This the middle of the story.  If this looks unfamiliar to you, you may want to start with Part 1.

Even though I kept my eyes locked on the entrances to the rail tracks, Dave still managed to sneak up on me.  Since he’s not active on Facebook, I hadn’t seen many recent photos of him, and to my surprise, he looked substantially the same as he did in college, although I’m sure the same can be said about myself.  We were both older but no worse for wear. Not wanting to waste a moment of catching-up time, we decided to stay in the building while we plotted out our day.

We headed downstairs to the dining concourse and talked over coffee for a long time, cramming 13 years of status updates into conversation rife with interrupted thoughts, tangents, recalled memories, and misrememberances.  Talking to Dave now, much as I did so many years ago as we sat in Sloppy Louie’s at South Street Seaport, was like starting an old car.  You’re afraid that it won’t turn over, but after a few cranks, the engine roars to life, and a few minutes later you’re cruising the neighborhood as if it were yesterday.

Before we knew it, a couple of hours had passed, our coffee had turned cold, pastries were reduced to crumbs, and it was time for lunch.  Using my phone for research, I started rattling off the names of nearby eating opportunities, but as soon as the word “fondue” left my mouth, our course was set, with Artisanal as our destination.  In less than ten minutes, had exited Grand Central Station, walked a few blocks, and were breezing through the front doors. We had the fortune of being seated immediately.

Artisanal is one of those restaurants where, if you needed a long, lingering meal as a backdrop to conversation, you’d find it there.  We ordered way, way too much, starting with the fondue and augmenting that selection with bread, salads, pork belly hash, and unending cups of coffee.  We never ran out of food, and we never ran out of conversation, which is pretty much the perfect combination of unlimited things.  Service was invisibly efficient, and I don’t recall ever seeing the bottom of my coffee cup. Eventually, I looked up to see that the restaurant was emptying out, and we found ourselves between the lunch and dinner service.

Stuffed, we walked off the meal by heading north, on our way to the second declared destination of the day, Laduree, for macarons.  It was a long, necessary meandering, notable for our passage by several locations of former, familiar, landmarks.  FAO Schwartz, which has now become a shell of its earlier glory.  The Apple Store cube, now standing where there used to be a pit of forgettable dining establishments.  We trudged up Central Park East, stopping occasionally to check our phones to get our bearings.  Eventually, we hit the right cross street and headed east to Madison Avenue.

Laduree was packed, so much so that a line of about 20 people spilled out of the doorway and down the block.  There was no sale or special promotion to be had – this was an everyday occurrence.  After about 25 minutes, we finally made our way inside and were blown away by the display cases, which were filled with a colorful array of macarons in flavors that ranged from citrus to straight-up chocolate and vanilla varieties.  We spent too much, but as in the days of old, we did it in stride.

The sun was starting to set on Manhattan, and it was time to decide where to end the evening.  I had heard much of Eataly, some good (an astounding array of Italian food and drink) and bad (so crowded you can’t even move) – but given that we were just two souls with relatively light baggage, we decided it was worth weaving through the crowds.  We hailed a cab and rocketed downtown…

Part 3 to come.

“This feels the same, doesn’t it?”

Dave said this somewhere in the vicinity of 70th street, as we ambled up Fifth Avenue, a brisk walk that had its beginnings at 32nd Street and Park Avenue. In actuality, our journey began over 16 years ago, but, due to a combination of factors, had suffered an unfortunate suspension that had lasted for far longer than it should have. His comment made me smile, and, in spite of my aching legs and lingering back pain, I could not have agreed more. All in all, it did feel quite the same.

He was the best man at our wedding. But for years before that, when we were in college, he was a great and most excellent friend. We would foray into Manhattan on a regular basis, paying the $1 PATH fare to hop a train from Newark, eating too much, spending too much, staying too late and catching one of the last trains back to campus. Food was always a primary focus on these trips – we would end up at the original Balducci’s on 9th Street, or at Benny’s Burritos. More often than not, we would close out our evenings at an espresso bar in Greenwich Village whose name I’ve long forgotten.

To say that I did not see eye-to-eye with Dave’s girlfriend at the time would be a vast understatement. Our personalities, from Day One, just never found any common ground, and when their relationship turned into an engagement, and then into marriage, I had made the decision not to remain as a constant source of irritation and disagreement. Graduation had brought its own elements of separation – Dave went into the working world and I took refuge from a bad economy by enrolling in law school. Time marched on, we lived our separate lives, grew older, and started families – and thus began a 13-year silence and one of the few legitimate regrets that I’ve had in my adult lifetime. With no contact information to be had from Google, and no social networking presence, Dave was impossible to find.

