"When you squeeze it, its golden brown crust should crackle and even sing. Its aroma should be a little bit sweet, a little bit toasty. There should be a good marriage between its crust and its interior crumb. When the crumb is pressed, it should spring back rapidly. Its color should be off-white and its cavities widely distributed and uneven in size. Its nutty, buttery taste should be both sweet and savory - like a good chardonnay.” Bread expert and Cornell prof
Steven Kaplan talks with Conan, to pretty hilarious effect, about his
latest book.
You may have to snoop around the NBC site - I couldn't find a direct link. The man is really into
baguettes. He's given a few entertaining
radio interviews as
well, and a New York magazine
profile of him features a list of his
six favorite NYC baguettes.
If you don't have a great bakery nearby, you can
try your
hand at
home.
Bonus Game:
Balance the Baguette! (from a previous post)
posted by jtajta
on Feb 24, 2007 -
22 comments
Steven Foster is the perfect bartender. He wants to share his
ontology,
his reflections on what it means to be happy,
bird aquariums,
how to make margarita mix from scratch, solutions to the world's five most pressing problems [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5, or just read the summary on every page towards the bottom], and more drink recipes than you can shake a stick at. This man delivers.
posted by trinarian
on Oct 12, 2006 -
20 comments
A Blinding Flash of the Obvious "The city is too beautiful of a city to be known around the world as the capital of exclusion and intolerance."
He was right. Now, a 22-minute film documents the successful fight to repeal an anti-gay ordinance in Cincinnati last year. The campaign was successful because it was honest, and because it included
people of faith.
posted by tizzie
on Feb 16, 2006 -
23 comments
The making of a D-Day tradition... I immediately get
goosebumps when I hear the score of
Band of Brothers...I'm not sure why, maybe it was my local connections (
Dick Winters,
Bill Guanere,
Albert Blithe,
Babe Heffron,
Thomas Meehan,
Ralph Spina,
Harry Welsh, and
Robert Strayer are all from Philadelphia), the surrounding suburbs, or Pennsylvania), or maybe it was because the original airings took place in the shadow of 9/11 (the premiere was September 9th, 2001, with the D-Day drop occuring in the second episode, Day of Days, on 9/16/2001), but this series will ALWAYS have a special place in my heart. Everything is done so beautifully, from
the special effects, to the sound,
the music, to the dutiful translation from
Stephen Ambrose book to the screen. It's certainly worthy of the
9.5 out of 10 that IMDB readers had given it. Every year now since, either HBO (On Demand - you have to subscribe to HBO plus have digital cable) or
the History Channel has played
Tom Hanks' and
Steven Spielberg's masterful WW2 epic. You can think of it as Saving Private Ryan, but 3 times as long. Even if war movies are not your thing, I can almost guarantee that they will see the human side of the soldier and becomely deeply invested in the characters. Follow the men of Easy Company from training and the running of Currahee, to the parachute jump on D-Day, through the liberation of Europe, the horror of a German concentration camp, and eventually to the end of the war, to Hitler's mountaintop retreat. I'm not the only one - check out the numerous fan sites to BoB (forum shorthand for Band of Brothers)
here,
here, and
here, as well as entries on
TVTome,
Wikipedia, and
Television without Pity. If you want to try before you commit to watching the whole thing, I'd recommend the episodes
Day of Days,
Crossroads, and
the Breaking Point.
posted by rzklkng
on Jun 4, 2005 -
24 comments
The Snow Show! In the winter of 2004 a unique cultural event, The Snow Show, will take place in Lapland. Internationally recognized architects like Steven Holl and artists, for example Yoko Ono, will collaborate to design installations using as their primary materials snow and ice.
They already made some pretty
cool previews last winter.
posted by hoskala
on Nov 9, 2003 -
3 comments
Steven. Steven. Steven. I can't get enough of this incredibly-cute-but-I-don't-normally-go-for-such-obvious-twinkiness pitchperson for Dell Computers. Apparently, neither can anyone else, as Steven (or more properly,
actor Ben Curtis) has been Dell's most successful advertising, uh, tool ever. Why do we love him? His Bill'n'Ted vocabulary? His toothy grin? Whatever the reason, at least now I no longer have to glue myself to the television to
watch his latest commercial overandoverandoverand Dude, I'll get a Dell if you deliver it to me personally. So to speak. Is it wrong to love a fictional character so much? Is there a support group? Any other MeFites have a strange attraction going on here? I can't be the only one, can I?
posted by WolfDaddy
on Jul 9, 2002 -
66 comments
