White Lily baking flour leaves Tennessee

FOR generations of Southern bakers, the secret to weightless biscuits has been one simple ingredient passed from grandmother to mother to child: White Lily all-purpose flour.

Biscuit dives and high-end Southern restaurants like Watershed in Atlanta and Blackberry Farm outside Knoxville use it. Blue-ribbon winners at state fair baking contests depend on it. On food lovers’ Web sites, transplanted Southerners share tips on where to find it, and some of them returning from trips back home have been known to attract attention when airport security officers detect a suspicious white dust on their luggage.
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But at the end of June, the mill, with its shiny wood floors, turquoise and red grinders and jiggling armoire-size sifters, will shut its doors. The J. M. Smucker Company, which bought the brand a year ago, has already begun producing White Lily at two plants in the Midwest, causing ripples of anxiety that Southern biscuits will never be the same.

Maribeth Badertscher, a spokeswoman for the company, said the new White Lily was the result of thorough product testing and promised that customers “won’t know the difference.” But in a blind test for The New York Times, two bakers could immediately tell the old from the new.

Read the complete story in the New York Times/ Dining.

Southwest Airlines will not charge for two checked bags

Southwest Airlines said it doesn't plan to charge passengers to check up to two bags on flights.

The Dallas, Texas-based carrier issued the statement in response to a New York Times article that said Southwest was considering matching a fee American Airlines Inc. will begin imposing on June 15.

Fort Worth, Texas-based American Airlines on Wednesday said it plans to charge passengers on discounted fares $15 each way to check their first bag.

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Read the rest of the story in the Nashville Business Journal.

Hobo Film Festival is on tour

I always wanted to hop on a train and see the country in the true hobo way but I never did. I would love to see the film from Shawn Lukitsch and to see what he has to offer. I hope someone makes it to one of his showings and gives me a full review of the film.
~Corey aka C.S. Webbspun


Photo is from the New York Times

For nearly as long as rail lines have crisscrossed the country, there have been stories about wanderers covertly climbing aboard train cars and riding away from problems or speeding toward some glimmering promise on the horizon.

The paths of train hoppers, tramps, hobos and travelers, looking for work, adventure or merely free transportation, have been recorded in lyrics and in literature. Jack Kerouac, Jack London and John Steinbeck have written about them. They have populated the songs of Merle Haggard
and Woody Guthrie.

More recently, filmmakers have documented the experience of riding the rails across the country’s varied terrain. And some of those works were recently screened in a storefront community center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, as part of a traveling cinematic exhibition called the Hobo Film Festival, which is progressing from state to state by way of a $200 Toyota station wagon driven by a 31-year-old train hopper from Asheville, N.C., named Shawn Lukitsch.