Then, in August, from out of nowhere, he sent me a message on Facebook.

So much had happened in the span of 13 years. His marriage had ended in divorce, but he was now in the midst of a new relationship with a wonderful woman who was perfect for him – age appropriate, free from a first marriage, and with children of her own. And just a few days after our initial contact, he emailed me to tell me that they were taking a trip to Niagara Falls, where he was going to propose to her. And he did, and she said yes. With so many tales to tell, of his first marriage, his divorce, and his new engagement, along with all of those little details that fill in the gaps in between, there was just no way that it would all fit easily into email messages. So we plotted to return to New York to engage in that old traditional form of communication, walking and talking. And, of course, eating.

I caught an early Amtrak out of Wilmington, heading north, while Dave hopped on a Metro North train southbound from Connecticut. I arrived into NYC 45 minutes earlier than he did, and I took the opportunity to grab a coffee and trek uptown on foot, from Penn Station to Grand Central. Even though we were texting back and forth, I still had not actually spoken to him in 13 years.

I made my way through the crowds at Grand Central, through the cavernous main concourse, and waited at the staircase, hoping to catch sight of him as he emerged from the platform.

Part Two of Reconciliation, Healing, and Charcuterie is coming…

I’m not very good at contests, which is why long time readers of this site have never seen me host one. The way I see it, if I announce a giveaway, there are two possible scenarios: either there’s so little participation (or, even worse, none at all) that I’m left picking a winner from a field of two or three readers whom I probably already know, or there’s a flood of entries, and I have to deal with the pressure of picking one deserving entrant with very little guiding criteria.

Oh, and then there’s the fulfillment aspect of it all, wherein I drive around for weeks with the prize in the trunk of my car and a To Do List that perennially includes the guilt-inducing task “MAIL PRIZE TO CONTEST WINNER”. Did I mention that The Best Food Blog Ever has no interns?

But this time, things are totally different! There’s chocolate involved, for one thing – really good chocolate. And the prize is outstanding, and something that won’t fit in my trunk and that I don’t have to ship. And to enter, all you have to do is click on the graphic that’s at the top of this post. “WHAT IS THIS GLORIOUS PRIZE?” I hear all of the Internet exclaim… (the graphic does not do it justice)

Ready? The grand prize, offered by Chuao Chocolatier, is:

A trip for two of you lovely readers to San Diego, California!

And, dinner at The Shores restaurant, which a quick Google reveals to be located right on the beach, offering spectacular views and seasonal dining.

Plus, a private wine and chocolate pairing event with Master Chef Michael Antonorsi.

And just for clicking and entering, you’ll also be eligible to win one of 14 Limited Edition Sweetheart Boxes filled with 22 bonbons or, as is considered in my household, a single serving.

While I will freely disclose that Chuao Chocolatier has sent me review samples of their products for the killer price of zilch, do you know what’s better than getting free chocolate?

Winning it. Beating others to it. Outperforming all of your peers to emerge victorious. Blood in the water is one thing. Chocolate brings the game to a whole new level.

So, here’s my selfish pitch. This contest is only open to readers of certain food blogs and websites, including this one, so the field of potential winners is much smaller than, say, that of a typical soft drink bottle cap sweepstakes. If the winner of the contest happens to have clicked through the link on this blog to enter, I get a $50 credit to stuff my maw with Chuao product. Plus, another $50 credit to give away to one lucky reader (again, this is good because I don’t have to ship it). So, you get a trip to San Diego, dinner, and a private wine/chocolate tasting. I get more chocolate. And someone else gets more chocolate. And still someone else may get bonbons.

I would describe this as a win-win-win situation. All you have to do is click and enter. I believe you can enter as many times as you’d like, once per day, and the contest runs until February 14, 2012. Now go and make me proud with your clickiness.

Note: Writing holiday posts has always been a challenge, because for a number of years, even before starting The Best Food Blog Ever, I have always stayed true to the same recipes.  And while tradition once again trumps innovation for this holiday season, when I started to consider how many new followers on Twitter and new readers I’ve gained over three years, it just made sense to repost my entry for roast turkey because, hey, it’s going to be new for someone out there.  First published here in 2008, and you’ll probably see it come around again at this time next year, and the year after that.

I promised to post the Thanksgiving recipes in time for Christmas, so here’s the final, and probably the most critical, one.  As I’ve already mentioned, this roast turkey recipe is a blend of different preparations that I’ve used over the past few years.  I’ve taken the best aspects of every preparation that I’ve used, and this is the result.

