Root Coffee

Cakes & Pastries

2009-08-02T22:07:00.000-07:00

Tres Leches: a house favorite, genoise vanilla cake, whipped creme, and peach filling soaked in three-milk syrup and tequila

Cheesecake: fluffy cream cheese topped with fruit and amaretto liqueur

Black Forest: black cherry and plum liqueur on delicious chocolate genoise cake

Apple and Almond Strudel: puff pastry with delicious fresh, sweet apples

Fruit Tart: crunchy shell filled with creme anglaise and seasonal fruit

Impossible: vanilla custard on luscious chocolate cake

Tiramisu: my husband's favorite, creamy layers of mascarpone cheese and lady fingers soaked in coffee liqueur

Parmesan and Gruyère Gougères with Jambon de Bayonne

2009-04-30T14:02:00.000-07:00

Parmesan and Gruyère Gougères with Jambon de Bayonne, Arugula, and Chive Butter

-makes 8-10 sandwiches-
A Note on Some Ingredients, and on Gougères
If you cannot find Gruyère, use Emmenthaler, Comté, or Swiss cheese.
If you cannot find Jambon de Bayonne, which can be scarce, do not hesitate to substitute Prosciutto or Serrano ham.

Please, do not be intimidated by pâte à choux. Even though it is unusual to bring a dough together on the stove, t is so easy, and actually so fun, to make—and so versatile. Just be sure to follow the directions, and bring the butter and water to a boil. After that, everything should go very smoothly, and you can alter the flavors to make it sweet or savory as you see fit.

Ingredients
8-10 Parmesan and Gruyère Gougères (recipe follows)
Dijon-Chive Butter (recipe follows)
8-10 thin slices of Jambon de Bayonne, Proscuitto di Parma, or Serrano Ham
1 cup of baby arugula leaves
20 chives, halved

Procedure
1. Once the gougères are mostly cool, but still just a bit warm, slice them in half horizontally, revealing the air-pocket within. Spread each half lightly with the Dijon-Chive butter. Place one folded slice of ham on the bottom of each gougère, and top with a small handful of baby arugula leaves and chive halves. Place the gougère lid on top, and voila, your perfect ham and cheese sandwich.

Sushi Halloween Costume

2009-03-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

We made this halloween costume for our daughter using cardboard, black duct tape (nigiri), packing peanuts (rice), and construction paper (salmon, avocado and cucumber). The pics show the step by step progression of the costume building. Leave comments and questions below!

Wall-E Bento

2009-03-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

A wonderfully creative bento artist makes these lunches for her boyfriend. Wall-E is one of my favorite movies; many kids and grownups wil surely like this set.

Via blog annathered.wordpress.com
and by kickintheheadcomic

Cute detailed scrumptious nursery-rhyme cupcakes

2008-12-09T07:30:00.001-08:00

Flickr user AbbieTabbie makes astonishingly awesome, detailed nursery-rhyme cupcakes that evinced two involuntary reactions from me: my jaw dropped and my salivary glands started pumping.

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

The origins of this Nursery Rhyme are unclear, but the following is one theory ......

Jack and Jill are the 18th century Louis XVI of France, who was deposed and beheaded (lost his crown), and his Queen, Marie Antoinette (who came tumbling after). The words and lyrics were made more palatable for the nursery by giving it a happy ending.

Chocolate cupcake with fondant covering and gumpaste decorations, and is 2 1/2" in diameter.

Humpty Dumpty was apparently an unusually large canon which was mounted on the protective wall of "St. Mary's Wall Church" in Colchester, England. It was intended to protect the Parliamentarian stronghold of Colchester which was temporarily under the control of the Royalists during the English Civil War ( 1642 - 1649). A shot from a Parliamentary canon succeeded in damaging the wall underneath Humpty Dumpty causing it to fall to the ground. The Royalists - "all the King's men" - attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall but even with the help of " all the King's horses" they failed and Colchester fell to the Parliamentarians after a siege lasting eleven weeks.

Hickory Dickory Dock,
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one,
The mouse ran down!
Hickory Dickory Dock.

You may be relieved to learn I don't really have much history on this rhyme except that It is said that the rhyme alludes to Richard Cromwell's one year reign as Lord Protector of England.

However, you may not know that in the full version there are in fact verses that go from one o'clock right up to twelve noon!

Mary, Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow,
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row

The tragic Mary, Queen of Scots, is the heroine of the rhyme, "Mary, Mary quite contrary". The cockle shells and silver bells are supposed to have been ornaments on a dress given to her by her first husband, the Dauphin of France. The pretty maids all in a row were her ladies in waiting, the famous Four Marys.

Another Nursery Rhyme .... another History lesson for you!

Ring around the roses
A pocketful of posies,
Atishoo! Atishoo!
We all fall down!

Many children's Nursery Rhymes have their origins in historical events, more often than not rather unpleasant ones!
I personally find these origins fascinating.

"Ring a Ring O' Roses" is said to be a macabre parody on the horrors of the Great Plague. One of the first signs of the plague was a ring of rose-coloured spots, and the protection against this terrible disease was, in popular belief, a posy of herbs. Sneezing was taken as a sure sign that you were about to die of it, and the last line "We all fall down" omits the word, "dead"!

Fondant iced with sugar(gum)paste roses.

Four and twenty blackbirds .....
by abbietabbie (flickr)

Root Coffee Wordle

2008-11-04T20:47:00.000-08:00

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/289415/Root_Coffee_Food_Blog

From

Halloween & Dia De Los Muertos Cupcakes

2008-10-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

Skully Pannacotta with figs, raspberries and pomegranate seeds with a mint sugar sauce. Feliz día de los muertos and Happy Halloween everyone!

what makes a pumpkin smile? A big plate of candy corn, that's what!

Happy Halloween Cupcake!

Dracula Cupcake!

Zombie food!! Red velvet raspberry cake with French vanillla cream cheese frosting and a chocolate brain Ugh!

Arrrr me Matey!! Whoaahh Hyhaaa!! Pirate vs Ninja cupcakes decorations made from fondant. Pirate: chocolate cake with chocolate mango and coconut-rum buttercream Ninja: vanilla cake with greentea and sake cream cheese frosting using a modified version of Chockylit's frosting recipe.

****recipe of pumpkin pudding****400g peeling pumpkin without seeds- 80g sugar- 200ml milk- 3 eggs- 2 table spoons of rum (if you like it, you can increase it. I always increase :D)- vanilla essence- cinnamon.
Boil pumpkins, softly put all the ingredients into the food processer, then serve 4-6; Put into the oven or boil.

Pumpkin Beeps! They're coming to get youoooooooo...and rot your teeth!

Beep-a-Boo! I luv these ghosts.

Mmmh chocolatey with chocolate wafers and that peculiar orange-colored white chocolate-like covering. Limited edition for halloween.

Hallowe'en doughnuts From Krispy Kreme. Go get me some!

Obento: Four cheese & potato perogi, jack-o-lantern egg half, orange onigiri with chicken curry filling, southwestern eggroll, beef gyoza, glow in the dark ghost pick, pumpkin pick, yaki udon (chicken, broccoli, teriyaki sauce, peppers, onions, whole wheat udon), vampire bunny cheese, pucca chocolate pretzel cookies.

Obento: Onigiri with salmon and wasabi, cream cheese, orange "onigiri" egg half, cheese skull, cheese pumpkin, kamaboko ghosts, caramel apple dip, glow in the dark ghost, brownie bats. Skull, pumpkins, and egg painted with food color paste. Egg shaped with onigiri egg mold and decorated with nori.

Halloween Brownie Mix with Halloween M&Ms. So festive!!

Shannon won her pumpkin contest at work ($100!) with her hamburger pumpkin. Yes, the bun is pumpkin with seeds glued on it to look like a sesame seed bun. The rest is all real, hamburger, cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes.

Previously on Root Coffee:

Wendy, a crafty blogger at Wisdom of the Moon, has a great post on making your own monstrous cupcakes through clever application of candy decorations. These are scary calories! Link (via Craft).

Update: From the comments: Matt sez, "I like to top mine off with a marshmallows for extra high 3D monster sculpturing."

Announcing New RSS Feed Redirection

2008-10-24T14:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Subscribers,

To more efficiently serve our readership we have redirected Root Coffee's rss feed to http://feedproxy.google.com/RootCoffee please update your readers.

Best,

Root Coffee

Too Hot to Handle: Spicy chili kills amateur chef

2008-10-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

He apparently got into bed at 2.30am and started scratching all over. His girlfriend ... woke up and he had gone. It is incredible. Who would have thought he could have died from eating chilli sauce?

Andrew Lee, 33, apparently died after making and eating an intensely spicy chili. Lee was apparently in good health and toxicologists are running tests to figure out exactly what killed him. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

The forklift driver from Edlington, West Yorkshire in England, made a tomato sauce with red chillies grown by his father, but after eating it suffered intense discomfort and itching.

Mr Lee went to bed and asked his girlfriend, Samantha Bailey, to scratch his back until he fell asleep.

When she woke in the morning he was dead, possibly after suffering a heart attack, The Guardian said.

An aspiring chef died after eating a "super hot" chilli sauce in a competition with his girlfriend's brother, an inquest in England has heard.

Andrew Lee, 33, challenged his girlfriend's brother to a contest on September 19 to see who could make and eat the hottest sauce, London's The Times reported.

The forklift driver from Edlington, West Yorkshire in England, made a tomato sauce with red chillies grown by his father, but after eating it suffered intense discomfort and itching.

Mr Lee went to bed and asked his girlfriend, Samantha Bailey, to scratch his back until he fell asleep.

When she woke in the morning he was dead, possibly after suffering a heart attack, The Guardian said.

Paramedics were called to the home but were unable to revive Mr Lee, who was lying on the floor, The Telegraph reported.

Toxicology tests will be conducted to establish if he suffered a reaction to the food. Mr Lee was in perfect health and just passed a medical examination at work, the inquest heard.

Mr Lee's sister, Claire Chadbourne, 29, said he took a jar of the sauce to his girlfriend's home and challenged her brother Michael, 29, to a competition to see who could eat it.

"Andrew just ate the chillies with a plate of Dolmio sauce. It was not a proper meal because he had already eaten lamb chops and potato mash after work," she said.

"He apparently got into bed at 2.30am and started scratching all over. His girlfriend ... woke up and he had gone. It is incredible. Who would have thought he could have died from eating chilli sauce?"

She said a post-mortem examination showed no heart problems.

"He loved cooking for his friends. He always said he wanted to be a chef but didn't want to start at the bottom."

The inquest was adjourned.

via Boing Boing

Why Tea Is Healthier Than Water

2008-10-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

Source: Lifehacker

While nobody is running around extolling the virtues of cola as a replacement for water for daily hydration, researchers at Kings College London want to make sure you don't think every non-water drink is a poor substitute for water. After reviewing numerous studies on the benefits of drinking tea, they've concluded that tea is a superior drink.

Dr Ruxton said: "Drinking tea is actually better for you than drinking water. Water is essentially replacing fluid. Tea replaces fluids and contains antioxidants so it's got two things going for it."

