B. Rodell

Brother magazine and booklets from Feed Publishing

It was a bold move when Momofuku's David Chang took magazine publishing and food writing into his own hands with Lucky Peach. There was a sense there that Chang felt as though the food media as it stood wasn't covering food, restaurant and chef culture in the way Chang related to, so rather than wait around for someone to start to write articles he wanted to read, he and his friends just put out something of their own.

Of course, maybe you have to be David Chang for someone to agree to put out a magazine for you. But in recent days I've come across similar ventures on a way smaller scale: The chef-made zine. I've been in Atlanta for the Atlanta Food & Wine festival, and during my time here, two chefs have handed me publications they've produced and put out themselves, small volumes of the type of food conversations they'd like to be having but aren't seeing anywhere else.

More »

Aaron Cook | AACK Studio

Wood-grilled whole fish, tomato rice, fried egg and crispy sopressata platter at AOC

The fallacy of "small plates meant for sharing," as The New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells pointed out in his blog post "The Big Problem With Small Plates," is that a small portion makes actual sharing somewhat frustrating. Unlike Wells, I'm a fan of the small-plates format -- I like the ability to taste a broad range of dishes. But if sharing is the main goal of small-plates dining, the smaller size is counterintuitive.

Enter the large plate, or large-format plate, or family-style dish. While roast chicken for two has been around forever, and some family-style dining is inherent to certain dishes and cuisines, large-format plates meant for sharing among more than two people are showing up on more and more menus these days.

More »

Flickr/purpaboo

Roast pork with vegetables ... and herbs?

With Los Angeles voters deciding on three ballot measures today (D, E and F) regulating marijuana dispensaries, here's some food for thought: Pigs fed marijuana stems, roots and leaves on a farm outside of Seattle grew 20-30 pounds heavier. (And happier, too?)

"They were eating more, as you can imagine," Susannah Gross, the farm owner with the porky pigs whose feed was supplemented with potent pot plant scraps, told Reuters. Also, they just wanted to wallow in the mud all day.

In November, the state of Washington made recreational marijuana use legal -- medical marijuana was already legal there. A medical marijuana grower named Matt McAlman provided Gross with the detritus of his business. He said he hopes the idea expands to other forms of animal husbandry, including chickens and cows.

Kinda gives new meaning to the terms "pot-belly pig," "herbed chicken" and "grass-fed beef," no?

More »

Anne Fishbein

A Prime Time Cuisine food truck customer

From the Department of Verisimilitude, or maybe the Ministry of Silly Hats, comes news from Variety that Jon Favreau (Cowboys & Aliens, Iron Man, Swingers) is starting his own food truck. Or at least he'll play a guy starting his own food truck, which is close enough, right? Favreau will write, direct and star in the upcoming movie Chef, in which he'll portray a chef who loses his restaurant job and starts a food truck to "reclaim his artistic promise and reclaiming [sic] his estranged family." Because that happens all the time in real life.

More »

Felicia Friesema

Helio radishes from Windrose Farm

California chefs -- think Alice Waters and Suzanne Goin -- have led the way in using seasonal, locally-sourced ingredients, practically inventing the concept of "California cuisine" in the process.

And so it's surprising to learn that our state placed a miserable 42nd of 51 in a national index ranking accessibility and dedication to local food.

More »

McDonald's

Ranch Grilled Chicken McWrap

Poultry is no longer an afterthought at traditionally beef-oriented fast food chains like McDonald's and Burger King, which earlier this year launched, respectively, a chicken wrap and a turkey burger on their menus. For insiders, the new items are just evident of a longtime wave toward beef alternatives.

Whether it's a business offense or defense, Kentucky Fried Chicken will be rolling out boneless fried chicken filets on April 14. KFC's website has a countdown with the tagline "the greatest day in chicken history." (Editor's note: the second greatest day in history being, presumably, when scientists create the entirely boneless chicken.) In recent years, the chain has released the Double Down and the Famous Bowl -- the latter a concoction that Patton Oswalt has called "a failure pile in a sadness bowl."

More »

Photo: joyosity

Bacon caramel popcorn

We're told April 6 is National Caramel Popcorn Day, but aside from the concession stands at The Arclight and Dodger Stadium, we're not seeing too much caramel corn in this town. Instead, a different kind of corn is popping up on L.A. menus, and it's got one thing in common: bacon. Sometimes, you can even find it doused in bourbon. In honor of this (questionable) national holiday, we recommend ditching the caramel and diving into more meaty -- and sometimes alcoholic -- popcorn offerings at these five spots.

More »

Flickr/Sakena

Beets in Ash at Noma

In Japan, a restaurant recently served an entire tasting menu of dirt -- dirt soup, dirt dressing, dirt risotto ... you get the idea. At Copenhagen's Noma (aka the Best! Restaurant! in the WORLD!!) you will eat burnt hay in any number of ways: coating tubes of leeks in a layer of black ash, accompanying dehydrated carrots, slowly smoldering around a lightly cooked egg. And now cuisine de charcoal is being served in Los Angeles.

More »

Bantam

Nancy Harmon Jenkins

For many of us whose idea of good food is a bowl of olives, a plate of mezze, a huge dish of paella or Catalan soup or lamb with couscous, Nancy Harmon Jenkins' cookbook The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, or her newer The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, is one of the basic books of the kitchen. First published almost twenty years ago, Jenkins' book was groundbreaking in its simplicity, with the book's subtitle -- "A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health" -- a promise that recalibrating what we eat away from fast and processed food to the ingredients of Mediterranean cooking could not help but yield healthful and delicious results.

Filled with recipes that read more like Yotam Ottolenghi's idea of food than WeightWatchers, Jenkins' book meant "diet" in the basic sense of the word: what we eat, what we should eat, what we used to eat, at least if we lived along the shores of the Mediterranean, where olives and vegetables and fish and grains and wine were once basic, ordinary fare.

When the results of a 5-year study were published recently by the New England Journal of Medicine, showing that 30% of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease could be prevented in people at high risk if they switched to a Mediterranean diet, Jenkins' book came into focus again. We caught up with her by phone in Maine this week, where she was happy to talk about her book, the new findings, her upcoming book on olive oil and whether her views have changed. (They have not.) She was also pretty happy to be decamping for Italy from her native Maine, where it had been snowing for much of the last week. Buon appetito! Turn the page.

More »

Chiptole

Sofritas burrito

Chipotle is testing out tofu in their menus. The Tex-Mex chain recently announced that they're trying out a new item called Sofritas in seven San Francisco Bay Area restaurants beginning Feb. 12. "It's seared and browned and braised like a sofrito," Chipotle communications director Chris Arnold told Squid Ink.

What it is: shredded tofu braised with chipotle chilis, roasted poblanos and a blend of aromatic spices. The soy is made from GMO-free tofu from Oakland's Hodo Soy -- a Bay Area supplier known for whole bean tofu.

More »