When I first decided on a recurring holiday turkey recipe, I started out by using a liberal application of herbed butter under the skin of the bird, which does a better job of flavoring the meat than basting or cavity aromatics would.  If you think about it, basting merely flavors the skin, and no matter how often you ladle pan drippings over the roast, those drippings do nothing but run down the outside of the bird back into the pan.  Psychologically, it’s satisfying, but technically basting accomplishes nothing since the skin acts as a barrier.  The same is true for stuffing things into the turkey’s cavity – no matter what you put in there, the meat will still be shielded from the aromatics by the bone structure of the bird, so the effect is minimized.

Using an under-the-skin application of herbed butter achieves two goals – it flavors the skin from beneath, and it also imparts a wonderful flavor to the meat below.  So, that’s the approach that I used for years, until I discovered brining, and now I use a brine-and-butter approach.

Brining takes the notion of flavoring the meat one step further, by immersing the bird in a salt and sugar solution for approximately 1 hour per pound.  Take note, though, that you should never attempt to brine what is sold as a “self-basting” turkey – which has already been injected with a saline solution, and which will turn out inedibly salty if you elect to brine it further.  Additional flavors are added to the brine according to the results that you’re seeking – the brine carries these flavors deep into the meat of the turkey.  From a scientific standpoint, the brining solution breaks up the fibers of the meat, resulting in increased tenderness, and the retained moisture from a good, long brine will translate to juicier meat.  I highly recommend using a brining bag, but you could use any food-safe heavy duty plastic bag if you need to.

So, here is the holiday roast turkey recipe.  The butter mix comes from a past issue of one of my cooking magazines, which I can’t recall after so many years, and the brining solution is sourced from Saveur, with a few modifications.  Remember that you need to begin brining the turkey the night before you plan on roasting it, so if you want to make this for Christmas, you need to start on Christmas Eve.

The Ultimate Roast Turkey Recipe by The Best Food Blog Ever

1 turkey

For the Brine

1 cup kosher salt
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup chili powder
2 cups apple cider
1 head garlic, separated into cloves, peeled
2 apples, cored and chopped
6 cups apple cider (separate step)
4 quarts cold water

For the Butter

1 stick of unsalted butter, room temperature
Bacon
Sea salt
Ground black pepper
Fresh thyme and sage, chopped

Start by making the brine.  In a food processor or blender, puree the garlic, the apples, and the 2 cups of apple cider, and set aside.  In the brining bag, set inside of a large stockpot, pour the salt, sugar, and chili powder, then add the 6 cups of apple cider and the 4 quarts of cold water, using your hand or a whisk to mix it all together so that the salt and sugar dissolve.  Add the apple/garlic puree and stir to mix again.

Prepare the turkey by first pulling out the utterly useless self timer plastic dart and throwing it away, being careful not to tear the skin as you do so.  Remove the giblet bag and reserve for stock (this can be frozen, whole, in a plastic bag in the freezer).  Carefully lower the entire turkey, breast first, into the brining solution, making sure the brine fills the cavity, and submerge as much as possible.  Seal the bag and place in a cold place – your refrigerator if you have room, or the garage or deck if the outside temperature is low enough.  You should anticipate brining the turkey for 1 hour per pound, thereabouts.

The next day, take your butter out of the refrigerator and let it soften.  Finely chop a few slices of bacon and fry them until crisp.  In a small bowl, mash the butter with the salt, pepper, bacon, thyme, and sage and set aside.  Set your oven to 350 degrees.

Pull the turkey out of the brine and set it in a roasting pan on a rack, making sure to drain the cavity.  Using paper towels, pat the turkey dry, then use your fingers to loosen the skin from the meat of the breast.  Take a spoon and spread the herbed butter under the skin of the turkey – you can use your fingers to push the butter off of the spoon through the skin, and smush it around until you’ve got an even coating of butter throughout.  Apply salt and pepper liberally to the surface of the skin.  If you’re using a probe thermometer, which I highly recommend, insert the probe now into the thickest part of the thigh without hitting bone.

Roast the turkey until the temperature of the dark meat reaches 165 degrees.  You may want to check the bird after about an hour or so, because the residual brown sugar from the brine will caramelize, causing the skin to become brown more quickly than you are accustomed.  If this happens, take the turkey out and tent it with foil before putting it back to finish cooking.  When you take the final temperature of the roast using a probe thermometer, it’s best to poke it in various discreet locations – all parts of the bird should register at least 160 degrees, which is done but not dry.

