Food
How to Make Apple Pie For the First Time
When I do something for the first time, I usually do a bit of research to make sure I’m doing it right. My first foray in pie-making – hell, baking in general – was great because I realized that baking isn’t some scary, landmine-ridden challenge. Somehow, people build it up to be a lot more intimidating than it actually is.
Making a pie is fairly involved (a lot of letting things chill in the fridge), but if you follow a few basic tricks and rules of thumb, the end product ends up totally agreeable. The most important is to keep the butter and/or shortening cold, and to not overwork the dough. This is to preserve those little lumps of fat streaked throughout, which will melt in the oven and result in that coveted tender/flaky pie crust.
I left California earlier this week, and am cooking in my friend’s mom’s kitchen out in the ‘burbs of Buffalo, NY. It is a somewhat improbable place to go on my year off, but has done wonders for skills cooking American classics (my friend Nick is wary of Asian dishes) and maintaining my San Francisco time difference. I just took a pie out of the oven at 2:30am and am blogging this at 3:15 am.
I had dinner at Nick’s friend’s house tonight. She served us a lovely California Cabernet and beef bourguignon over egg white noodles with freshly baked popovers. Her mother was a whippersnapper of an 81 year old who still ran her own business and gave many tips on baking the perfect pie.
I used a vodka pie crust recipe from America’s Test Kitchen, using a pastry cutter rather than a food processor. (Check out their new blog, America’s Test Kitchen Feed!) I precooked the filling (recipe) based on the pie expert’s advice, since the apples were a bit tart, but wished I had cooked them a few minutes less. I threw in brown sugar and extra cinnamon, just because. The filling ended up very soft while the crust browned too fast on top and remained a tad undercooked.
Still, I’m pretty proud of the finished product. The kitchen smells delicious, my friend Jason gave it his programmer’s grunt of approval from behind his setup of monitors, and it’s not bad for Pie Numero Uno.
Should Cafes Ask Customers to Leave?
My favorite cafe asked me to leave last week. For the second time.
I’ll tell you why I feel sad: when I first found Crema Cafe two years ago, I fell in love. I spent so much time there, my sweaters absorbed its scent, an inexorable melange of lattes, carbs, and indie-pop Pandora playlists. The owners described it as a place between home and work; I took that quite literally. I proudly told my friends I was considering moving in.
Over the past two years, I’ve spent so many happy hours in that cafe. I love bringing my laptop to do work on the upstairs level. I’ve forcibly dragged friends there and bought them my favorites, just so they could be converted. I’ve blogged about them, plugged them on Serious Eats, posted photos to various food sites. When I signed up for Mint.com, I budgeted a very liberal portion for “coffee.”
If you ask me for restaurant recommendations, you’ll likely hear raves about their turkey-avocado-jicama-slaw sandwich or their baked-fresh-from-scratch pastries.
So I disappointed when I was asked to leave during a busy Saturday afternoon to make room for other customers. I’d been there for a little over 2 hours with my laptop, and had planned on taking a seat closer to a wall outlet when one of the owners stepped in. (I had polished off a medium coffee and a chicken sandwich.) He had promised that table to another customer; since I had headphones on, I hadn’t seen the line forming behind me.
He was apologetic. As I was leaving, he apologized again. And this was the second time – a month before, a different owner had asked me to leave, but relented when I bought another sandwich. I’ve generally tried to share my table or buy another pastry during marathon study sessions, but I know I’ve overstayed my welcome in the past.
And I understand why they’re taking a more aggressive tack. Mostly. They charge reasonable prices for freshly made food. They have high labor costs and rent; they depend on table turnover and volume to pay the bills. I ended up chatting that owner for about an hour about the trials of the business world and how to solve the problem of being too popular.
I’m happy Crema has done well. It clearly has no problem attracting loyal customers and long lines. But I’m disappointed that the same place that I cheered for and championed feels that its success is dependent on asking me to leave. Are the two really at odds?
Perhaps this Seth Godin (a well-known marketer) post about “best customers” summarizes some of how I’m feeling:
If you define “best customer” as the customer who pays you the most, then I guess it’s not surprising that the reflex instinct is to charge them more. After all, they’re happy to pay.
But what if you define “best customer” as the person who brings you new customers through frequent referrals, and who sticks with you through thick and thin? That customer, I think, is worth far more than what she might pay you in any one transaction. In fact, if you think of that customer as your best marketer instead, it might change everything.
If you’re a cafe lover, do you think cafe owners should ask customers who have finished eating to leave?
Cafe owners, how do you deal with slow table turnover?
This is the Pancake of Your Wet Dreams.
