a cathedral roast and some satsuma-glazed beef back ribs in New Orleans for Christmas, and now I’m all nervous energy and restless plans of action. And one such plan has a special claim on me. I am making my new year’s resolution. I don’t know about you, but I take my new year’s resolution seriously. Not in the sense of actually sticking with it, or accomplishing it, or even thinking about it. But at the time, I mean it, or at least I try to mean it. And it seems to me that if you try to mean it, than [...]...

It’s not the flavor of gourmet hamburgers that I hate so much. It’s not their dense and cloying buns. Their mushy pickles don’t annoy me that much, and their meat is often very good indeed. No, my problem with them is hypocrisy. Let me back up a little. Over the years, I know that I have been ungenerous towards gourmet hamburgers. I have abused them in print, badmouthed them in private, railed against their makers and the consumers alike. I have alienated myself from half the hamburger-loving population. And so I want to clarify my position. I’m not against innovation. I like all the burgers Rachael makes – her beer burger, her sage-scented veal burgers, and so on. What galls me so [...]...

Have you ever met a hipster? Neither have I. All hipsters, by definition, despise hipsterism, and each other, and themselves. Foodies are not much different. I’ve never known someone who is really into food and restaurants to unironically call themselves a foodie. (The same is true of Trekkies, Cork Dorks, and any other subculture you can name. They’re insular and angry, always writing off aggrieved messages into cyberspace and getting into heated defenses of things other people barely know exist. So the fact that we foodies were wrong about pork should come as no suprise. But wrong we were. I learned this the hard way recently, when I was organized a big pork dinner out of New York. I had two [...]...