Germination; Food Literature
July 7th, 2008 | by Loretta |Project Mango.
Project Mango is going well. The injured seed is progressing much faster than the other two in terms of germination. I wonder if this has any implications in gene or hormone regulation. Doubt it.
Food Books.
The Strand is closing their Annex location on Fulton Street by the end of this summer. Have you been to Fulton street lately? The construction is very heavy in the area and they’re working on the street and everything below it. This has led to fewer customers for the stores in the area, which is unfortunate, since it’s a nice street to walk down to go to the Seaport.
Anyway, I ended up going there during lunch and everything was 20% off. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any traces of Anthony Bourdain’s books in the food writing section. 
I’m disappointed, of course, as I’ve had my eye on a few of them for some time. How will I ever find it in the main store? Hm. I also had no luck with Harold McGee’s almost-Bible to the kitchen/food science. Nor was there any sign of Cookwise, though I’ve never seen it, which is written by Shirley Corriher (I love her and know of her from Alton Brown’s show, Good Eats.)
A little disappointed, I browsed the cookbooks rather apathetically. I found a few books on James Beard. A thick on his life. While James Beard is pretty significant name in the food-related aspect of our culture, I wasn’t interested enough to make the purchase.
There was no David Sedaris. No Frank McCourt….then I pretty much stopped looking in the Fiction section once author names were out of reach in my memory. On my way out, I saw the Science and Mathematics section. After some difficulty finding the Mathematics section, I ended up finding three books that piqued my interest. There’s this one on Decartes that I remember seeing on Amazon.com when I was looking for more books on Paul Erdos (two dots on the o; it’s Hungarian); I started reading it today and I’m liking it so far. Of course, I’m a bit skeptical about a few parts, but I’m no expert on the history of mathematics. Two other books I bought deal with the history of mathematics and numbers as well. So generally speaking, these are math books of the non-textbook variety– they make for very good reads, though not all of them are equally intriguing.
Knife Skills
There was a whole book on Knife Skills. A thick one. I recently purchased a santoku knife at the outlet in Wrentham, MA. It’s got a nice weight to it and a comfortable handle. I always imagined that my first chef’s knife would be purchased after asking many questions to the people at Bowery Kitchens in Chelsea Market. I always imagined that it would cost me a fortune (in my mind, I budgeted roughly $40-70 bucks for a sturdy chef’s knife…) but it didn’t. Not at all. And I thought I’d get the more tradiation French chef knife, but nope. Santoku.
More on that another time though. Until I get a proper knife guard for it, it’ll be untouched.