Many people have lumped tea in with other caffeine containing drinks such as coffee and colas, as a dehydrating drink. Not a concern, the research team says:

"Studies on caffeine have found very high doses dehydrate and everyone assumes that caffeine-containing beverages dehydrate. But even if you had a really, really strong cup of tea or coffee, which is quite hard to make, you would still have a net gain of fluid."

If you're interested in drinking more tea check out the health benefits of green tea and tips for properly steeping tea. Photo by Kanko*.

Tea 'healthier' drink than water

The researchers recommend people consume three to four cups a day

Drinking three or more cups of tea a day is as good for you as drinking plenty of water and may even have extra health benefits, say researchers.

The work in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition dispels the common belief that tea dehydrates.

Tea not only rehydrates as well as water does, but it can also protect against heart disease and some cancers, UK nutritionists found.

Experts believe flavonoids are the key ingredient in tea that promote health.

Healthy cuppa

These polyphenol antioxidants are found in many foods and plants, including tea leaves, and have been shown to help prevent cell damage.

Tea replaces fluids and contains antioxidants so its got two things going for it

Lead author Dr Ruxton

Public health nutritionist Dr Carrie Ruxton, and colleagues at Kings College London, looked at published studies on the health effects of tea consumption.

They found clear evidence that drinking three to four cups of tea a day can cut the chances of having a heart attack.

Some studies suggested tea consumption protected against cancer, although this effect was less clear-cut.

Other health benefits seen included protection against tooth plaque and potentially tooth decay, plus bone strengthening.

Dr Ruxton said: "Drinking tea is actually better for you than drinking water. Water is essentially replacing fluid. Tea replaces fluids and contains antioxidants so it's got two things going for it."

Rehydrating

She said it was an urban myth that tea is dehydrating.

"Studies on caffeine have found very high doses dehydrate and everyone assumes that caffeine-containing beverages dehydrate. But even if you had a really, really strong cup of tea or coffee, which is quite hard to make, you would still have a net gain of fluid.

"Also, a cup of tea contains fluoride, which is good for the teeth," she added.

There was no evidence that tea consumption was harmful to health. However, research suggests that tea can impair the body's ability to absorb iron from food, meaning people at risk of anaemia should avoid drinking tea around mealtimes.

Tea is not dehydrating. It is a healthy drink

Claire Williamson of the British Nutrition Foundation

Dr Ruxton's team found average tea consumption was just under three cups per day.

She said the increasing popularity of soft drinks meant many people were not drinking as much tea as before.

"Tea drinking is most common in older people, the 40 plus age range. In older people, tea sometimes made up about 70% of fluid intake so it is a really important contributor," she said.

Claire Williamson of the British Nutrition Foundation said: "Studies in the laboratory have shown potential health benefits.

"The evidence in humans is not as strong and more studies need to be done. But there are definite potential health benefits from the polyphenols in terms of reducing the risk of diseases such as heart disease and cancers.

"In terms of fluid intake, we recommend 1.5-2 litres per day and that can include tea. Tea is not dehydrating. It is a healthy drink."

The Tea Council provided funding for the work. Dr Ruxton stressed that the work was independent.

Custom Lego Sushi Combination

2008-10-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

Lego Sushi set that looks almost like the real thing, except for the inedible part. Taken from Big Daddy Nelson Flickr page, these has got to be the most intricate lego sculptures of sushi ever made. Every detail is made to look like its real life counterpart, the ikura sushi (fish eggs seaweed roll) shows its brimming fish eggs, wasabi with uncanny matching color and the ebi sushi (shrimp sushi) that looks ready to be eaten.

Check out more pics of lego sushi sculptures below.

Source: Big Daddy Melson Flickr

Five Mushrooms Searches Several Recipe Sites at Once [Cooking]

2008-10-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

When you're looking for a recipe with certain ingredients or by a particular chef, hit up Five Mushrooms, a multi-recipe site search engine which includes results from Allrecipes.com, the Food Network, Yahoo! Food, Cooking.com and Epicurious among others. Search by ingredients—like carrot celery onion—or specific quantities, like 1 egg, or by chef and ingredient, like emeril beef. You can even use advanced operators like the minus sign to exclude results (i.e., cookies -"chocolate chip"). Where do you turn when you need a good recipe for dinner? Let us know in the comments.

Five Mushrooms

Color-Coded Cutting Boards Save You From Fishy Meat [Design]

2008-07-29T10:08:00.001-07:00

Being an amateur chef with kitchen obsessive compulsive disorder, I'm glad that someone thought of these color-coded Index Chopping Boards, which are not only purty but smart and extremely useful. The polypropylene, dishwasher-safe boards are designed to be easily stored, like folders. They are also easy to pick up, with icons for each food group: fish, meat, vegetables and... medusas? I can't make out the fourth icon from the photo, but whatever, for $79 I'm getting one. [Sharesale via Random Good Stuff]

The New Yorker: A Man of Taste

2008-05-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

Achatz with several pieces of a dish he calls Licorice. “We may utilize science in the kitchen, but it doesn’t appear in front of our guests. I consider what we do an art form, and art is in many ways the opposite of science,” Achatz says.

Achatz serves Licorice suspended at mouth level—guests are asked to eat the dish using no hands.

A cylinder of honeydew with vinegar, served in mint-infused gelatin.

Tropical fruits under a sheet of coconut.

Achatz at work in Alinea. “He said that, if his ambitions were different, his condition might not matter so much—many successful chefs leave their menus mostly unchanged, season after season,” Max writes.

Dehydrated bacon wrapped in apple leather.

Huckleberry juice thickened with modified starch and frozen.

Gelled sweet potato, brown sugar, and bourbon, tempura-fried on a torched cinnamon stick. “Mixing flavors was one of the aspects of cooking [Achatz] liked most,” Max writes. “‘Since I've been ten years old, even eight years old, my life has been devoted to tasting and memorizing flavors,’ Achatz says. ‘They are really burned in my brain.’”

From the New Yorker (Link)

A chef with cancer fights to save his tongue.
by D. T. Max May 12, 2008
Slide Show: The culinary creations of Grant Achatz.

The entrance to Alinea, a restaurant in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, is unmarked. Visitors pass through gray metal doors, go down a narrowing corridor, and arrive at a set of doors that slide open automatically. The diner walks into Alinea just to the side of the kitchen, which lacks a big oven or hanging pots. Instead, there are gleaming low stainless-steel tables, ceiling lighting of the type found in a conference room, and gray area rugs. On the wall are large sheets of poster board covered with sketches, in black ink, of dishes that Alinea’s chef, Grant Achatz, is thinking about adding to the menu.

When I visited on a Tuesday evening in April, there was a drawing of what looked like a flag; in fact, it was a slice of Wagyu beef attached to a pair of chopsticks held up by a base. Another sketch depicted “edible string,” made from corn silk or herb stems. In a third image, a sphere had been divided into three concentric layers: a core of strawberry, a middle of Niçoise olives, and a crust of white chocolate flavored with violet. Alinea is closed on Tuesdays, but Achatz, who is thirty-four, was working on new dishes—he tries to change his menu every season. He likes to come up with new culinary ideas late at night, when the restaurant is empty, sketching various “prototypes” on pads of paper. He later transfers these drawings to the large posters on the kitchen wall, so that his staff can look at them. That evening, one bore the words “Capture spring. What is it? New, Fresh, Ice, Sprouts, delicate, gradual.”

Three sous-chefs had joined Achatz, who is a lean five feet nine—“Five feet ten, if you ask me,” he says—and has a handsome face with red hair razored short. After the four men had changed into their long white chef’s coats, they gathered around a table. They were focussing tonight on the dessert involving strawberries, Niçoise olives, and essence of violet. Achatz (his name rhymes with “rackets”) had thought up the dish in March and, at first, wasn’t sure how to combine the three ingredients, which, he explained in an e-mail, captured “the idea that, in certain red wines, people often smell strawberries with ‘purple flowers’ (a.k.a. violets) and olives.” He had simply scrawled “Composed dessert?” near the exhortation to “Capture spring.” Over the next few weeks, he came up with various approaches: a broth, a capsule, an aromatic bath. He works in the tradition of molecular gastronomy, which aims to take familiar foods and, using scientific techniques, give them new tastes and textures. Molecular gastronomists talk of “manipulating” ingredients rather than “cooking” them. For the dessert, Achatz finally settled on a ball the size of a jawbreaker: the three ingredients would be wrapped around one another. Achatz said in the e-mail, “The flavors are put together on the assumption that if they smell good together they will taste good together.”

As the men talked, Achatz sometimes paused—his voice was hoarse—and opened a container that he kept with him, coated the heel of his hand with a white chalky liquid, cocked his head, and rubbed his hand along the inside of his mouth. The liquid was Lidocaine, a pain reliever.
Ten months ago, Achatz was given a diagnosis of tongue cancer. He was informed that if he did not start treatment immediately he would die. “You have Stage IV cancer,” he remembers being told by a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “There is no Stage V.” Doctors removed lymph nodes from his neck; a pink scar now extends from an inch below Achatz’s left earlobe to an inch above the collarbone. He was also given twelve weeks of chemotherapy treatment, which made his hair fall out, and six weeks of radiation, which nearly swelled his throat shut, and caused the skin inside his mouth and on his face to peel. “They burned me so bad I had to wear a burn mask,” he recalls. The therapy also destroyed his sense of taste. Although it is slowly returning—the process can take a year or more—he is in the precarious position of having to create and serve food that he cannot really taste.

That night, Achatz and his team wanted to figure out the balance of ingredients for the white-chocolate-and-violet outer layer of the new dessert. The filling was another puzzle: too much strawberry would overwhelm the salt in the olives; too much olive would mask the strawberry. The violet had to serve as a link between these two strong flavors—as a reverberation of spring.

After the white chocolate had been melted, Achatz stepped back and let his sous-chefs take over. One used a medicine dropper to add lavender into the beige liquid, while another stirred the drops in. Achatz was using lavender as a proxy that night, because the restaurant had not yet received its shipment of violet oil.

“How’s it taste?” Achatz asked the three chefs.
“Not there yet, Chef,” one said.

Achatz put his nose deep in the bowl. “More drops,” he said. He stood back again, his concentration intense.
One sous-chef added more lavender, while another took out a spoon and swiped a bit off the top of the mixture.
“Do you taste it yet?” Achatz asked him. He danced around his staff.
“Not really,” one answered.

More lavender. Achatz turned to another sous-chef and asked him to taste it. The sous-chef picked up the spoon put down by his colleague, flipped it, and loaded the handle end with a taste from the pot. “No,” he said.
Achatz put his nose into the bowl again. His staff kept adding drops and tasting. Finally, they said that the blend of white chocolate and violet had the right flavor.

