New York City – A Photoset
![In case you didn’t see, the site I designed for Wondermade, makers of fine marshmallows, launched last week. Working from the great logo designed by The Heads of State, I created a fun, textured [responsive] site to see their marshmallows.
Take a look and while you’re there, buy a few marshmallows! I’ve been told the Guinness are fantastic!](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5walsjp7F1qzxsbgo1_500.png)
In case you didn’t see, the site I designed for Wondermade, makers of fine marshmallows, launched last week. Working from the great logo designed by The Heads of State, I created a fun, textured [responsive] site to see their marshmallows.
Take a look and while you’re there, buy a few marshmallows! I’ve been told the Guinness are fantastic!
The Table
My friend Sarah Handelman publishes an interesting zine called Not French Cooking. In her words, Not French Cooking is:
[A] zine published by Sarah Handelman that explores relationships with and through food. Inspired by Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the series addresses ideas surrounding health, nourishment and culinary-based relationships. Each themed issue explores and shares many diverse experiences with cuisine. Everyone is welcome at the table.
In celebration of the holidays, Sarah put together a special issue called Serving Forth which centers around the idea of gift-giving (a favorite subject of mine) and I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute an essay. The idea behind the issue is that each contributor would submit a recipe that would be “given” to someone else. Once the issue is assembled, each contributor has a full cookbook to give to that loved-one.
I wrote a little piece about drinking whiskey sours with my college roommates that turned into a metaphor for craving deeper relationships. Here’s a part of it:
The table brings people together. There is an open chair pulled out for you to sit and take a break from the world you carry on your shoulders. Share a meal, split a drink, break some bread. Share your life with those around you. Share your joys and your sorrows. The world is falling apart faster than we can fix it. Maybe if we all gather around the table together, the world won’t feel so heavy.
I wrote it in honor of good friends but feel like it was actually a gift to myself. It feels like something I needed to write. We have friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, and contacts on Google+, but these things don’t make me feel any less alone. We need deeper, more meaningful relationships in our lives. Some of my happiest moments were spent with good friends, good conversations, and good drinks. This essay is about that.
So, thanks to Sarah for asking me to participate and I hope you go read my entire piece and check out the entire issue (even if it’s just to try the amazing digital unwrapping). There are some great holiday recipes.
“You eventually realize that the only secret ingredient that matters is paying attention to what you’re eating — and a dash of gratitude.”
Steve Silberman, The Meal that Ended My Career as a Restaurant Critic
My friend Sarah and I were talking recently about how much we love breakfast so we started a little Tumblr blog celebrating the most important meal of the day. We’re calling it Morning Bird.
Grab some coffee or tea and follow along!
Grant Achatz on how he creates a new dish from The Atlantic’s Ideas Issue:
We do different tests of every dish. Someone will have an idea, work on it, and put something in front of me. I’ll taste it and make comments and suggestions. We’ll continue the process until we all think it’s where we want to be. If we have concerns that a dish will be too challenging for the customer, we usually address them before it goes onto the menu; a lot of thought goes into every dish before we even serve it. With the rabbit, we wondered about the amount of strange or intimidating things. But we put the course on the menu in October, and it’s still on. The response has been overwhelmingly positive.
One of my goals in life is to eat an Achatz-created meal. The man’s approach to food is inspiring and innovative.
Since starting this school year in late August, I’ve been working on a series of posters for my Poster Design class. The class ends tomorrow and I just got my final posters back from the printer. The topic of my series was America’s Industrialized Food System and includes four posters that handle major elements of this system: cloning, factory farming, genetic engineering, and pesticides.
The idea behind each design is that the traditional farm is being replaced by new methods and techniques to get us our food so each poster features a barn structure being repurposed into it’s new use. Aesthetically, I wanted them to look like old science posters like something you’d see in a high school biology lab. After working on these for nearly two months, it’s great to finally see them in their final form and I’m really happy with the results.
“Everything new looks strange”
—Ferran Adrià, from this article on his restaurant in The New York Times.
Mr. Adrià is the executive chef of El Bulli, an interesting restaurant experience located outside Barcelona. I’m becoming more and more fascinated with what Adrià and his team are doing there and their experiments in molecular gastronomy. This is the cutting edge stuff in the culinary world.
Anyway, El Bulli is only open a few months each year but will go on a two year hiatus in 2012 and may or may not reopen in 2014.
Inside the world of Trader Joe’s
A great inside look at America’a largest neighborhood grocery store:
You’d think Trader Joe’s would be eager to trumpet its success, but management is obsessively secretive. There are no signs with the company’s name or logo at headquarters in Monrovia, about 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Few customers realize the chain is owned by Germany’s ultra-private Albrecht family, the people behind the Aldi Nord supermarket empire. (A different branch of the family controls Aldi Süd, parent of the U.S. Aldi grocery chain.) Famous in Germany for not talking to the press, the Albrechts have passed their tightlipped ways on to their U.S. business: Trader Joe’s and its CEO, Dan Bane, declined repeated requests to speak to Fortune, and the company has never participated in a major story about its business operations.
My Cooking Diary is a unique food website featuring recipes by Sharon Hwang and photography by Mike Matas. Not only does every single recipe look delicious, the web design is also fantastic and original. Instantly bookmarked.
Cool Hunting brings us another great video, this time with Eduard Frauneder, owner of NYC’s Seasonal restaurant. Mr. Frauneder gives a brief demonstration on how to make an Eiskaffe, a great summer iced coffee. I need to make one of these.
I love this video produced by photographer William Hereford that blends beautiful cinematography, old French music, delicious recipes, and great typography into a nice little cooking video. The finished product is an interesting video that strangely blends the feeling of photography, magazines, and video into one medium. I’d love to see more of these and producing them for the iPad would make for a great kitchen companion.
