THE GURGLING COD: The Twelve or so days of Crassmas, #4: Thomas Keller's "Under Pressure" b/w Lower Eastside Girls Club

Allow me, for a moment, to be real. If you read this blog, you either like food, or are obsessed with 8 Femmes, too, and cannot use Google. If it's the former, you probably have heard of this Thomas Keller guy. He has restaurants that are very well regarded and very expensive. He also writes cookbooks. In Service Included, Phoebe Damrosch described cooking out of the first one as a daunting experience. Now there is a new one: Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide.
I have earlier noted my confusion about the title -- a vacuum is the opposite of pressure, so it would be as if The Nuge's Kill it and Grill it focused on braising animals that die of natural causes. Also, as FOC Homer points out, there is the disclaimer, "Many, if not most of these recipes call for including...liquid in the bag. ...We don't recommend you attempt...unless you have a chamber packer." A chamber packer? Rumor has it they run about twelve grand.

Long story short? You will cook out of Under Pressure about as much as you cook out of Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. So take that $75, and kick it over to The Lower Eastside Girls Club. Gurgling Cod Philanthropy VP the Lime Spider describes it as "what would happen if Wonder Woman, Rosa Parks, Patti Smith, and Julia Child took over the girl scouts."* For seventy-five dollars, ten girls can go ice skating, or twenty five girls can go to a museum. (Lime Spider hastens to add that this outfit serves mainly the old LES population -- IE low income/public housing, first generation Americans, and so forth, not so much the Two Boots set.) Check out more here. And sidle over here and drop some coin on them. Alternatively, if the economy is making you feel short in the treasure department, there are spots for your time and talent as well.

*Which is to say, they ride on an invisible bus, singing "Horses" and baking killer baguettes.

Comments

Dear Cod's quips are closer to the truth than he realizes:

*On election day, Girls Club members brought cupcakes from Sweet Things, the Girls Club-owned/operated bakery on Ave. C, to voters waiting in line at the polls.
*For the Howl Festival, they made huge banners of women activist and artists (I'm partial to their Dorothy Day) and danced with them through the streets of the East Village in sparkly pink ball gowns.
*For V-Day, a delegation traveled to the closing event in New Orleans, participated in V-Day events, and met with a start-up "sister" youth organization.

If you want to order holiday cookies from Sweet Things, you can do so on the website - the cookies are made by the girls and all proceeds support Club activities. Tell them Cod sent you, and you'll get a special Lime Spider thank you.

Posted by: The Lime Spider | Friday, 12 December 2008 at 01:01 AM