“I can really smell it,” Achatz said.
The four men dipped chunks of strawberry coated in an olive mixture into a pan containing liquid nitrogen, flash-freezing them. Then they coated the balls in the flower-infused white chocolate, and put them in the freezer.
Afterward, Achatz and I sat down at one of the tables in his empty restaurant. He said that, if his ambitions were different, his condition might not matter so much—many successful chefs leave their menus mostly unchanged, season after season. But this is not a route that Achatz is willing to take. He noted that he had once worked for Thomas Keller, the celebrated chef of the French Laundry, in the Napa Valley. He said, “Thomas has his Oysters and Pearls”—a signature dish. “We just don’t do that. We develop dishes that we feel are great and then eventually replace them.”

Indeed, Achatz’s rising fame rests on his restaurant’s commitment to novelty. (“Alinea” is the word for the backward “P” symbol that proofreaders put at the beginning of a new paragraph.) So if Achatz can’t keep creating new dishes the restaurant will close, or, at the least, it will lose the central place it currently occupies among food enthusiasts. (Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet: “Grant Achatz is redefining the American restaurant.”) And so Achatz is willing, while his body heals, to play an odd, new, dependent role in his kitchen. “For years and years and years, it was the opposite,” he told me. “My sous-chef was handing me food, and I was saying, ‘No, it needs more salt.’ ” He added, “Now I just have to trust them, to either confirm what I myself am perceiving or to tell me, ‘No, Chef, that’s not it.’ ”

Achatz comes from a family of restaurant owners. His relatives—some of them German, others French-Canadian—owned seven diners within a fifty-mile radius of St. Clair, Michigan, Achatz’s home town. When he was five, his parents made him a dishwasher at their establishment, Achatz’s Family Restaurant. He stood on a milk crate so that his hands could scrub the bottoms of the pots. By the age of twelve, he was a cook on the line. “I was on the schedule, like a normal employee,” he says. Achatz’s Family Restaurant served basic food—eggs, roast chicken and potatoes, beef stew. The restaurant, he recalls, was “a social gathering place in the community, a place where everyone went after church on Sunday. And it did the most fundamental thing that food does—that is, nourish people.”

Such food did not lend itself to decoration. When Achatz was eleven, he added a sprig of parsley to an omelette plate. His father told him, “It doesn’t have to look good. It just has to taste good.” Undeterred, his son continued to experiment. One day, in 1988, when he was fourteen, Achatz was whipping potatoes in a Hobart mixer and his eye fell on some McCormick poultry seasoning. He remembers thinking, Hey, I wonder if I put some poultry seasoning in there what it would taste like. The whip of the mixer knocked the container out of Achatz’s hand, and the seasoning quickly spread throughout the potatoes. Achatz added milk and butter and put the potatoes on the steam table, hoping that no one would complain. They had to be thrown out.

Despite this mishap, mixing flavors was one of the aspects of cooking he liked most. “Since I’ve been ten years old, even eight years old, my life has been devoted to tasting and memorizing flavors,” Achatz says. “They are really burned in my brain.”

Over his father’s objections, he skipped college and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York. On one break from school, Achatz returned home and roasted emu for his parents and their friends. “We didn’t even know what it was,” his father recalls.

In 1995, the year after he graduated, Achatz went to work for Charlie Trotter, the owner of the eponymous restaurant in Lincoln Park, near where Alinea is today. (“I want to be like him,” Achatz remembers saying to himself. “I want to be the best.”) A year after that, he moved to Northern California to work at the French Laundry, under Keller, a cook’s cook who emphasizes fresh ingredients and combines them in often dazzling ways. Achatz still recalls his surprise at the Oysters and Pearls dish: “Caviar with pearl-tapioca pudding? Not only is it delicious, but who thinks of putting pudding with caviar? It was just mind-blowing.”

In 2000, Keller sent Achatz to visit El Bulli, a restaurant in Catalonia run by Ferran Adrià, one of the leaders of the molecular-gastronomy movement. “Thomas always looked at me during my tenure as kind of an idea guy,” Achatz says. At El Bulli, Achatz saw foaming foods and hot gelatins. Adrià was also known for serving meals in a fantastic manner. One season, peanut butter came to the table in a toothpaste tube; in another, diners were given a plastic ampule to squirt mushroom cream into their mouths. Keller, at the French Laundry, was more interested in what you could do with food rather than to food; Adrià made Achatz consider new possibilities. Soon after his trip, he sat down with Keller and told him, “I need to go. I need to do my own style, ’cause I’m thinking of food differently from the way you need it and want it prepared here.” Keller wished him well.

In April, 2001, at twenty-six, Achatz applied to be the chef of Trio, a well-known restaurant in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The owner hired him after he auditioned with a seven-course meal. He quickly became renowned in the food world for a dish called Truffle Explosion—the diner bit into a piece of ravioli and was greeted by a burst of intense black-truffle liquid. In 2002, the Chicago Tribune’s restaurant reviewer gave Trio four stars; a year later, the James Beard Foundation named Achatz its Rising Star Chef. A month or two after that, a tiny lesion appeared midway along the left side of Achatz’s tongue.

The main risk factors for cancer of the “oral tongue,” as the forward two-thirds of the organ are called, are alcohol and tobacco. Achatz never smoked or drank heavily, but his life style wasn’t exactly healthy. At Trio, he ate poorly, drank ten Diet Cokes a day, and worked long hours, sometimes as many as ninety a week. (When a local magazine featured Achatz and asked him to name “one thing that’s overrated,” his response was “Sleep.”) He had also recently become a father: he and Angela Snell, a former events coördinator at the French Laundry, had moved to Chicago together, and had a son, Kaden, in 2001.

Cancer cells can grow wildly; they can travel through the bloodstream to find distant organs to colonize; they can take over blood vessels. But, as skillful as they are, they meet a remarkable opponent in the mouth, whose tissue is designed to withstand salivary acids, bacteria, fungi, and chewed food. “Our mouths are set up to tolerate a large amount of insults,” Joseph Califano, a head-and-neck surgeon at Johns Hopkins, says. “Evolution has created the cells lining the mouth to be extraordinarily resistant to tumors.” So at first Achatz’s cancer, which may have emerged as early as 2003, had only marginal success in gaining a hold in his tongue.

The tongue’s nerves rise close to the surface, and the lesion, as small as it was, exposed these nerves, which soon came in contact with Achatz’s teeth. Achatz’s tongue began to bother him. He felt it at night and when he put hot or sour foods in his mouth. One day, in April, 2004, Achatz, on his way to work at Trio, stopped in front of a mirror, opened his mouth, and stuck out his tongue. He saw the lesion—a white dot—which he at first took to be a canker sore. He made an appointment to see a dentist, who told Achatz to stop biting his tongue. “You’re stressed, you’re young, you’re successful, you’re stressed, you just had a kid, blah, blah, blah” is Achatz’s summary of the diagnosis.

That month, Achatz began organizing a group of backers to invest in his own restaurant. He loved Trio, but since he was a teen-ager he had wanted his own kitchen. He found a partner, Nick Kokonas, a former derivatives trader who was a fan of the food at Trio, and they wrote up a business plan and started looking for money. Six investors soon joined Kokonas, who himself put in more than half a million dollars. The owner of Trio was devastated by Achatz’s departure. He complained to the Tribune, “What’ll I do without truffle ravioli? It’s like the memory of an old girlfriend.”
Achatz wanted his new restaurant to be different—no tablecloths or silverware waiting on the diners’ tables, and no rubber mats in the kitchen. His chefs would be so precise that they could work on carpeting. He planned to cook with Cryovac packets, a technique that uses vacuum-sealed containers to infuse meats and vegetables with seasonings; molecular-gastronomy advocates say that the method creates more flavorful food. So Achatz would need lots of hot water but hardly any ovens. He did not want a huge range from which he could command a kitchen brigade but, rather, a modular field where cooks could rotate in and out of different tasks as equals.

In all this, Achatz followed in the footsteps of the molecular gastronomists, who believed that the standard repertoire of cooking—the roasting, boiling, and sautéing that dominated the kitchen since the time of Auguste Escoffier—was out of date. Chefs like Ferran Adrià had noticed that a hundred years ago kitchens and science laboratories used the same techniques, but in recent years labs had pulled far ahead. Multinational food companies benefitted from the labs’ innovations, converting solid foods into sprays (the coating on Cheetos), and using nitrous oxide to aerate them into foam (Reddi Wip). The world’s best restaurants, Adrià and his ilk believed, needed to catch up with Nabisco.

Adrià’s influence was unmistakable when I ate at Alinea, in March. The meal was almost comically elaborate, involving twenty-four courses and costing three hundred and seventy-five dollars, with wine. The food starts off at the savory end of the spectrum, and slowly turns sweeter, concluding with coffee, in the form of crystallized candy. Most items could be eaten in a bite or two, but the procession took four and a half hours. I had liquefied caramel popcorn in a shot glass, and a bean dish that came on a tray with a pillow full of nutmeg-scented air. The plate of beans was placed atop the pillow, forcing the aroma out. I sampled a “honey bush tea foam cascading over vanilla-scented brioche pudding,” in the words of the young man who brought it. There was also a dish centering on a cranberry that had been puréed and then re-formed into its original shape. The berry was then prepared on a device called the Antigriddle, which Achatz had helped design. The Antigriddle froze the bottom of the berry but left the top soft.
A few dishes were merely fanciful; most were fanciful and delicious. My favorite was called Hot Potato, Cold Potato. A ball of potato, simmered in clarified butter and covered by a black truffle, had been skewered on a steel pin, along with a cube of Parmesan, butter, and chives. I slid these items off the needle, allowing them to fall into a bowl of cold potato soup. Then, doing as the server instructed, I tipped my head back and downed a soup that was two temperatures at once.

Achatz downplays the connection with Adrià. “It’s certainly not like we’re buying his cookbook and copying his food,” Achatz said. “We may utilize science in the kitchen, but it doesn’t appear in front of our guests. I consider what we do an art form, and art is in many ways the opposite of science.”

The cancer made Achatz, always a thin man, thinner. He stands very still, and has a rabbit-like alertness—ears open, eyes peering, nose flared. He does not show much emotion, even when he talks about his sickness, so what he said next surprised me: “To me, I think we do a good job of evoking emotion through food, and that’s kind of our focus, our perspective. That’s our hope.” He mentioned that some diners cry during a meal at Alinea, brought back to their childhoods by the combinations of flavors and smells. The meal I had, Achatz reminded me, included liquefied hay in one of the soup dishes. Achatz hoped that the subtle taste would summon diners’ memories of long-ago hayrides. A goose dish on the Winter, 2006, menu came with a ramekin of orange peel, nutmeg, allspice, sage, and goose fat. The ramekin, which was heated, was meant to give off the smell that comes from opening the oven door on Christmas Day. Another creation, on the Fall, 2005, menu, had smoldering oak leaves surrounding poached pheasant breast. “The whole point of that aroma is not to flavor the food,” he said. “This is what happens to me personally when we set oak leaves on fire—I’m transported to my youth, raking the leaves in front of my house, jumping into the leaves, and setting them on fire.” He went on, “What we try to do is really search out that kind of emotional trigger.”

