What Is A Chef?

“Chef” is a word much overused these days.
It seems that anyone who can cook competently, whether at home or under the scrutiny of television cameras, is now called a chef, either by himself or by others.
I think it is time to stop indiscriminately using the word and return to its original context: that of […]

A Little Food Art For Your Weekend

This little dragon was carved by Morganna last night in the kitchen at Salaam, before our rush of customers came in for dinner. She started playing with her paring knife and a spinach leaf, and ended up essentially tooling it as one would do leather, in order to put the three-dimensional veins on the wings, […]

Local Tomatoes Stuffed With Mediterranean Rice Salad: Recycle, Reduce, Reuse

At Restaurant Salaam, we use a lot of basmati rice; it is the main starch which accompanies our curries, our kofta and dals. Twice, sometimes three times a day, we fill up our large electric rice cooker with basmati and water and in about twenty-five minutes we have perfectly fluffy, steaming hot rice.
Which is […]

Adventures in Restaurant Life (Or, Why Some Chefs Go Postal)

This is a post that The Food Whore could have written, and which I have avoided writing for a while because she has the “funny stories about weird restaurant patrons and catering clients” genre down to an art.
But people seem to have an endless appetite for tales on the myriad sorts of weirdness that […]

News, News, News

I’ve been busy, busy, busy.
And last week, our internet connection was down, down, down.
So, I could not post, post, post.
But then the internet came back on, and we had the busiest weekend at Salaam of the past several months, so I was tired, tired, tired. (Tired, but smiling–I live for crazy-busy nights. […]