Remove the turkey from the oven and set it aside, tented with foil, for at least 30 minutes.  If you hazard cutting into any roast before it has had proper time to rest, you risk spilling valuable juices and ending up with dry meat.  The resting period allows the juices, which are pushed to the surface during cooking, to recede back deeper into the flesh.  Don’t worry about the turkey getting cold – depending on its size, the roast will retain heat for close to an hour or more, and your kitchen, if it’s anything like ours, will be plenty hot anyway from all of the other cooking that’s going on.

“Pace yourself,” I was told as I picked up my badge at the registration desk for this summer’s Fancy Food Show.  Truer words were never spoken.

Three years ago, I attended my first Fancy Food Show at the Jacob Javits Center in New York, where I proceeded to utterly fail at pacing myself.  Upon entering the cavernous exhibit halls, I was immediately overwhelmed by the cornucopia of high-end cheese, chocolate, olive oil and other specialty food offerings, all accompanied by the background hum of the distributors, producers, brokers, and other industry representatives wheeling and dealing in a dozen different languages.  It’s magical.  It’s electric.  It is also very exhausting.

By the time we had reached the end of the second aisle, as measured from the front of the Javits Center to the back wall, we found ourselves full from samples, our progress slowing and hampered by our efforts to negotiate the crowds.  The worst part?  It took us close to an hour just to get through two aisles. Over the next two days of nearly constant walking, sampling, and frequent stops to rest, we only managed to see about a third of the 2,300 exhibiting companies that year.

The next year, having obviously not learned my lesson from the prior year, I made the naive commitment to covering the entire show, all floors, all booths.  Over the course of three days, I hit every vendor from every nook and cranny of the culinary universe – from the largest European pavilions down to the Mom and Pop businesses selling products based on a family recipe.  On the third day, after visiting the most remote booths of the lower level of the convention center, my mission was accomplished.  But instead of feeling a sense of achievement, I felt burned out, unable to process all of the information into a coherent thought.  My legs and back hurt for days afterwards.

This year, I settled on a hybrid approach to covering the Fancy Food Show, one that would focus on discovering the vendors and products that were nominated for sofi awards, considered by many to be the Oscars of the specialty food industry.  I would bypass any vendors that were already familiar to me, or whose products I had already sampled in earlier visits.  I would seek out products that were awarded the sofi Silver awards, with special attention to those that were in the running for sofi Gold awards.  I was intent on walking the entire exhibit floor, but not necessarily stopping at each exhibitor.  It would be the equivalent of strolling through an art museum, but not reading the description of each individual work.

There are, of course, always exceptions to the “no familiar vendors” rule.  It’s an imperative to visit the Vosges booth to sample such wares as their Black Salt Caramel Bar (sofi Gold winner for Chocolate) and to indulge in what was probably the best brownie that I’ve ever had in my lifetime, still warm from the oven.  Nueske’s produces the finest bacon and smoked meat products on the planet, so it would be ludicrous to bypass a free sample.  Sometimes, you can even be caught off guard by a food that’s familiar, but produced at a level of quality that far exceeds anything you’d expect from a packaged product, as was the case with the Hancock Gourmet Lobster Co.’s line of products that included lobster pot pie, lobster corn chowder, and lobster mac and cheese that you would swear were never frozen.  sofi Gold winner for Outstanding Product Line?  Absolutely.

One of the thrills of attending a Fancy Food Show is being able to spot and taste innovative products before they hit the mainstream, and sometimes before they’re even released for sale to the public.  For example, one of last year’s most interesting new products, black garlic, is just now starting to appear on grocery store shelves.  Not the same as roasted garlic, black garlic presents itself as a sweet and savory flavor that’s hard to identify at first, and it’s starting to see integration into restaurant dishes.  Garlic also played prominently in this year’s awards, with the sofi Gold award for best new product going to GarLic It!, which describes itself as a private reserve caramelized garlic finish.  Having received a sample of GarLic It! a few days ago, I popped open the jar and stirred a tablespoon of the bronze shards into a pot of orzo, transforming it into an upscale accompaniment without any effort whatsoever.

It’s the thrill of these types of discoveries that keeps me coming back to the Fancy Food Show.  I even found the change of venue to Washington DC, triggered by long-term renovation work at the Javits Center, to be refreshing, since I was able to leave the convention center and be within walking distance of the hotel and other points of interest.

I could hear the excitement in my wife’s voice when she called me.

“I just called the farm this morning, and they told me that today’s the first day of cherry picking!”