Achatz’s mouth continued to bother him, and in November, 2004, he went back to his dentist, who referred him to an oral surgeon. The surgeon took a tissue sample and sent it to a laboratory for a biopsy. The tissue came back without evidence of cancer. Everyone stopped worrying. (“Was it not there? Was it a geographical miss? Was the biopsy erroneous or misread? It could have been any of those things,” one of Achatz’s cancer doctors told me.)

Meanwhile, Achatz was ready to open Alinea. Things began with a bump: an opening-week Critic’s Notebook column, written by Frank Bruni, the principal restaurant critic of the Times, wondered why the bison had to be served atop a heated glass tube that wafted cinnamon scent in the diner’s nose (and that the server compared to a bong). He also mentioned that, when his dining companion broke off her dehydrated bacon from the tiny silver scaffold it hung on, a bit fell into her shoe. Bruni described the opening course, P. B. & J.—a single grape skinned and wrapped in peanut butter and brioche—as a “visually nifty riff.” He saw the science more than the heart, and wrote that he preferred Adrià’s restaurant in Spain. Achatz’s goal of reinventing cooking while conjuring Proustian memories seemed, to Bruni, contradictory. (The article did not please Achatz. Given Bruni’s well-known love of classic Italian food, Achatz asked me, “How can he possibly review Alinea?”)

Chicago prides itself on being a city with more daring restaurants than Manhattan—the city also has Moto, an Asian-inflected outpost of molecular gastronomy—and the home-town response was unequivocal. The Tribune exalted the very dishes that the Times suggested were contrived or showy, declaring the P. B. & J. opener “comfort food fit for the Museum of Contemporary Art.” One local food enthusiast posted on a popular online food forum, eGullet, a photograph of every dish he ate at Alinea as well as the average number of bites each course required (4.14 bites per course; a hundred and sixteen bites over all).

Soon, Ruth Reichl, of Gourmet, came to Chicago. In 1997, when she had held Bruni’s job at the Times, she had praised the French Laundry as “the most exciting place to eat in the United States.” Achatz had been a sous-chef there at the time. Gourmet now anointed Alinea the best restaurant in America. In an essay, Reichl called Achatz a successor to Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, who helped define American cooking over the past three decades. She even claimed that Achatz had surpassed his mentor Thomas Keller in originality. “Achatz clearly thinks about cooking in a different way,” she wrote, praising his “gorgeous, inventive, and delicious food.”
Kokonas and Achatz went to the bank and gave out fifteen thousand dollars in tips to Alinea’s cooks and crew. Achatz appeared on the “Today” show. The fifteen months that followed were a “swirl of energy and momentum,” Achatz remembers. “It was just everything you could imagine.”

International hotel chains came to talk about opening branches of Alinea. Achatz signed a contract for a cookbook. He and Kokonas began making plans to open a restaurant in New York. During these months, he dealt with the ongoing sore in his mouth by placing a bumper of chewing gum between his teeth and his tongue.

By this time, Achatz and Snell had had a second son, named Keller, in honor of Achatz’s mentor. They married in 2006, and almost immediately divorced. The pain in Achatz’s tongue continued to bother him. He recalls the time: “I am certain that I am, like, biting my tongue because I am stressed, you know. Continue on, have another kid, open Alinea, sleep four hours a night, you know, drink more coffee than I eat food.” In July, 2006, Achatz went to a new dentist, who fitted him for a top mouth guard.
Cancers are constantly reinventing themselves, and the cancer cells in Achatz’s mouth that had been blocked for a long time finally found a way to progress. “The surrounding cells would, at first, be able to slow the cancer down,” Anton Wellstein, a cancer researcher at Georgetown, says. “But, after a while, the cancer outsmarts them, having been selected over a long time to be very aggressive.” The cancer cells in Achatz’s tongue began to grow downward, dissolving the matrix that holds cells in place. The healthy cells floated apart, allowing the cancer cells to fill the spaces between them. Cancer cells also often recruit normal ones, to help them grow and survive. “The cancer certainly learned something new,” Achatz’s oncologist, Everett Vokes, told me.

Eventually, a tumor developed in Achatz’s tongue. By the spring of 2007, it had swollen to the point that Achatz could no longer talk clearly. He lost a lot of weight and lived on soup. “It had to be liquid, and it had to wash down my throat,” he remembers. He still showed up every day in the kitchen and helped as best he could, avoiding hot and cold dishes, and those with a harsh texture. He pushed ahead on the cookbook and the idea of opening a New York restaurant, but the pain and impairment were becoming disabling.

In June, he called the dentist whom he had seen the year before, and asked for an adjustment to his mouth guard. The dentist told him to come in. Her files contain a note: “Patient is aware he is rubbing tongue but can’t stop.” She sent him to a periodontist. Achatz remembers the visit: “At this point, I can barely talk. I’m losing weight, ’cause I can’t really chew. Because when I rub my tongue on my teeth it hurts. I open my mouth and she looks at me and goes ‘Woof, this is obviously not a bite issue.’ ”

Achatz was referred to a new oral surgeon, who took another tissue sample. Achatz and Kokonas were by now nervous—Achatz looked sick. He was fifteen pounds lighter than his normal hundred and sixty. When Achatz learned that it could take a week to get the result of the biopsy, Kokonas called the surgeon’s office to speed things up. “Look, the guy’s a chef. He can’t taste,” he said. The oral surgeon’s partner, who had also examined Achatz, called back two days later. “Ten o’clock tomorrow, you have to come in,” he told Achatz. At the meeting, he told Achatz that he had tongue cancer. Kokonas, who was playing in a golf tournament in Michigan, wanted to rush down to Chicago to be by his friend’s side. Achatz said no: he was already headed back to work, and did not want to talk about the cancer. Kokonas left the tournament and drove home. That night, Achatz made him duck breast with morels in the kitchen at Alinea.

Three days later, a head-and-neck surgeon at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, not far from the restaurant, examined Achatz. He was surprised to see a man with advanced cancer show up for an appointment with his business partner. The doctor explained that the standard treatment would be to remove two-thirds of the visible portion of Achatz’s tongue and sew a piece of tissue, probably from his arm, onto the remnant. Achatz would have a natural-looking tongue, but it would have, at best, limited sensory function. He might even need a tube in order to eat. Achatz says he thought at first that the surgeon was joking: “I’m, like, C’mon, this is 2007. You guys don’t have this figured out by now? It’s, like, barbaric. C’mon, there’s got to be an alternative treatment.”

Achatz and Kokonas left the appointment stunned. Though it was only 10 A.M., they went down the street to a Mexican restaurant and ordered margaritas. Kokonas could already sense that Achatz was not going to let anyone cut out his tongue. Kokonas said, “Let’s attack this like we attacked the restaurant.” He began Googling, looking for an option other than surgery.

Kokonas, who is six years older than Achatz, treats him like a bright but impractical younger brother. After Achatz and Snell divorced, Kokonas became, as he says, his “support person.” So the diagnosis of cancer hit Kokonas more as a personal threat than as a business one. Though he was often on the verge of tears himself, he tried to cheer Achatz up. “You’re going to be the tongueless chef who’s still a genius!” he told him. “I’ll just die,” Achatz said repeatedly.

The two men briefly considered seeking treatment for Achatz in secret, but realized that news would inevitably get out to the restaurant world and, from there, to foodies and critics. “All these guys leave work and go to a bar and they’re up there with the Trotter people and the Boka people,” Achatz says, referring to Boka, a restaurant on the same street as Alinea which serves contemporary American food. “There’s no way you can really keep it private.” Soon afterward, Kokonas and Achatz told their employees, some of whom went into the alley behind the restaurant and cried.

Following the meeting with the surgeon from Advocate Illinois Masonic, one of the restaurant’s investors arranged for Achatz to visit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in Manhattan. Achatz explained to a head-and-neck surgeon there what he was worried about: “O.K., I get three-quarters of my tongue cut out, what’s my quality of life? Can I talk? No. Can I swallow? No. Great! That sounds like fun for the rest of my life.” When the surgeon did an imitation of how Achatz would sound with a reconstructed tongue, it made him even more upset. Achatz told the surgeon that he might refuse treatment, and, as he remembers it, the surgeon replied, “Well, you’ll be dead in four months.” (The surgeon’s account is less pugilistic: he says that he informed Achatz that, without treatment, the cancer would “block his eating, and block his breathing, and it would take his life in a matter of months.”)

Achatz still did not believe that he had explored every avenue of treatment. Recalling the visit to the Sloan-Kettering surgeon, he says, “I point-blank asked him, Are there any alternatives to surgery? And his answer was, looking me in the eye, no. . . . He was a surgeon, so, in his mind, what you do to cure cancer, you cut.” The doctor says that when Achatz asked about alternatives to surgery he gave his honest opinion—he said that there were “no good ones.” Both men agree that he told Achatz to drop everything, have surgery, and hope it would save his life.

Taste is the orphaned sense. Even among those interested in the field, it plays sidekick to smell. “Taste is a waste, the action’s in olfaction” goes the quip. Few researchers study it, and when they do it is usually for the food industry. But such efforts are built on very little basic science. The bodily processes behind taste—how information begins in the taste buds and then is sent via nerves to the brain, to be merged with input from the eyes and the nose and formed into a conceptual whole—remain unclear. “With taste, believe it or not, we’re still not actually sure how salty works,” Marcia Pelchat, a researcher on food at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. “That just amazes me.”

It is only in the past decade that the redoubtable “map of the tongue” has begun to fall out of circulation. The diagram, which dates to the early twentieth century and can still be found in some medical textbooks, places the taste buds for sweetness on the tip of the tongue, those for bitterness at the back, the ability to sense salt on the top edges, and sourness on the bottom edges. When Achatz showed me what had happened to his taste buds, he explained it by making reference to the classic map, as did his surgeon. In fact, all the regions of the tongue are capable of recognizing sweet, salty, bitter, and sour flavors, as well as savory tastes, which had been left off the original map altogether. There is now speculation that there are receptors on the tongue’s surface for other kinds of tastes. “There may be one for the metallic taste, the water taste, and the fat taste, and there may be other tastes as well,” Leslie Stein, another researcher at Monell, told me.

But, however many kinds of tastes we can apprehend, they will never truly account for what we experience as flavor. The taste buds cannot detect nutty, buttery, or earthy tastes. They do not know beef from lamb. Researchers think that the role of taste in our evolutionary past may explain why it is such a blunt instrument. Our ancestors were hominids who spent much of their time in trees, as chimpanzees do. Their taste for sweet foods helped them find nutritious fruits, and their ability to sense bitter tastes helped them to avoid poisonous plants. But to find edible fruits and avoid toxic ones you don’t need very subtle information: cover the bitterness of cyanide with sugar, and a person will happily drink it. Taste is an easily outwitted sense.

