Mahi-mahi with roasted avocado and roasted carrots — possibly more important, the Birra Etruscan Bronze from Dogfish Head. It comes cold, but you should let it warm just a bit (two bits, really). Delicious.
618 things jlovett likes Explore more popular stuff on Tumblr →
-
“The Food Channel fetishization of cooking has made it look intimidating …”
— This post by Mark Bittman (more on his review of Michael Pollan’s new book on cooking below) finally brought in to focus something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, namely, why I dislike all those shows like Chopped, etc, on television.
Now, I love cooking shows, shows with recipes and instructions and ingredients. I even prefer Rachel Ray’s 30 Minute Meals to all those semi-homemade, professional, and industrial looks at cooking. Maybe it’s the teacher in me, or maybe it’s the scholar, but either way, regardless of the celebrity chef du jour (your Boy Meets Grill, your Molto Mario, your Naked Chef), I really enjoy cooking shows.
Which makes my disdain for most* all the more jarring. When the Cooking Channel, launched I was ecstatic. First, because it gave me the satisfaction of being right. It fulfilled a prediction, which I would tell to all and sundry, that Food TV was going to alienate the initial audience that earned it a devoted following, and that another channel would step in and fill that void and steal their audience. Second, because it started with a lot of actual cooking shows. (I was also hopeful that, since it was Food TV doing this, that they realized precisely what I thought was wrong with their programming and would keep it cooking-oriented. Alas and alack, that did not last very long at all, to my great disappointment.)
And Bittman’s comment gets at the thing that really bugs me: the programming that slowly seeps in has an entirely different idea of the subject watching it. Cooking shows imagine producers, people who care about the details and are trying to increase their capacities for living in and engaging with the world around them**; shows about restaurants and cake’s that look like animated characters imagine the opposite, consumers, slowly persuading*** us to “outsource all our cooking to corporations” (as Pollan says).
Bittman notes the extremely cynical argument that some make, that it is “a waste of time for anyone making more than, say, $20 an hour.” Talk about life stripped of all the living. I really like Pollan’s writing (and hope to incorporate it into future intro to college writing courses), and I’m glad he’s now covered pretty much the whole food chain. I am also particularly attuned to both Bittman’s and Pollan’s argument that we need “to create a gender-agnostic cooking culture.” It’s high time for that statement to be obvious.
*I do like Iron Chef, though for a long time I didn’t like the American version. The original was just so far out there, like the Bob Ross of cooking shows.
**Though my appreciation is not quite so naive as above, simplified as it is for this topic. There are many perfectly justifiable and important critiques of both cooking shows and Michael Pollan … for another time.
***In the sense of the term John Berger uses it, in his excellent book Ways of Seeing.
Loading... -
Okay, we’ve pointed out more than our share of pallet stories. But this is cool, because it’s totally DIY, and would totally involve putting to use found/discarded pallets.
We recently recycled a shipping pallet we’ve had in storage into a versatile indoor/outdoor storage system, and we can’t wait to share how easy it to make one of your own.
You Will Need:
A shipping pallet
Crowbar
Hammer
Spray primer
Indoor/outdoor spray paint
Sandpaper or grinder
Wood filler and finishing nails (optional)
Hanging hardware
Face mask & protective glovesThe rest is here: How-Tuesday: Upcycled Pallet Shelf | The Etsy Blog
Loading... -
Today’s pallet porn: Wine racks made from pallet wood.
That’s three recurring Unconsumption themes — pallet-, wine-, and storage-related repurposing — all rolled into one photo!
(photo via DelHutsonDesigns on Etsy)
Loading... -
Just finished this book. It was amazing. I’m still dealing with the emotional and mental fall out from it. It was really great, postmodern, but not in a pretentious way, and unconventionally emotional in such a way as to avoid all sense of melodrama. I recommend it very highly. It has rekindled my interest in planetary conservation while simultaneously making me think about love and choice and all of these things that define our lives. If that’s not a great novel, I don’t know what is.
Loading... -
Gilt at the Fashion Hackathon
Hello there!
I’m Miguel Fajardo, an engineer at Gilt. I want to share a great experience I had with fellow Gilt engineers Jose Sanchez and Patrick Losco at the recent Fashion Hack during New York Fashion Week.
Hearst Corporation hosted the event in their New York City headquarters, the Hearst Tower. The building is easily identified by its diamond-patterned façade. Many other companies co-sponsored the event, including Microsoft, Spotify, Okta, HTC, and of course, Gilt.
The two-day event kicked off on Saturday morning in the auditorium where Hearst explained the rules of the competition. The goal was to build a web or mobile application that would interact with the APIs of some of the sponsoring companies, that included Gilt.
As one of the companies exposing the APIs to be used as part of the competition, we presented our developer portal and showed some examples to illustrate how to use the Gilt API. Anyone can query our systems to retrieve information about current or future sales, including what products will be included and a ton of info about them (price, current availablity, checkout URL, etc). If you are interested, you can find more info in our developer portal.
Here you can see the team once dinner was served at 7pm:
From left to right: Miguel, Jose, Patrick, and Dalia (she joined our team as application designer and front end developer).
Our idea was to use a city selected by the user and the current local weather to show trends in the form of relevant clothing and accessories from Hearst media. When the user chooses an image, the application recommends similar products available on Gilt. We built it using the Play framework with Java and Twitter Bootstrap.
By midnight, we had the retrieval of content from the APIs completed and started focusing on the front end. Time flies in this kind of event, where you are trying to design and build an entire application in such a short period of time!
We had all major functionality wired up by dawn, and then it was a matter of improving the user interface and optimizing performance. We improved the algorithm to select what images from Hearst to show and how to link these to the Gilt items on sale. We decided to fetch the weather at runtime, but cached other API calls that were taking up to a minute. The submission deadline was Sunday at 1pm and we made it just in time. There was no time to rest before all the teams presented their work.
The presentations took place on the 44th floor of the amazing Hearst Tower.
The views were stunning, especially with fresh snow from the previous day’s blizzard covering the city.
Our presentation went smoothly and we even appeared in a tweet from Hearst president David Carey.
In the end we got a special mention as one of the top 5 applications.
Jose was already asleep by the time we got to the prizes.
The Hearst Fashion Hack was a great experience. Not only did we learn a lot about the APIs, but we had a lot of fun together. You can view a demonstration of the application in this video.
Hope you enjoyed the post!
Loading...