Shortly after moving into the area, we had discovered a farm about fifteen minutes away, offering Pick-Your-Own produce throughout the growing season, and a thriving apple and pumpkin business in the fall.  While we had started with tomatoes (no longer offered, sadly), the lure of freshly-picked berries and fruit soon led us to establish a pattern, an ushering-in of summer marked by cherries, blueberries, and the occasional foray into black and red raspberries.  Of these, cherries are the most challenging, due largely to their very short window of availability.

Last year, we missed cherry picking completely because we had to be out of town for one weekend.  That’s it – just a single weekend away from home meant the difference between picking our own cherries or paying the markup at the supermarket for hardy, non-local varieties bred to survive cross-country shipment by truck.  It’s due to a combination of voracious families of pickers and a life cycle that sees cherries ripen and fall off of the trees within days.

This year, I was visiting the farm’s website every few days, hoping to see some sort of announcement regarding cherry season, but the blog remained mysteriously static as we entered the month of June.  But armed with her secret information, Jennifer decided to take her lunch break and go picking while the rest of the unsuspecting cherry-loving populace toiled away in their cubicles.  She came home with 27 pounds of cherries, filling almost three cardboard trays.

The next day, we went back for more.  Returning to the cherry trees, I could see why she had been so productive in such a short time – the trees were filled with cherries, making the use of a stepladder unnecessary.  Camping out in the midst of the branches and leaves of one tree, I made quick work of tugging gently on the ripe fruit, which popped out into my palm for transfer to my tray.  We only stayed in the field for a short while that day, knowing that the bulk of this year’s picking had already been accomplished.  A little over an hour later, we returned home with nine additional pounds of fruit.

That weekend, we lost a lot of sleep.  Planting ourselves firmly on the couch, we pitted cherries for hours as we watched movies, going to bed well past midnight only to repeat the process again the following night.  When it came time to transform the fruit into preserves, we discovered that 27 pounds of cherries never really reaches the magical temperature of 220 degrees that’s required to make the mixture firm up, no matter how long you leave it at a boil.  We canned them anyway, choosing to be satisfied with capturing the essence of summer, even if that essence wasn’t as set up as we would have preferred.

In the week that followed, I started thinking about those jars of loose preserves.  As I was driving home through typical rush hour traffic, I remembered that, when canning, jars that fail to achieve an airtight seal can always be reprocessed without any safety issues.  It then occurred to me that it may be possible to reprocess the cherry preserves in smaller batches in order to hit the right temperature.  When I got home, I opened four of the half-pint jars, dumping the contents into a saucepan over high heat.  Sure enough, within minutes the mixture was at a full boil, and soon the readout on our thermometer crept up to 220 degrees.

We reprocessed the smaller batch in boiling water, hearing the loud pop of the lids as they cooled on a kitchen towel on the counter.  Before going to bed, I grabbed one and turned it upside down, to find, happily, that the preserves had fully set.  Now, even taking into consideration that four half-pints turn into two half-pints when reprocessed, we still have enough cherries to last us well into the start of next year’s picking season.

Every so often, I’ll meet someone new and mention that I have this site, and they’ll ask me what I write about. No matter how many times this happens, I always find myself awkwardly reaching for an answer, unable to encapsulate a response into a neat sound bite, and I ultimately end up rattling off a laundry list of things that I don’t write about instead. Reading this account of the demise of a food blog in Buffalo, New York made me think long and hard about how I view myself as a writer, and how I want others to view me.

Since the inception of The Best Food Blog Ever, I’ve always regarded myself as a food writer. In that singular declaration, though, are a lot of presumptions that need to be dismissed. For one thing, I’m not a food or restaurant critic. I’ve never felt that it was my place to decree that anyone that happens to find themselves reading my material should be obligated to like and dislike the same things that I do. Words have power, and words that you publish on the Internet have enduring power.

If a restaurant has a bad night, with an unfamiliar face filling in for a sick chef, or a large party that lingers, causing booked reservations to pile up in the foyer, or for any one of a million unknown factors, I’m not going to memorialize the displeasure of that evening in an entry. On the other hand, if I have a fantastic experience, one that goes beyond all of the expectations that I had when I laid my hand on the front door, sure, I’ll write about it. In the realm of restaurant cuisine, it’s far more likely that an establishment has the occasional off night than to have a consistently bad place that occasionally gets it right. Restaurant critique is best left to the professionals, whose livelihood depends on being able to weigh the quality of a dining experience in as objective a fashion as possible. For most of us on the web, without formal training, this isn’t possible. There are too many bloggers, and I’m including everyone on Yelp, who believe themselves to be the next Ruth Reichl, Frank Bruni, or Craig LaBan.