After I had dinner at Alinea, I made a note of the flavors I tasted, among them caramel, mint, cedar, cinnamon, smoke, vanilla, lemon, grass, iodine, pepper, grape, the cardboardy taste of hay, the carbonish taste of burnt toast, the cloacal undertone of ripe banana. I tasted these flavors, but my knowledge of them, it turns out, did not come primarily from information received by my tongue. Taste relies on other, more discriminating senses for help: our eyes and our nose do a lot of the work that we ascribe to our tongues. “We do know there’s a lot of cognitive, top-down influences in taste,” Pelchat, of the Monell Center, says. The nose can detect many thousands of odors, as opposed to the five or so tastes that the taste buds can discern. An orange jelly bean and a licorice one have the same taste, as do some apples and onions. A person needs to smell these foods, note their texture, or see them in order to distinguish between them. Some estimates put the amount of information that smell contributes to identifying flavors at eighty to ninety per cent, but no one really knows. (Food smells do not just reach the nasal receptors through the nostrils: they also go in through the rear of the mouth, a process called, unappealingly, “retronasal olfaction.”)

All this might suggest that Achatz worried more than he needed to about losing his sense of taste: couldn’t his eyes and nose alone keep the food at Alinea as good as it had been? To some extent, they did. One day in the kitchen, in the middle of a routine afternoon of food preparation, Achatz called me over and took down from a shelf a maple emulsion that went with a bean dish. Prepared by his cooks, it was dirty white. He added some maple syrup and sherry vinegar, which gave the pasty mixture a tinge of gray. “See, I can taste it just by looking at it,” he said. “Just by looking at the color, I can tell that it doesn’t taste right.”

But, while smell and vision can supplement taste, nothing can replace it. “I can’t smell salt. I can’t smell sugar,” Achatz explained to me. “Those are the building blocks.” This may be why, in the nineteen-eighties, the British food writer Egon Ronay insured his taste buds with Lloyd’s of London, for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Indeed, the loss of taste can make those who suffer it feel disconnected from food. Achatz mentioned this problem when I first interviewed him, in February. At the time, he could taste nothing but sweet flavors. I brought up the obvious example of Beethoven, who composed his Ninth Symphony while deaf. Achatz answered, his hoarse voice rising, “He did it, but did he enjoy it? Sure, he wrote a great symphony when he couldn’t hear. I can cook right now and I can’t taste. So I enjoy it on a mental level. But do I wish I could taste my own creation and be satisfied with it? Sure I do.”

According to Paul Breslin, a Monell researcher who studies the effect of radiation therapy on taste, people who cannot taste at all often have to be coaxed or fed by tube, because they lose their desire for nutrition. As Breslin and a co-author note in a chapter for a recent textbook, “Taste is arguably the only external sensory system required for life.”
Flavors gain fullness by being experienced more than once: the better we know a flavor, the more likely we are to enjoy it. Our memories of taste closely approximate the actual experience of tasting, too. Various researchers have placed subjects inside functional-MRI scanners and asked them to imagine taste; the scientists found that the same areas of the brain—principally, the insular cortex—light up when a person tastes something as when he thinks about its flavor. In 2004, a Japanese research group, which had performed such a study, concluded in NeuroImage that “gustatory memories enable us to generate vivid perceptions of taste in the absence of peripheral gustatory inputs.” Achatz is right when he says, “Flavor is memory.”

In July, 2007, Achatz went to the University of Chicago, in the hope of joining a clinical trial that treated advanced head-and-neck cancer patients with chemotherapy and radiation. The protocol had been suggested by a surgeon at Northwestern, who realized that Achatz would never accept surgery. Early results of the Chicago trial have been promising. The prognosis for people with Stage IV head-and-neck cancer has not been good: for those with cancer like Achatz’s, survival rates after three years can be as low as thirty-one per cent. But under the University of Chicago protocol seventy per cent of patients are alive three years after treatment.
Still, the Chicago program has faced skepticism from the cancer establishment. Head cancer is ordinarily diagnosed by surgeons, and surgeons tend to believe in surgery. “He who finds the lesion owns the lesion,” Elizabeth Blair, a head-and-neck surgeon for the protocol, told me. But she and her colleague Everett Vokes, the oncologist, knew that the medical response to tongue cancer had gone largely unchanged in forty years, and felt that it was time for new thinking. She characterizes the historic approach to head and neck surgery as “resect the unresectable. . . . You have to believe that what you’re offering is at least as good as the standard of care. Otherwise, it’s just human experimentation.”
Blair and Vokes met Achatz, and gave him a physical exam and reviewed some body scans that had been taken of him, which showed that the cancer was still limited to Achatz’s tongue and the lymph nodes of his neck. This allowed him to be enrolled in the protocol. Immediately, he started chemotherapy. Vokes gave him three anticancer drugs: paclitaxel and carboplatin, which interfere with the DNA replication of cancer cells; and cetuximab, an antibody designed to frustrate a growth-factor receptor in the same cells. Achatz tolerated the chemotherapy well, physically and emotionally. When his hair began falling out, he gave his young sons an electric razor and told them to shave it all off. At the beginning of the therapy, Achatz’s tongue was still so swollen that he could not eat most foods. To keep his spirits up, his girlfriend, Heather Sperling—an editor at StarChefs.com, which calls itself “the magazine for culinary insiders”—took him to the Gramercy Tavern, in New York. Michael Anthony, the chef there, whose own father had tongue cancer, prepared them a special nine-course dinner of pastas and other soft foods. Thomas Keller, who also has a restaurant in the city, Per Se, came by for dessert.

The tumor soon began to shrink under the pressure of the drugs. By September, it had become seventy per cent smaller, and Achatz could eat most foods again. During the chemotherapy, Achatz continued working twenty-hour days, and resisted suggestions to cut back. Elizabeth Blair thinks that this determination may have helped Achatz to get through his ordeal. She says, “He is young. He is very bright. He’s intense. He is a bit absent-minded about activities of daily living. He is not histrionic. He is not an obsessive about every little thing about his care. Probably he dissociates a little bit. He compartmentalizes.” (When I asked Achatz if his marriage was a casualty of his career, he said briskly, “No. You know, relationships fall apart. Who knows?”) Blair was surprised to find that, when Achatz came in for his chemo treatment, he brought in his laptop to work on the cookbook. “He never quit working,” she recalls. “Toward the end of radiation, when he had a lot of redness to his face and a lot of swelling, I said, ‘You probably are not going to want to give a lot of TV interviews.’ And he said, ‘Really?’ ”

As Achatz’s tongue returned to normal shape, he began to gain weight. But two months into the chemotherapy treatment the radiation therapy began. Radiation kills all cells, but it kills aberrant cells, including cancerous ones, more quickly. It also targets rapidly growing cells, and those inside the mouth are among the most dynamic in the body, with the cells on the surface of the tongue replacing themselves almost weekly. Achatz’s doctors had warned him that the radiation might affect his sense of taste. One day in early October, he picked up a Diet Coke and thought it tasted funny. He spat it out. Looking down at the can, he was relieved to see that he had been holding a Diet Dr. Pepper. “It was the clue to the impending doom,” he says. Shortly afterward, Achatz was eating the afternoon meal that the cooks make for the staff, when he noticed that he couldn’t taste the sweetness of the basil in the tomato sauce, and that the sauce no longer tasted acidic.

Within a week, Achatz was unable to taste anything. He told me this story while we were sitting upstairs at Alinea. I asked him what this loss felt like. He stopped talking, put down his container of Lidocaine, and placed his hands over his eyes—it was like being blind. He explained, “You make yourself a vanilla milkshake. Grab some Häagen-Dazs vanilla, add whole milk. You think you know what it’s going to taste like, and it tastes like nothing. All you get is thick texture. You get vanilla because you can smell it, but there’s no sweetness. It’s bizarre.”

Achatz—unable to taste, his mouth raw—stopped eating again. He lost the weight that he had just gained back, and then lost some more, dropping to a hundred and thirty pounds. He lived on apple juice, protein supplements, and work. When Nick Kokonas suggested that he cut back on his hours to save his strength, he refused. “You don’t understand,” he told him. “If you take that away from me, then there goes the fight.”

Achatz had his last dose of radiation in November. His neck was bright red and there was a four-inch scar where Blair had cut out some of his lymph nodes. CT scans, a biopsy, and an examination showed that the cancer had not returned. Vokes and Blair were delighted. A favorable outcome for a famous chef would help give the protocol more credibility. “We are still considered controversial here,” Blair says.

Achatz was left at once hopeful and scared of a recurrence. “I always have this looming fear the doctor is going to pull the scan results up on the computer, to show me an image of me riddled with the stuff,” he told me. He couldn’t taste anything, but he was still determined to create new dishes for the winter menu. He dreamed up ideas when he was alone in the restaurant, a sheet of paper in front of him. Sometimes an idea was spurred by an image or a memory. A woman came into the Alinea kitchen to thank him for the meal she had just eaten. She wore dangling silver earrings with red beads. That night, Achatz decided that he would like to serve edible string with something red in it. “Cranberries would have been too obvious,” he says. He went into his kitchen with his chef de cuisine, Jeff Pikus, and worked on the string first. “We tried dipping chives in liquefied nitrogen to make them rigid,” he says. “We used corn silk. Nothing has really worked yet, so it’s back to the drawing board.”

He came up, too, with a capsule of pressed mango and soy with foie gras inside. This one did not present problems. “Mango, soy, foie gras,” he says. “Sweet, tart, salty, and fat. You know, it is that easy. That’s what people don’t understand.”

By the end of 2007, he could taste sweet flavors again. To celebrate, he went with Heather Sperling to WD-50, a Manhattan restaurant in the molecular-gastronomy tradition, where the pastry chef, who had worked at Alinea, made them an eight-course meal of desserts. “It was awesome,” Achatz says. In succeeding weeks, Achatz survived on milk-shakes and ice cream. The evening that he worked on the layered ball of strawberry, Niçoise olive, and violet, he drank a half-quart container of milk mixed with maple syrup. “I have much more of a sweet tooth now,” he joked. He cannot yet drink Diet Coke, because his mouth cannot stand carbonation.
When irradiated, taste receptors usually disappear and reappear according to the importance that they had to our hominid ancestors: sweetness goes last and returns first. “Before you can be afraid of eating toxins, you have to want to taste food,” Paul Breslin, of the Monell Center, theorizes. When I met Achatz, in late February, his sense of the taste of salt still eluded him. Bitterness suffused all the fats and butters in his mouth. Day by day, he recovered more of his palate—soon salt was perceptible. The flavor prickled, he told me; it made his tongue feel the way a person’s legs feel when they fall asleep. If his recovery is like that of most patients, he will have most of his taste back within another year, but there is no assurance that he will ever have all of it, and the over-all statistics for Stage IV tongue cancer do not escape him. Most radiation oncologists believe that you can radiate tissue only once, so if the cancer recurs Achatz will have limited options. “Do you see me as a dead man walking?” he wrote me in an e-mail.
Because his ability to taste has come back over time, Achatz feels that he is understanding the sense in a new way—the way you would if you could see only in black-and-white and, one by one, colors were restored to you. He says, “When I first tasted a vanilla milkshake”—after the end of his treatment—“it tasted very sweet to me, because there’s no salt, no acid. It just tasted sweet. Now, introduce bitter, so now I’m understanding the relationship between sweet and bitter—how they work together and how they balance. And now, as salt comes back, I understand the relationship among the three components.”