Google “pancake recipe” and you get nearly 3 million results. How do you sort through the mess, if you’re just lusting after a syrup-sodden flapjack of joy?
Enter MyStack. This is an entirely fictional Pancake Search Engine – the Google of pancake recipes – that allows you to delicately tweak ingredients, mix-ins, calories, and costs. It even calculates whether a pancake is qualitatively “sweet” “hearty” or “fluffy” using ingredient ratios.
Its backend, if it were ever built, would feature a hell of a lot of data parsing, web scraping, and hopefully tap into existing recipe database APIs, should they be made available.
Again, this website does not actually exist. I drew up this mockup in Photoshop (in a record 1.5 hours) for my CS171 Data Visualization class.
The Pancake Challenge prompt:
Mon Feb 7 – The Pancake Recipe Challenge
Google the words “pancake recipe,” and you will get more than 1 million hits. Looking more closely, there are actually many ways to make such a simple thing as pancakes.
In this exercise, we want each breakout group to pick some tasks that have to do with the variety of pancake recipes and to sketch a visualization that supports as many of these tasks as possible. The list of possible tasks includes, among others:
- I have some ingredients at home, which pancake recipe can I make?
- Which is the most diet friendly recipe?
- What recipe will require the least amount of money?
- How will pancakes turn out for the difference recipes? Taste? Texture?
- To what extent do recipes vary? How much deviation is in the various quantities?
- I am making pancakes — I wonder what recipe my friends recommend?
You can also come up with your own tasks. Note that the data is many pancake recipes and not just one, so your interface should scale to billions of pancake recipes (just kidding – but you get the point). At the end, you will present your design to the class and explain how the visual elements and possible user interactions are supporting the tasks you chose.
Unfortunately, I’m going to be out of town on Monday when the project is due.
This probably the one time I’ve ever wanted to present my homework… but I figured I’d let it into the wilds of the Internet, in case anyone wants to build the mythical MyStack and turn it into syrupy reality. (Slice and dice the full size mockup here.) What the hell, let’s throw in a handful of blueberries and add “tortilla” to the database.
Pardon the dust – we’re redesigning!
If you’ve seen this site going through more makeovers than Madonna on fast forward, it’s because I’ve been experimenting with the layout for the past week. To go magazine style or not magazine style? Slideshow feature box or no slideshow feature box? These are the kinds of questions that occupy my mind.
Not to fret, we’ll be back to regular functioning capacity as soon as my mind does. Which is no real guarantee of anything. But you wouldn’t be reading my blog if you were looking for that. Because you know, it’s not happening. Anyway – I have a lot of food photos to share. So how about it:
My new obsession: Dorado Tacos‘ (in Brookline, on Harvard Ave) fish taco. This is their fried fish taco, holding a tender, golden-crisp core of Atlantic pollock set off with salsa fresca and Baja crema. Did I mention it’s very pretty, too?
Give it a good squirt of lime, pair it with some chicken tortilla soup, and you’re ready to GO PUBLIC. Er. I mean. CONQUER THE WORLD.
That would be this.
Here’s the pho from Xinh Xinh in Chinatown. I was more taken with their “goi du du” – papaya salad with shrimp – that came with three shrimp chips (those things that look like delicious disks of styrofoam) and chopped peanuts. But the pho made for a more sensual viewing experience.
More pics from Davis Square’s Journeyman if I muster up the energy later (no guarantees!!!) but here’s a sneak peek anyway – an endive, black rice, and steak from a 5 course meal at the unusual restaurant. It’s located in an an alley. It’s started by food industry n00bs. (Adorable n00bs!) And you can only order 3 to 7 course set menus. Dat’s right.
I highly recommend skipping the reservation and just sitting at the bar, where you get to directly face the open kitchen. That means the chef can literally look up and ask you, “So, any of you allergic to clams?” Priceless.
Because emotions are meant to be eaten.
I am happy to announce the beta launch of Shouldn’t Have Eaten, a website dedicated to …
things you shouldn’t have eaten.
The possibilites are endless.
Here are some of my favorites from real, live users so far:
the Hell Pasta with ghost chiles. Both my stomach (and my toilet) would be happier if I hadn’t.
an entire gallon of egg nog. I walked around the whole with Christmas joy and mild shame in my stomach.
One. Pound. Of. Almonds. In a day. Fucking Costco. Besides the nausea, what comes in most go out…
We’re moderating submissions for now, to keep the quality up (and spam down) so send us your best stuff.
We want this to be the pulse of America’s guilty obsession with food. To shine a light on a twisted cultural pysche. To expose guilt at the bacon-saturated grassroots.
And we want you to be a part of it.
Shouldn’t Have Eaten: what shouldn’t go in your stomach goes here.