I also don’t publish recipes on any regular basis, and in saying that, it’s not my intent to knock those sites that do. One of the reasons why food blogging is so popular is that, if you’re focused on recipes, you can count on being able to generate at least one new recipe per week, and likely many more. In the early days of The Best Food Blog Ever, I dabbled in recipe design, and almost immediately felt suffocated by the limitations of that writing model.

In my mind, recipe writing and food writing are different animals. There is a scientific, methodical approach to recipe writing, and while you may have endured many long hours experimenting with different ingredients in shape, form, and quantity, ultimately your end product consists of a list of components, followed by numbered steps telling folks what to do with them. Finish it up, take a good photo, then post it. This is not to say that I’ll never write another recipe ever again, but unless I have a dish that’s truly inspired, it’s just not anywhere near the top of my list. There’s got to be a story that drives the recipe in order for me to consider posting it. I was asked to submit a recipe that will be published in a compendium later this year, and, to be honest, I enjoyed writing the headnote the most.

With all of that said, sometimes writing for The Best Food Blog Ever is the hardest thing to do, and also the most rewarding. Once you’ve eliminated restaurant reviews and recipes from the regular rotation, the universe of possibilities shrinks to a small solar system of prospective topics. From time to time, a particularly inspirational story just lands in your lap.

One of the phrases that stuck with me, when I read the writer’s final entry on Buffalo Chow, was that “our system here…is too broken for me to fix it”. This, after enduring a meal at the Olive Garden and venting about the decline of the quality of restaurants in the Buffalo area, and of suspiciously biased reviews of establishments by the local papers. In the end, it seems that the blog died because, as a site focused on restaurant reviews, there was nothing left to write about.

I’ll admit it, I eat at the Olive Garden. I’ve also eaten at Taillevent. And in between the Olive Garden, with its vibrating, flashing pagers and Taillevent, where your bottle of wine is poured over a candle flame so as to avoid getting sediment in your glass, I will eat and write about an entire universe of food, if there’s a story to tell. I won’t tell you about the Olive Garden, because you and everyone else knows about the Olive Garden. Personally, I don’t find the food to be particularly epic or offensive, but the prices are decent, they have a great kid’s menu, and the atmosphere is loud enough to mask the sounds of a fussy baby. Now, if you’re going to the Olive Garden exclusively for the food, and you don’t have a baby with you, your own personal experience is going to lack two of the three important factors that appeal to me. But my experience is going to be different from yours, obviously. As a new parent, I enjoy the Olive Garden much more than I would have before the baby came along.

Is it my responsibility, as a food writer, to “rescue” people from dining experiences that don’t meet up to my own personal standards for quality, value, or foodworthiness? Did the Olive Garden suddenly become a much better restaurant once I became a parent? Of course not. Our lives, perceptions, and priorities are in a constant state of change and evolution, and it just so happens that we’ve become part of the demographic that the Olive Garden has designed its restaurants to attract. 21 months ago, we weren’t in that demographic. Today, we are.

The world of food writing is large enough to accommodate all of us, whether we choose to embrace the comforting uniformity of chain restaurants or elect to be the first reservation on opening night of the latest Farm to Table to Fork to Mouth to Gut bistro. No matter where you fall in the spectrum, it is my ambition to offer you the best writing that you can find on the web. Writing that happens to be about food, at least most of the time.

It’s time for a new edition of Five Food Questions on The Best Food Blog Ever.  Short, sweet, and to the point, Five Food Questions is designed to provide insight into the culinary lifestyles of interesting and compelling people who may or may not be directly involved in the food world.  Today, my Five Food Questions subject is Jael McHenry, whose first book The Kitchen Daughter, about a young woman with Asperger’s Syndrome who discovers that she can summon the ghosts of dead relatives by cooking from their recipes, debuted this past Tuesday.

1. So, are you a writer who learned how to cook, or a cook that learned to write well? Which came first?

Both, maybe? Neither? I guess writing and cooking are two things I feel like I’ve always done. I was writing little poems in second grade, and baking cookies with my mom around the same time, and I’ve just kept working at both throughout my life. But The Kitchen Daughter is the first time I thought to combine the two. I wanted to write a character who was passionate about cooking but had never used it to connect with people – I feel like food plays this great role in connecting people, especially family, and a character who cooks just for the process of cooking and not for the end result was really intriguing to me.

2. The main character in The Kitchen Daughter cooks from heirloom recipes. Do you find yourself cooking more from family recipes passed down through the generations, or from cookbooks?