The layered dessert ball is born of this rediscovery. The diner who bites the food is taking a voyage through Achatz’s lost time. At first, he will taste nothing, just inhale the odor of the violet. Next comes the sweetness of the chocolate, then the brininess of the olive, and then a return to sweetness: the strawberries.

Achatz hopes that, ultimately, the months he has spent without his sense of taste will make him a more creative chef. Regulars at Alinea praised the food that he prepared during his radiation treatment. This worried him; he thinks it suggests that he was cooking timidly. “Before, I would take more mental risks, and be able to check myself with my own palate,” he says. He has called off the planned restaurant in Manhattan and is focussing on Alinea. The dishes he has devised for the Spring, 2008, menu include squab candy bars, pea-and-smoked-salmon lollipops, and hot fava beans with banana-and-lavender ice cream. “Bananas and lavender just seem, to me, to make a lot of sense,” he told me. “But I can’t really explain it.” He calls the menu “edgier.”

He knows that he will continue to need help from his sous-chefs, who are used to this arrangement by now. “I think more about what he would like than what I would like,” Jeff Pikus, who first began working with Achatz at Trio, told me.

Achatz believes that the dishes that the team at Alinea is producing are very good. But a doubt remains in his mind. What, exactly, are his customers tasting? “I can articulate it, and I can explain it,” he says. “But I wonder. When I close my eyes, I know what it should taste like, and I wonder how close it is to that. People love it, so I know it’s O.K. He did fine. But I wonder how far off it is for me.” ♦

Cute Japanese Bento Lunch Boxes

2008-03-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

Bento is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento consists of rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables as a side dish. While bento are readily available at convenience stores and bento shops throughout Japan, it is still considered an essential skill of a Japanese housewife to be able to prepare an appealing boxed lunch. Bento can be very elaborate, aesthetically pleasing cuisine arrangements. Often the food is arranged in such a way as to resemble other objects: dolls, flowers, leaves, and so forth.
A bento is traditionally made in a 4:3:2:1 ratio: 4 parts of rice, 3 parts of the side dish (either meat or fish), 2 parts of vegetables, and 1 part of a serving of pickled vegetables or a dessert. However, almost anything can be used to make a bento. Here are some gallery of extra-cute bento.

kuririn bento

Hello Kitty Pita

Bento Containers

Hello Kitty Nigiri

Eyes Bento

Hard-Boiled Egg Bento

Clockwise from top: bunnymarshmallows; green asparagus with bacon on couscous; cucumber, red pepper, feta, olives, spring onion; pasta with pesto and cheese

Clockwise from top: wraps with humus, cucumber and fresh mint; mushroom and cucumber salad; radish flower on white and wild rice; egg with pesto filling

Clockwise from top: green beans; quiche with spinach and feta; cucumber salad; couscous salad

Clockwise from top: peas, sweetcorn, tofu and cheese flowers; carrotsalad with apple and sultanas; onigiri with tuna birdy; noodle salad

Tomato Lobster

Tree Frog

Sardine Bento

Piggie Bento

Strawberry Tomato

Green Tea Frapuccino

Photo sources:
lookatmyphotos, pkoceres, kitsa_sakurako, santos, kitsa_sakurako 1, @N00, carolichan, rainjuli, bentoboxes

NEW! Bread in Aerosol Can

2008-01-24T21:06:00.000-08:00

(Click images to enlarge)

This might be the best thing since sliced bread!

Marcelo Tejedor, a cook from Compostela in Galicia, Spain, presented his invention of liquid bread at the gastronomic convention Madrid Fusion, in the Spanish capital.

The product is a "world novelty" that is presented as a mix in an aerosol can, similar to those used for whipped cream. The contents are sprayed onto a pan, baked in an oven for a few minutes and voilá, the bread is hot fresh and ready to eat.

The cook demonstrated the product's features at Madrid Fusion by preparing an empanada de berberechos, a traditional Galician dish consisting of a pastry stuffed with cockles (mollusk) .

Marcelo substituted the cockles' water with an ajada (a Galician paste or sauce made with garlic, potatoes, eggs and olive oil), then he cooked the bread inside the can and, finally, dressed the dish with kelp oil and a salty meringue.

La Voz de Galicia (Link): El compostelano Marcelo Tejedor presenta el pan líquido en aerosol

La Voz de Galicia (Link): Entrevista Marcelo Tejedor

A Unified Theory of Sandwich Physics

2008-01-10T08:04:00.000-08:00

There is a method to it all, and sandwiches are not the exception.

Grilled cheese and PB&J (peanut butter and jelly for the uninitiated) sandwiches have been staples for young children everywhere, and part of the recipe repertoire of anyone who has the biological need to eat, from babbling babies to potheads to the most illustrious members of our society.

But there are many more wonders in the sandwich horizon - a plethora of deliciousness delicately stacked between two (or more) pieces of bread.

You can make a sandwich of just about anything; the possibilities of bread and ingredient combinations are quite literally endless...just take a look at this short list: Bacon butty, Butterbrot, Banh Mi, Barros Jarpa, Barros Luco, BLT, Caprese, Cheesesteak, Choripán, Club sandwich, Croque-monsieur , Fluffernutter, Grilled cheese, Gyros, Hamburger, Happy Waitress, Hero sandwich, Hoagie, Hot dog, Tuna melt, Muffuletta, Panini, Po' boy, Reuben sandwich, Sloppy Joe, Submarine sandwich, Torta, Treble- or triple-decker
Tuna Salad .... and these are just the most popular ones, or the ones people have agreed to name. WOW!

Oh I know what you are thinking:

"How is it possible that there be so many combinations of ingredients yet so much simplicity, each a perfectly balanced culinary masterpiece waiting to explode in a million particles of exquisite taste and aroma?"

"How can I, wretched little me devoid of the smallest ounce of food-preparing ability, ever even aspire to understand, let alone master, the secrets of such wonderful craft?" [hyperventilation, cold sweat, abundant salivation]

Let us take a deep breath now. Please don't let this sudden wave of choices and mouth-watering goodness overwhelm you.

As I said before, there is a method... a secret formula for which great women and men have embarked on many a dangerous quest across the ages to obtain what I am about to reveal to you today: A Unified Theory of Sandwich Physics (UTSP or ootspee)

Needless to say, this knowledge will open doors for you, bring fortune, fame and the attention of the opposite sex, or that for which you have a preference or appetite. Just remember that with this GREAT power comes great responsibility...use it for good, not evil.

With that said I bestow upon you the four elements of ...

A Unified Theory of Sandwich Physics

1: Soft fillings are best served on soft breads.

2: When wet ingredients, such as tomatoes are used, a thin coating of mayonnaise, butter, cream cheese or oil should be applied to the bread as a moisture barrier.

3: Avoid placing layers of slippery, slidy substances next to one another.

4: Never, ever use a bread you wouldn't eat on its own.

Now take a minute to digest this revelation.

And now some challenges to test your new skill:

CUBAN SANDWICH (SANDWICH CUBANO)
4 hoagie rolls
2 tablespoons yellow mustard
1/4 pound baked ham, thinly sliced
1/4 pound roast pork, thinly sliced
1/4 pound provolone cheese, thinly sliced
10 thin dill pickle slices, approximately
2 whole pickles
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, room temperature

Slice the bread horizontally in half, leaving 1 edge intact. Lay the bread open and spread each side with the mustard. Divide the ingredients evenly among the slices of roll. Start with the ham followed by the pork, cheese, and dill pickles. Bring the tops and bottoms together.

Heat your panini maker or sandwich press. Butter each side of the press. Place the sandwiches inside, press down and grill until the cheese is melted and the bread is flat and browned, approximately 10 minutes. If you don't have a sandwich press, you can heat 6 fireplace bricks wrapped in foil, in a 500 degrees F oven for 1 hour and then press the sandwich between them for 10 minutes. Serve warm.

PAN BAGNAT
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 baguette, approximately 16 to 18 inches long
12 ounces canned tuna packed in oil or water, drained and crumbled
1 small green pepper, sliced into rings
1 small red onion, sliced into rings
2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced
1 cup chopped kalamata olives
1 tomato, thinly sliced

In a small mixing bowl, whisk together the red wine vinegar, mustard, salt, and pepper. While continuing to whisk, gradually add the olive oil. Whisk until an emulsion forms. Set aside.

Slice the baguette horizontally into 2 pieces. Tear out some of the soft bread in the center of each side, making a slight well in the bread. Place the tuna, green pepper, red onion, hard-boiled eggs, olives, and tomato on the bottom side of the bread in that order. Drizzle the vinaigrette over the vegetables, top with the second piece of bread, and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Let stand at room temperature for 2 hours before serving.

Cut into 4 sandwiches and serve.

More Sandwich Styles (Link).

Cute Pink Cupkakes Galore!

2008-01-08T16:42:00.000-08:00

I know what my Valentine's getting this year... a batch of these deliciously pink cupcakes. White chocolate, strawberry, rainbow candy, spongy goodness, all quite delectable. Bon Appetit!

1. Pink Cupcake, 2. strawberry cupcake 2, 3. Pink Cupcakes, 4. Pink cupcakes, 5. pink trio cupcakes, 6. So Pink And Girly, 7. Pink multi-decorated cupcake, 8. pink heart cupcakes 3066, 9. rainbow and cupcake cupcakes, 10. Pink & Pretty, 11. H.E.A.R.T.S. II, 12. White Chocolate Heart, 13. strawberry cupcake, 14. Strawberry Cupcake, 15. Boy and Girl Pirate Cupcakes, 16. cupcake pink

Cute Sesame Street "Sometimes Foods"

2008-01-03T01:18:00.000-08:00

Sesame Street "Sometimes Foods" - A collection of really cute Sesame Street cupcakes and other edibles. The textures and detail on these are awesome.

These bakeries are brought to you today by the letters A and R, and by the number 7.

'Sesame Street' advocates healthy eating habits

Thursday, April 7, 2005 Posted: 6:42 PM EDT (2242 GMT) NEW YORK (AP) -- Something must be wrong in the land of Muppets.

First PBS announced that "Sesame Street" would kick off its 35th season this week with a multiyear story arc about healthy habits. No problem there; childhood obesity rates are soaring. Then I learned of changes that turned my "Sesame Street" world upside-down.

My beloved blue, furry monster -- who sang "C is for cookie, that's good enough for me" -- is now advocating eating healthy. There's even a new song -- "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food," where Cookie Monster learns there are "anytime" foods and "sometimes" foods."

Sacrilege!" I cried. "That's akin to Oscar the Grouch being nice and clean." (Co-workers gave me strange looks. But I didn't care.)

Being a journalist, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I investigated why "Sesame Street" gave Cookie Monster a health makeover.

The answer would lead me into a world where television producers worked with health experts and politicians, a place where Cookie Monster does care about his health, and by association, the health of children.

The first place I headed was the Internet. On the Sesame Street Web site, little had changed. There was Cookie Monster, in all his blue furriness. He was holding a plate of cookies. He was chomping on a cookie. He still looked the same. But as we all know, looks can be deceiving.

