Heirloom Heresy

Jane Black at the Washington Post claims the best tomato she ate last summer was not an heirloom tomato, and that 'heirloom' does not always equate to 'good.' Read full article

Bayless wins $100,000 for grower charity

IACP member Rick Bayless, owner of Frontera Grill in Chicago, won the inaugural season of Top Chef Masters, a cooking competition on Bravo television network. His prize — $100,000 to the charity of his choice, goes to the Frontera Farmer Foundation, a charity he started in 2003 to provide grants to small Midwestern farms.

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Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

Michael Pollan writes in the New York Times:

I was only 8 when “The French Chef” first appeared on American television in 1963, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this Julia Child had improved the quality of life around our house. My mother began cooking dishes she’d watched Julia cook on TV: boeuf bourguignon (the subject of the show’s first episode), French onion soup gratinée, duck à l’orange, coq au vin, mousse au chocolat. Some of the more ambitious dishes, like the duck or the mousse, were pointed toward weekend company, but my mother would usually test these out on me and my sisters earlier in the week, and a few of the others — including the boeuf bourguignon, which I especially loved — actually made it into heavy weeknight rotation. So whenever people talk about how Julia Child upgraded the culture of food in America, I nod appreciatively. I owe her. Not that I didn’t also owe Swanson, because we also ate TV dinners, and those were pretty good, too.

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