Cookbooks more often than family recipes, but I’m not a good recipe-follower. I’m always tweaking and substituting. Probably one of the reasons I cook more than I bake. I use family recipes for special occasions – pierogi, Cornish pasties, butterhorn rolls – and those, I never change. The rest of the time I’m often improvising in the kitchen, either with a recipe as a jumping-off point or just starting with the ingredients themselves as inspiration.

3. You used to live Philadelphia but now you live in NYC.  How do the food and dining scenes stack up against each other?

Oooh, that’s a loaded question. But there are things I love about both of them. I miss the BYOB scene in Philly – being able to walk into a place like Matyson or Mercato or a hundred other places with a bottle of wine you paid retail for – that just doesn’t exist here in NYC. There’s BYO here and there, but it’s not the same. In general, of course, New York has more of everything – more fine dining, more street food, more greenmarkets, more variety – and I have had a lot of incredible meals here in the past year. You can buy amazing ingredients in both places, and you can eat delicious food for $20 or $200 in both places. They’re two of the best places in the country for foodies to live.

4. What was the last thing you cooked?

I made some killer black bean enchiladas last week with a blend of smoked cheeses and chile colorado for my book club. Enchiladas are generally a fallback for me when I don’t know what else to make, but these, I would definitely make again on purpose. Smoked cheese is a brilliant invention.

5. Name your favorite guilty pleasure food.

Combos, no question. The cracker and cheddar (well, “cheddar”) kind.

Once the exclusive province of fine dining kitchens and chefs whose names rhyme with ‘Lommus Beller’, sous vide cooking has recently emerged as a viable (albeit not inexpensive) option for the home kitchen.  The technique, which involves placing food in a vacuum-sealed pouch, then immersing it into a water bath at a precisely-controlled temperature, has become such a staple of reality cooking television shows that it’s easy to perceive the process as something so complex, so prone to error, that it’s best left up to the professionals.  But that simply isn’t true.

As 2010 drew to a close, I received an email from Frank Hsu, an entrepreneur based out of Toronto who heads up a company named Fresh Meals Solutions, the manufacturer of a sous vide system called Fresh Meals Magic.  Frank was kind enough to provide me with a Fresh Meals Magic setup, which consists of an immersion heater, a Sous Vide Magic controller, an air pump, and a large 18 liter plastic bucket.  It’s far from pretty, but it works well, and the Fresh Meals Magic system offers a scalable solution that’s not limited by the size of a fixed container.  And did I mention that it costs less than the Sous Vide Supreme, the more widely known market leader in sous vide products for the home?  More on that later.

Since receiving the Fresh Meals Magic system, I’ve dedicated myself to preparing nearly every protein imaginable using the sous vide technique.  Starting with eggs, then progressing to steak, chicken, pork, and fish, I’ve accumulated a ton of notes detailing technique, rules of thumb, pitfalls, and other nuggets of wisdom.  After considerable delay, I finally feel confident in sharing them with you.  There’s only one problem – it’s a boatload of brain-bits that can’t be dumped en masse on an unsuspecting blog-reading populace.

The topic of sous vide cooking is far too vast to address adequately in a single entry, and it wouldn’t be fair to those of you who find yourselves on The Best Food Blog Ever seeking knowledge on how to properly sous vide a specific kind of food.  This is why, from this point forward, you’ll begin to see more discussion about specific dishes that use the sous vide technique.  Have I tried to sous vide eggs?  Yes.  Did I like the outcome?  Eh.  What’s my favorite dish to prepare sous vide?  You’d be surprised.

From a practical standpoint, sous vide cooking is no more complicated than boiling, except everything occurs at a much lower temperature.  Here’s the elevator pitch – the entire point of cooking is to bring the internal temperature of your food up to a certain level, whether that be the temperature associated with a medium-rare steak or a minimum safe temperature to ensure that your chicken breast doesn’t make you sick.  Every technique that you would implement in the kitchen involves the application of heat that cooks your protein from the outside-in.  That’s why even the most perfectly cooked steak will come off of the grill or saute pan with a margin of over-doneness surrounding the medium-rare core.  It’s the reason why it’s hard to cook those ultra-thick pork chops that lovingly beckoned you to free them from their glass case at the market.

The magic of the sous vide technique is this – your food still cooks from the outside-in, but since you’ve placed the food into a water bath at a set temperature, your food will never cook past that temperature, no matter how long you leave it in the water.  A steak cooked to medium-rare has an internal temperature of between 130 and 135 degrees.  Set your sous vide setup to maintain that temperature, hold the meat in the water bath long enough, and you will be assured of having a medium-rare steak on your table for dinner that is exactly medium rare from edge to edge.  That’s the essence and simplicity of sous vide.