So I searched the site for news on Cookie Monster and up popped a press release about the show's "Healthy Habits for Life" emphasis. Buried near the bottom was a one-sentence mention about Cookie Monster eating fewer cookies.

But what did that mean? Scarfing one plateful instead of two?

Talking vegetables

I picked up the telephone. "What's going on with Cookie Monster?" I asked the "Sesame Street" press office. "Why are you doing this?"

They sent me to Dr. Rosemarie T. Truglio, the show's vice president of research and education.

She said the show changes every year, focusing not just on teaching numbers and letters but also emotional and physical health. With the rise in childhood obesity, Truglio said "Sesame Street" is concentrating on the need to teach children about healthy foods and physical activity.

This season, each episode opens with a "health tip" about nutrition, exercise, hygiene and rest.

Truglio said "Sesame Street" also will introduce new characters, such as talking eggplants and carrots, and offer parodies, such as "American Fruit Stand." Even guest stars will address healthy activities, such as Alicia Keys talking and singing about the importance of physical activity.

Even politicians have gotten into the act, filming public service announcements with "Sesame Street" residents. In one taping, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist taught Elmo to exercise -- jumping up and down. In another, Sen. Hillary Clinton and the small red monster discuss the various textures and tastes of foods.

But what about their position on Cookiegate?"

Even Cookie Monster is learning to control his cookie cravings," Frist told me by e-mail. "His sage advice opened our eyes to the simple joys of a tasty cookie and now reminds us that moderation is the key to healthy living."

Cookie Monster was not available for comment. (I'm hoping he hasn't gone too Hollywood.)

"We are not putting him on a diet," said his spokesman, Truglio. "And we would never take the position of no sugar. We're teaching him moderation."

'Sometimes food'

The furry one also plans to try different kinds of cookies (read: healthier cookies) rather than his just staple, chocolate chip.

But will he still scarf his food? Yes, plus the occasional object, Truglio said.But isn't that unhealthy?

Her reply: He's still Cookie Monster.

Cookie Monster appears to be happy with the new "sometimes food" song, because at the end he warbles: "Is sometimes now?"

"Yes," he's told.So there it is. Cookie Monster still gobbles cookies, he's just a healthier version of his old self. His eyes are still googly, his fur is still scruffy and he's still messy.

Even "Sesame Street" recognizes that we all need guilty pleasures.

Sesame Street Canned Food Sculptures

2007-12-30T17:46:00.000-08:00

I found these really cool pics on Flickr; a very creative and fun way to help. Amazing Sesame Street sculptures out of canned food. I love the way the constructed Big Bird, with all the right colors; and Oscar the Grouch in his garbage can. Beautiful work:

Mission Statement: Big Bird & Oscar (photos by wallyg)
This years sculpture "Big Bird & Oscar" has been designed to address the growing problem of hunger among 34 million adults and 16 million children in the United States. It is for this reason that Big Bird and Oscar have been constructed both of adult and children's foods.

Big Bird has always represented a parental figure, giving hope and guidance to young children all over the world. While Oscar might be grouchy sometimes, he is always willing to sing a song to enterain the neighborhood children.

It is with love that Oscar has been constructed of children's food to help sooth the growing number of hungry children, and Big Bird is built of adult food and represents the optimism and out continuing belief that hunger can be ended.

NK ArchitectsTeam: James Weitze, Captain, Kevin Edwards, Bogdan Szacillo, Jeffrey Hassert, Will Tolentino.

Total Donation: 18,291 cans, 7,595 pounds

World's eyes on Fresno blog

2007-12-09T16:57:00.000-08:00

ERIC PAUL ZAMORA/THE FRESNO BEE
Pablo Orozco and his wife, Sol Orozco Hernández, have redirected their personal blog and focused it on reporting developments of a flood-damaged area where Hernández's mother lives in Mexico.

From The Fresno Bee:
World's eyes on Fresno blog
Local chef draws attention to flood victims in Mexico
By Vanessa Colón / The Fresno Bee
12/08/07 21:26:02

A Fresno chef has drawn international attention, but not for her pastries.
The chef's Web log on food has been getting hits from all over the world since it recast its mission and started raising awareness of -- and money for -- flood victims in Tabasco, Mexico.
Sol Orozco Hernández, who grew up in Tabasco, pushed photos of chocolate flan cake and fruit tarts to the side of the page. She replaced them with photos of flooded streets, dead cattle and piles of trash from last month's flood in the southern Mexican state.

Since Nov. 1, her "Root Coffee" blog has received 20,000 hits from readers in Austra`the United States. That's nothing compared with the most popular blogs, which can get well over 1 million hits a day. But it's a huge number compared to the 80 regular visitors "Root Coffee" normally draws.

Orozco Hernández, who bakes cakes from her north Fresno home, said she and her husband changed the blog's focus because they felt the U.S. media hasn't given the disaster enough attention.

"On top of there being little media coverage, there was no way to send aid directly from the U.S.," said husband Pablo Orozco.

Retooling a blog's mission isn't common but it happens during a crisis, said Melissa Wall, an associate professor of journalism at the California State University, Northridge.
Wall said the mainstream media will inform the public about a disaster and information on assistance, but it won't go beyond that for fear of being biased.

"A blog does have a mission to rally around an issue. You have a personal relationship with the readers. You get a sense of who they are," she said.

Wall, who has done research on blogs, the Internet and international news, said bloggers sometimes provide better insight on distant countries because the U.S. media tend to rely on officials for international news.

"You don't get the voices of ordinary people. ... In a blog, you can sometimes discover those people," Wall said.

The flooding that began Oct. 31 in the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas affected more than 1 million residents. It is considered one of the worst natural disasters in Mexico, according to the American Red Cross. About 70% of Villahermosa, Tabasco's capital city, was underwater in early November, the Red Cross reported. Homes, crops and livestock were destroyed.
"I'm worried about my family. I don't know how the economy will flow again," said Orozco Hernández, 28.

"Root Coffee" provided updates on the disaster through news stories, links and through accounts of Orozco Hernández's relatives. Many of the entries are in English, some are in Spanish.

Her mother's home was spared because the block it's on is higher than other parts of town, she said. Her mother opened her two-story home on Colonia Reforma to displaced relatives and friends, sheltering about 30 people in the flood's aftermath.

In one blog entry, Orozco Hernández described the destruction as seen through her mother's eyes: "According to my mom, Hortencia (Dona Tencha to friends), the few streets that are drying up are a mess: a fetid stench emanates from the muddy sidewalks and walls, dead animals lie bloating under the sun, and trash collection is a challenge."

The blog began attracting more visitors after Orozco Hernández e-mailed the British Broadcasting Corporation to post comments and accounts of the destruction and mentioned her blog. The entries piqued the interest of the BBC, which e-mailed Orozco Hernández and asked where her family lives and whether a reporter could contact her relatives.

"All of a sudden we got a call from a man with a British accent" asking for an interview, said Pablo Orozco, the chef's husband.

The Orozcos also started e-mailing a list of 200 people, including family, friends and the blog's 80 regular visitors. They asked their readers to spread the word about the blog. They also created a PayPal account, raising about $700 in donations. They posted links to other donation sites, such as the American Red Cross, the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles and UNICEF.
More than a month after the floods, there are fewer updates from news outlets and relief agencies. Reports from relatives in Mexico also have tapered off. The blog has not been updated since Nov. 17.

Orozco Hernández might resume adding recipes and cooking tips next week.
But she plans to keep the focus on Tabasco.

"It's like a big lesson for me. When New Orleans flooded, I said 'poor people.' But when it's your loved ones, you really feel it," Orozco Hernández said.

The reporter can be reached atvcolon@fresnobee.com or(559) 441-6313.

California Valle Central: "Ayuda a Tabasco" Eventos y Donaciones

2007-12-05T22:00:00.000-08:00

¡TODOS UNIDOS POR TABASCO!

¿QUIENES SOMOS? / WHO ARE WE?
Las campañas de " Una Sonrisa en los Niños de México ", "Todos Unidos por Tabasco" y " Root Coffee Blog " se unen para apoyar a nuestra gente Tabasqueña en vista de las recientes inundaciones que afectaron la región.
Este esfuerzo es llevado a cabo por una asociación de comerciantes hispanos y de voluntarios del Valle Central de California con la finalidad de apoyar a nuestra gente, local e internacionalmente, en los momentos que más lo necesitan.

The Campaigns of " Una Sonrisa en los Niños de México ", "Todos Unidos por Tabasco " and " Root Coffee Blog " have joined to help our friends in Tabasco in light of the recent floods that affected the region.

This effort has been undertaken by an association of Hispanic businesses and volunteers in Central California with the purpose of providing aid, locally and internationally, to those who need it most.

DONACIONES / DONATIONS

Pulse el botón para hacer una donación segura y rápidamente via PayPal. O haga su contribución directamente en la cuenta "Ayuda a Tabasco" 0824442982 de Bank of America.

Click to make a quick and secure donation via PayPal. Or make your contribution by depositing directly to Bank of America account 0824442982 "Ayuda a Tabasco".

OTRAS FORMAS DE AYUDAR / OTHER WAYS OF HELPING:

Compra tu camiseta por $8 o $10 dólares / Buy a shirt for $8 or $10 dollars
Compra un certificado de cena para dos $50.00/ Buy a dinner certificate for two $50.00
Dona artículos para la subasta / Donate items for the silent auction
Corre la voz y pide a tus amigos y familia que se unan a la causa / Share the news and ask your friends and fanily to join the effort
Conviértete en un patrocinador Plata ($250), Oro ($500), o Platino ($1,000) / Become a Silver ($250), Gold ($500) or Platinum ($1,000) sponsor

EVENTOS / EVENTS:

12/15: Asiste al Show Equestre de "Caballo Español de Alta Escuela" el / Attend the "Trained Spanish Horse" Equestrian Show
12/7, 12/14, 12/21, 12/28: Apoya los Teletónes en Fresno/ Support the Fresno Telethons
12/8, 12/15, 12/22, 12/29: Apoya los Teletónes en Merced/ Support the Merced Telethons
12/21: Asiste a la Charreada de Fresno / Attend the Fresno Charreada

Todo el dinero recaudado será destinado para la compra de artículos de primera necesidad que serán entregados directamente a los afectados en Tabasco por nuestro equipo del 3 al 7 de enero del 2008.

All the proceeds will be allocated to the purchase of basic supplies that will be delivered directly to the people of Tabasco by our team January 3rd to the 7th, 2008.

¡Apoyanos, unidos haremos la diferencia!

Les damos las GRACIAS a todos los patrocinadores y medios de comunicación de Fresno, Merced y Modesto por su apoyo incondicional a esta causa.

