On dinner parties. 19 March 2008 7:21 pm
Posted by Tracy in : work, politics, time versus money, school, responsibility, friends, identity, cooking , 2 commentsOh, lady. Stuff White People Like wins again with yesterday’s post on dinner parties, a subject I’ve written about on a few memorable occasions. The following little essaylet, first posted on Everything2.com on September 1, 2001, tells the story of one such occasion. (Writing it was another, and I suppose reposting it here is yet one more, in a very meta way.)
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For years and years, my parents have belonged to a club that treated its members to gourmet dinner parties, sometimes in restaurants, but also for some time hosted at members’ homes and prepared in a prescribed potluck style by the guests, who were given recipes for dishes selected to fit the evening’s theme. In addition to these smaller seasonal events (four times a year; you figure it out) the club — ominously named The Establishment — used to meet in its entirety twice a year for an annual formal, black tie dinner in January and a much more informal outdoor picnic/barbecue in July. The venues for these latter two events were fixed for years, at the homes of the club members with the most extensive silverware, glassware, and flatware collection, and the largest back yard, respectively. But I digress.
As a result of my parents’ participation in those black-tie dinners, I learned quite a bit about the workings of the dinner party, first-hand, by working as part of its catering staff (with the help of a rotating roster of friends recruited to help) for five years in a row (the pay got better every time, especially when I returned to “the annual dinner” as a starving college student). However, I believe that it was as a result of this experience that I failed to earn a potentially valuable scholastic distinction during my senior year of high school. (more…)
Friday funnies: Stuff White People Like 29 February 2008 3:10 pm
Posted by Tracy in : kitchen gear, breakfast, vegetarianism, consumerism, Morning Glory, vegan, anthropology, vegetarian, identity, restaurants , 2 commentsHappy Leap Day! Laughter is good Tracy food, and the blog Stuff White People Like makes me laugh. Have you seen it? It’s completely brilliant, as long as you don’t read the comments (don’t say I didn’t warn you). Here are a few samples I picked for their relevance to TracyFood:
#36 Breakfast Places (I swear I’m printing this one out for Morning Glory).
#54 Kitchen Gadgets
That last one, of course, hits especially close to home. (more…)
Eek! Missed a day! 11 July 2007 10:40 pm
Posted by Tracy in : reviews, movies, food snobbery, seasonality, Morning Glory, vegetarian, identity, vegan, books , add a commentI completely forgot to write anything for TracyFood yesterday because of the record-breaking heat which made me fall asleep at 7 PM because there was literally nothing else I could do. Really. That’s what I get for going home too early (i.e. at the very hottest part of the day) instead of staying at Peter’s nice air-conditioned office at the U of O (more…)
Book review: “Second Nature” by Michael Pollan 19 June 2007 6:13 pm
Posted by Tracy in : reviews, politics, garden, seasonality, school, Michael Pollan, identity, books , add a commentTracy is on vacation. You can read all about it at Van Boothe Tandem Adventures. Regularly-scheduled non-vacation TracyFood posts will be back on Monday, July 9. Meanwhile….
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From Second Nature by Michael Pollan:
Of course, a real green thumb would have done everything I did without having to think about it so much. But you have to start somewhere…. Only much later does it become second nature. Now, I get it — indeed, can no longer imagine not getting it — and from here on I’ll probably grow fine carrots without a moment’s reflection, no bigger a deal than riding a bike. So maybe that is what a green thumb is, a particular form of memory: a compendium of little stories that have been distilled to the point where the gardener can draw on their lessons without even thinking about it — the morals of these stories (most of which are about his own experiences, but some of which may be secondhand) are always at his fingertips.
Confessions of a food geek: Olive oil obsession and more. 6 June 2007 10:46 pm
Posted by Tracy in : salad, America's Test Kitchen, news, cheese, eating, identity, cooking , 3 commentsSo in case it wasn’t obvious from, oh, this entire blogsite, I’m a bit of a food geek. My kitchen scale is the coolest new toy maybe since Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, I think Cook’s Illustrated is by far the best food magazine in the entire universe not just because it has no ads but even more so because their recipes read like lab reports (here’s what we wanted, here’s what went wrong, here’s what we learned and how we eventually fixed the problem), and until recently I was pretty sure that nothing could beat the culinary nerdiness of Cook’s TV show, America’s Test Kitchen. However, until just a few hours ago I had never seen a single episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown. Wow. (more…)