Beyond precise control over the outcome of your meal, sous vide also offers the unique opportunity to experiment with foods in a way that would be impossible to do in a safe manner using any other technique.  Take chicken, for example – we’ve been trained to cook chicken to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, which is the temperature at which harmful bacteria dies.  A lot of cooks, just to be safe, will bring their chicken to even higher temperatures just to achieve greater reassurance.  But once the internal temperature of chicken exceeds a certain level, the proteins begin to change, water is expelled, and your dinner begins its transformation into a dried-out, overcooked mistake.

With sous vide, you don’t have to cook your chicken to 160 degrees.  While it’s true that bacteria dies at 160 degrees, what isn’t often mentioned is that 160 degrees is the temperature required to kill bacteria instantly.  At lower temperatures, it just takes longer for the bacteria to die.   With the constant temperature control that’s available with sous vide, it’s entirely possible to hold any protein at a set temperature for the appropriate duration required to eliminate the risk of bacteria.  You have, most assuredly, heard of this before.  It’s called pasteurization.

Is there a downside to the sous vide technique?  Well, for one thing, most food looks horrible when it emerges from its time in the bath – chicken looks boiled, and beef has an unappealing grey character that reminds one of bad school cafeteria lunches.  But it’s nothing that a quick sear in a hot pan with the fat of your choice can’t repair.

Also, you have to make some adjustments to the way that you season your food if you intend on cooking it sous vide.  Fresh garlic, which is typically the first ingredient to hit the chopping block in my kitchen, is out – the vacuum seal locks in and intensifies flavors, so garlic would overwhelm, in a bad way.  The same is true, in my case, with fresh pepper – while many sous vide recipes call for salt and freshly-ground pepper, I find that the sous vide technique tends to bring out a variety of bitter and generally unpleasant notes from my Tellicherry peppercorns.  Generally, any ingredient that should be kept out of the vacuum seal during the sous vide process can be added later during the pan-sear, or as part of a sauce.

So, after all of that, let’s talk about the Sous Vide Magic setup by Fresh Meals Solutions.

The Fresh Meals Magic sous vide system consists of a Sous Vide Magic controller, an air pump, an immersion heater/bubbler, and a 18 liter clear plastic bucket.  The bucket holds your water, into which you place your vacuum-sealed pouches of food.  The immersion heater rests in the bucket and is cycled on and off by the controller box in order to maintain a constant temperature.  A small sensor plugs into the back of the controller, with the other end resting in the water and providing constant temperature readings.  The air pump, which is the same pump that you would find in an aquarium shop, ensures that a stream of bubbles circulates throughout the water, eliminating hotspots.  There are a few connections to make, but it quickly becomes second nature after you’ve done it once or twice.

To get started, just plug the Sous Vide Magic controller into a power outlet, flip the switch, and program in your desired temperature.  At any given time, you can glance at the readout on the front of the unit and see the current water temperature, as well as the target temperature.  Using hot tap water, which comes out of my kitchen faucet at around 105 degrees, it usually took about 15 to 20 minutes for the water to reach target.  During this time, you season your food and vacuum seal it using a FoodSaver device.  Once the water bath is ready, place your bags into the water and leave them there for at least the minimum suggested cooking time, which varies depending on the protein you are using and its size.  When you are ready to serve, cut open the bags and give the contents a quick sear in a hot pan.

I mentioned that one of the benefits of the Sous Vide Magic system over other alternatives is its scalability.  With the immersion heater, there’s really no limit to the space that you use to house your water bath – you could conceivably cook multiple pieces of meat in the sink, or a bathtub, even…in any vessel up to 36 liters.  The 18 liter bucket provided by Fresh Meals Solutions with the purchase of a kit is really for the sake of convenience, more than anything.  The Sous Vide Supreme limits you to the dimensions of the unit, topping out at 10 liters.  It’s fine for a steak or two, but you wouldn’t be able to pull off a large sous vide dinner party.

Admittedly, the Sous Vide Magic system doesn’t look as refined or elegant as the tabletop unit offered by Sous Vide Supreme, but this is a solution for those food geeks among us who care more about delivering a flawlessly prepared steak or salmon filet than showing off some new piece of kitchen gadgetry.  It does the job, and it does it well.

Check back here for sous vide recipes, tips, and tricks, coming soon.