This week we journey to Monterey, California for an in-depth look at one of the culinary world's biggest issues: healthy and sustainable seafood. It's politics at the grass roots level as we examine how the fishing industry is influenced by what chefs choose to serve in their restaurants. The show was recorded live at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Cooking for Solutions weekend.
Can you remember the last time you ate a peach so perfectly sweet, juicy and delicious it knocked your socks off? Probably not. In fact, why does most of our produce have so little flavor? For answers we turn to Russ Parsons, award-winning food and wine journalist for theLos Angeles Times. Russ has been tracking American agriculture for 20 years and explains what it means to farm for flavor. He leaves us a recipe forSugar Snap Peas and Shrimp with Chive Mayonnaisefrom his latest book,How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table.
This week it's a scholarly look at junk food and fast food through the eyes of American food historian Andrew Smith. He tells how it all started and claims that between the Erie Canal and Ben Franklin our destiny had nowhere else to go. Mr. Smith is the author ofThe Junk Food Encyclopedia.
"Hunger is a country we enter every day, like a commuter across a friendly border," says nature writer Sharman Apt Russell. She joins us this week with a look at the subject through a new prism—hunger as art, hunger as power, and hunger as revelation. Ms. Russell's book is Hunger: An Unnatural History. The Sterns dine on succulent Italian roast pork sandwiches at Tony Luke's in Philadelphia.
This week it's vegetable gardening for the horticulturally challenged. Gardening expert Katherine Whiteside, author of The Way We Garden Now, stops by with short cuts to instant gratification (hard labor is not for her) and a recipe for Rhubarbaritas.
She's sensual, iconoclastic, and hungry. In the late 1960's she blew the lid off stuffy food writing with her restaurant reviews for New York, the smartest magazine in town. She's Gael Green, a critic like no other and the woman who led the pack in a dining revolution. Gael joins us this week to share memories from her new autobiography, Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess. The recipe for Danish Meat Loaf is from the book.
Fred Kirschenmann of The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture joins us this week to talk why America lost touch with her food source—the farm—and looks at the resurrection taking place, right now, on farms across the land. The Sterns are at the final stretch of the famed Route 66 in Stroud, Oklahoma.
This week we're going inside the process of how exceptional cookbooks are brought to life. Our guide is Judith Jones, often called the cookbook editor's editor. Forty-some years ago she discovered Julia Child. In the ensuing decades Judith's influence changed the American cookbook forever and her authors became a "who's who of food."
This week it's a look at how the pros decide what to drink with nearly every food you can imagine. Our guest, Karen Page, author of What to Drink With What You Eat, talked with expert chefs and sommeliers to find out what goes with everything from apples to veggie burgers. She takes us beyond wines and waters to coffee, soda and even vinegar!
This week Mary Ewing-Mulligan puts wine where she thinks it belongs: it's all about taste. Mary claims quality is second to flavor, geography is more important than the grape, and a number on the bottle can help us match a wine to a menu. Mary's new book is Wine Style: Earthy Whites to Powerful Reds: Using Your Senses to Explore and Enjoy Wine.