Todos Unidos Por Tabasco Fresno, Viselia, Kerman, Reedly, Merced, Modesto, Valle Central, CA
ph: 1-866-600-0742
todosunidosportabasco@gmail.com

Noticias de Tabasco en Un Blog de Mexicali

2007-12-01T21:49:00.000-08:00

Noticias de Tabasco por http://maluya.blogspot.com/:

Malu te cuento de rapidín, pues ya estamos en Villahermosa, la ciudad está
totalmente destruida el río se desbordó y con una ola se llevó todo. Ya fuimos a nuestra casita el agua le subió un metro 60 osease mi estatura tuvieron que romper la pared para sacar el agua del baño, de ahí venimos parece que INFONAVIT nos va a asegurar pero nada mas te hacen dar vueltas y no vemos claro sólo es por la construcción no por los muebles aún no podemos habitarla, dejamos a tres señores con un carcher y 10 litros de cloro para empezar y ya abrimos las ventanas para se oree pero lo peor es que dicen que con el derrumbe que hubo en Chiapas la presa peñitas se está fracturando y es muy probable nos volvamos a inundar pero son puros rumores no sabes si el gobierno desorganizado no quiere decir nada o es el pánico de la gente.
Nuestro fraccionamiento es un lugar fantasma no hay nadie ni un alma ni siquiera limpiando hay zonas en donde no puedes circular porque el gobierno no quiere se vean muchas cosas. Por lo pronto un alma caritativa se apiadó de nosotros y nos prestó una casa y ahí estamos porque aun cuando limpien uno tiene dejar pasar unos días.
Todo Villahermosa huele a que está podrido, esta horrible todo malu, un lado de la ciudad ya esta seco pero la otra mitad sigue inundada esta lleno de soldados, ejercito, policías… malu, pues se siente bien feo… por aquí en la universidad nos regalaron una despensa pero ni refrigerador para guardarla la gente luego manda cosas que no se pueden guardar hoy nos apuntamos a una lista en donde se supone nos van a dar algo para reponer enceres electrodomésticos a ver que tal nos va pero todavía falta mucho apenas empieza lo peor falta comida pero faltan colchones, cobijas delgadas, almohadas, cepillos de dientes
y es bueno saber que hay gente ayudando hay ocasiones en que la gente no dimensiona la catástrofe, si aquí ocurre con las personas que no se inundaron y viven aquí… te dejo me llego una persona

Tabasco Flood Donations

2007-11-30T09:42:00.000-08:00

All Related Artciles:

LINKS TO TABASCO FLOOD HELP SITES From Mexico, the US and Abroad: How can we help? Below you'll find information and links to donation and assistance organizations

1. The State of Tabasco Official Site has many links to donation sites and account numbers for monetary donations: http://www.tabasco.gob.mx/

2. Root Coffee is collecting donations. You can send donations via Paypal to Root Coffee Here. (Thank you all for your generous contributions!)

3. UNICEF USA has opened an account for Tabasco's displaced children,UNICEF's donation page is here.

4. Operation USA is appealing to the public and corporations to aid in response to the flooding in Southern Mexico. Donation page for OPUSA is here.

5. The Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles has posted their Bank Account for donations here: Wells Fargo Bank NA, account 599253401, BBVA BANCOMER account 2280300127, and ABA 1-2222-05-06 for deposits outside California.

6. Catholic Relief Services (CRS) has $1 million pledged to help its partners Caritas Mexicana and Caritas Tabasco. They are taking donations Here.

7. Save the Children Moves to Assist Families in Flooded Mexico, they are taking online donations here

8. In Canada, Bank of Montreal Account number.: 38748116488. Make payable to: Mexican-Canadian Cultural Association Ottawa-Gatineau (ACMCOG)

9. In the United Kingdom the Mexican Embassy set up BANK HSBC Account Number: 81408224 SORT CODE: 40-03-22. Make payable to: Ayuda Tabasco 2007.

10. En France Ambassade Mexique Ayuda Tabasco, Banque Societé Generale #: 00050752139 66 Código del banco:30003 Sucursal Paris Bourse (03020)75002 Paris

11. En España BBVA Banco: 0182, Oficina: 7911, DC: 65, Cuenta: 0201557408

12. Sweden BankenEmbajada de México
Skandinaviska Enskilda "Ayuda Tabasco 2007"
Cta. 52771020629

13. The International Community Foundation (ICF), Azteca America and Fundacion Azteca are raising money through their International Water Emergency Relief Fund.

14. Grupo Salinas, Fundacion Azteca America and Azteca America call on anyone who would like to send donations to Tabasco. BBVA Bancomer, California, USA, Account name: Ayuda Tabasco 2007. Account number: 2280300127

15.Red Cross International Response Fund you can make a secure online donation and visit updates.

After the Storm Comes ...

2007-11-16T19:52:00.001-08:00

November 15. Santiray alert in Villahermosa.
November 15. The sad return home in Colonia Gaviotas
November 14. Cleaning the Pino Suarez market.
November 10. Cattle that got poisoned with the water from the flood were incinerated in a ranch near Villahermosa.
November 15. Community kitchens set up by the Army. (Source: fotocubas' photos )

It’s often said that after the storm comes tranquility. It seems to me like in these situations it takes a bit longer before calm actually arrives.

This week communication with my folks has been easier; now I know things are moving forward slowly – the government has been implementing a strong preventive vaccine operation so that another tragedy (epidemic) doesn’t breakout. Although the city is still topsy-turvy; it even smells worse than during the first days of the floods because of all the stuff decomposing: food, all kinds of trash, animals, and, unfortunately, some people that passed away.

The water levels have receded almost entirely exposing a dismal landscape for everyone (both those who lost and those who didn’t). Some parts of the city are still flooded (Gaviotas and Lima), as well as some rancherias and municipalities.

Do people still need help? – OF COURSE! They still do!

But why if they can go back to their homes now? – And in what condition do you think they’ll find their houses? Unfortunately … in very bad shape. And how are they going to rebuild if their jobs were also flooded? With what money will they buy supplies, food and medicine? Here we are certainly talking about half the population that’s still in this situation.

I’ve collected many stories in my mind, both good and bad, in which the best and worst of human nature is exposed. I’ll focus on the positive. One such story of extreme resiliency is the single mother and her 5-year-old daughter that lived in a small hut made of wood and corrugated metal. They were actually happy to see that half of their things had been spared. However, the mother, who’s a waitress in one of the flooded downtown restaurants, is out of work because that business literally went under. But when the reporter asked her what she was going to do, she very confidently and full of optimism replied: “Tabasco might have flooded, but I didn’t”. She has some food for the time being thanks to the aid that has come in.

Another story is the one of the old lady that couldn’t leave her home in time, and not because she wanted to protect her belongings, but because her husband is in a vegetative state and she couldn’t drag him out by herself. How did they stay safe? They used-up the little food they had stored and the she raised her husband on a hammock above water so that he would stay dry. They survived and now they’re doing better.

My mom, my brother and all those I know tell me that the people helped each other out a lot; that was what helped everyone keep safe, and, sure, the government has done their part. Of course some rotten things also went down – there’s always going to be some thief or weasel that will try to take advantage of people. But we can’t generalize and say it was total chaos; then Tabasco would have been in worse shape. On the contrary, I can gladly say that thanks to the solidarity and good faith of the people they are on their way to recovery. I don’t know how long this will take, but it’s our job that this issue is not forgotten and that help keeps coming in.

I have an aunt in Vancouver, Canada named Xochitl who is teaming-up with some of her friends to send a trailer-full of household items to Tabasco. Here in the U.S. there’s a group of people that have contacted me (whom I owe infinite thanks and my sincere appreciation) that are trying to send some items as well. The only concern is whether this aid will be able to cross the border freely. I sure hope so.

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Se dice que después de la tormenta viene la calma. A mi más bien me parece que en este tipo de situaciones la calma tarda en llegar. En esta semana la comunicación con mi gente ha sido mas fluida, sé que las cosas avanzan lentamente; por ejemplo, el gobierno está implementado un fuerte operativo de vacunas preventivas para que no haya otra tragedia (epidemias). Claro está que la ciudad se encuentra de cabeza, incluso huele peor que durante los primeros días de las inundaciones por todo lo que se descompuso: comida, materiales de todo tipo, animales y, por desgracia, personas.

El agua ha bajado casi en su totalidad dejando un panorama desolador para todos (tanto el que perdió como el que no). Hay algunas colonias que aun siguen inundadas (Gaviotas y la Lima), también algunas rancherías y municipios.

¿Que si la gente aun ocupa ayuda? ¡CLARO! Aun la necesitan.

¿Por qué si ya pueden regresar a sus casas? ¿Y como creen que encuentren sus casa? En mal estado. ¿Y cómo la arreglaran si aun no pueden regresar a sus trabajos que también se fueron al agua? ¿con que dinero comprarán sus medicinas? Ciertamente estamos hablando de la mitad de la población que se encuentra en esta situación.

En mi mente se han recopilado muchas historias, buenas y malas, en las cuales sale lo mejor y lo peor del ser humano. Hubo una que se me hizo de extrema fortaleza: la de una mama soltera con su hija de 5 anos. Ellas viven en una cuartito de madera y techo de aluminio, llegaron y con alegría vieron que la mitad de sus cosas estaban bien. Sin embargo, la madre (que es mesera en la zona del Centro) ya no tiene trabajo por que este se inundó y fue perdida total. Pero ella mantiene el optimismo y lo expreso así: "Tabasco se inundó pero yo no". Por ahora puede comer gracias a que aun se distribuye despensa.

Otra historia linda fue la de una viejita que no pudo dejar su casa, y no por proteger sus cosas, sino por que su esposo esta como un vegetal y ella sola no lo pudo sacar. ¿Cómo se mantuvieron a salvo? Pues con la poca comida que les quedó y por que ella alzo a su viejito con la hamaca para que este no se mojara. Sobrevivieron y ahora se encuentran mejor.

Mi mama, mi hermano y todo el que conozco me dice que se apoyaron mucho entre la población, que eso fue lo que ayudo a que todos estuvieran mas seguros, y claro está, el gobierno también ha puesto de su parte. Por supuesto hay cosas no muy buenas - robos, gente aprovechada - siempre pasa eso. No se puede generalizar y decir que todo era caos; si fuera así Tabasco estaría peor, al contrario, con gusto puedo decir que gracias a la solidaridad y buena fe se están recuperando. No sé cuanto tiempo tardarán pero espero que aun no se olvide la noticia y se siga ayudando.

Tengo una tía en Canadá llamada Xochitl que junto con otros amigos ha mandado un trailer lleno de artículos para el hogar. Aquí en E.U. hay un grupo de personas que (al cual les agradezco infinitamente) que llevarán ayuda también. El único pendiente es si esta ayuda podrá cruzar la frontera libremente.

Vínculos externos
Fresnte a la Crisis en Tabasco: Resultados de la encuesta telefónica nacional GEA-ISA
“En Tabasco, las mayores lluvias en 47 años”, Investigación y Desarrollo, enero de 2000.
“La tragedia se pudo evitar: ONU”, Milenio, 4 de noviembre de 2007.
Pardiñas, Jonathan, “Granier previó la tragedia; nadie le hizo caso”, Milenio, 5 de noviembre de 2007.
Zepeda Patterson, Jorge, “Tabasco, corrupción y desidia”, el Universal, 4 de noviembre de 2007.