Read the entire story in the New York Times.

~~~

Here are some hobo markings and what they mean

Some great horse related stories in the paper today

The gelding we nicknamed Big Brown, in honor of the Kentucky Derby winner, loped off to the far corner of the arena as if he were looking for a place to hide. I exchanged frustrated frowns with my teammate, Shanda Steenburn, a tall, curly-haired nurse and hospital pharmacy manager.

We were participating in an introductory exercise at the Horse Institute in Ancramdale, N.Y. Our assignment was to catch Big Brown, slip a halter over his head and hook him to a lead line.

Our seemingly simple task was proving to be more daunting than either of us had expected. Shanda knew a lot about handling medications for humans but next to nothing about handling horses.

My previous experience with horses was limited and not especially pleasant. I’d taken fewer than a dozen riding lessons during my youth in Texas. The last time I’d been on a horse as an adult, I’d suffered a back injury that took three months to heal.

To make matters worse, Big Brown shared the arena with three other very large and very wary steeds: a white one, a second brown one and one with a mottled brown and white coat, a breed called a paint. Three pairs of nurses who worked with Shanda at Columbia Memorial Hospital in nearby Hudson, N.Y., were simultaneously trying to catch and halter those horses. But instead of cooperating, the paint, the white and the second brown kept darting away and huddling with Big Brown.

Suddenly, Big Brown separated from the herd and walked toward me. I patted his neck and stroked his face, cooing sweet nothings in his ear for at least a minute. Shanda handed me a halter. As if on cue, Big Brown bolted away again.

Read the entire story HERE.


A thoroughbred named Tchaikovsky, a grandson of Secretariat, was having a tooth pulled in one stall. A horse in another was given a sponge bath. Out the stable door, about a dozen horses shared a sun-lit field.

Somewhere, far out of sight if not entirely out of mind, countless other former racehorses were on their way to being slaughtered.

“I struggle with it,” Diana Koebel said. She is the owner and trainer here at LumberJack Farm, one of hundreds of horse farms around the country helping rescue and rehabilitate thoroughbreds considered too slow or damaged to be worth anything more than horse meat. The rescuers cannot keep up.

“Are we really helping?” Koebel asked as she stood in a stable stall. “I know we are, and every one counts, but it’s overwhelming at points. Can we really fix this industry?”

LumberJack Farm works with a nonprofit organization called ReRun, which prepares discarded racehorses for a second career — as jumping show horses, maybe, or just as pets — and then makes them available for adoption. ReRun annually places about 40 thoroughbreds once destined for the slaughterhouse.

Read the entire story HERE.

X Marks the Test Room

It is known simply as the X-room.

Set up last November at the Courtyard by Marriott in partnership with the University of Delaware in Newark, it is a test guest room. It is equipped with everything from waterproof mattresses to the experimental technology of wireless electricity (no plugs) to a specially designed Nintendo Wii game console for travelers. There is also a digital door display that lets guests see who is in the corridor.

Nor is Marriott the only chain with what the lodging industry calls test rooms or room labs. From a hotelier’s perspective, a test room helps demonstrate what is working and what is not, before huge amounts of money are spent on the latest technology or new light bulbs are acquired.

“In the last five years there’s been more research on what the consumer wants than at any time during my 40 years in the industry,” said Joseph McInerney, chief executive and president of the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

Read the entire article in the New York Times.

My yacht is better than your yacht

IN a shipyard in Germany, Blohm & Voss workers are building a mammoth yacht called the Eclipse.

Like many things in the secretive world of superyachts, its exact length is hard to pin down. So is the name of its owner, and the cost of building it.

But according to the Web site of The Yacht Report, one of several publications that track yachting with the same intensity that gossip magazines cover Hollywood hunks, the Eclipse is 531.5 feet long.

That’s six and a half feet longer than the Dubai, an 11,600-ton behemoth that now holds the record as the world’s largest yacht. Its owner is the ruler of Dubai, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.

The extra length on the Eclipse isn’t an accident. Supersized yachts are the latest examples of one-upmanship among billionaires, many of whom already own a private jet, a Rolls-Royce or two, and multiple mansions.

Despite fear of an economic recession and unrelenting job pressures among those who remain yachtless, there’s still a lot of money floating around the world. And as the superrich get richer, the size of yachts grows bigger and bigger, too.

“When a yacht is over 328 feet, it’s so big that you lose the intimacy,” says Tork Buckley, editor of The Yacht Report. “On the other hand, you’ve got bragging rights. No question, that’s a very strong part of the motivation.”

Read the entire article in the New York Times.

Should someone be able to sell a reservation for a restaurant besides the restaurant?

I think this is just wrong for someone to act like they have the ability to "auction" or "sell" tables at restaurants without working with the restaurant. Having been a concierge, I know that there are times when you can have a restaurant hold a table or two for you but to sell them...I can't agree with that. I never was a fan of OpenTable or other websites that tried to do the job of a concierge or a person calling the restaurant themselves but after reading this article, I really don't enjoy this process.
~Corey Webbspun


By SARAH KERSHAW
Published: March 12, 2008

IT is hard to imagine Joseph Bastianich, who owns a dozen restaurants with Mario Batali and controls some of the most coveted tables in the country, being flustered by a reservation for two at Babbo for 6:15 on a Friday night.

But Mr. Bastianich was furious: someone was offering that table at TableXchange, a Web site on which diners can buy and sell reservations, hot commodities in a town where getting a table at the most popular restaurants has become an extreme sport.

The price was $25. The table was gone within an hour.

“We’re selling dinner; we don’t sell the opportunity to have dinner,” Mr. Bastianich said. “It goes against the grain of everything we do.”
~~~
Read the entire article in the New York Times.

A Handmade Home

by Joyce Wadler


ANY fool can hire an architect to draw up a plan for a house, but it takes a truly inspired fool — which is to say, an artist — to start building and see where the earth and driftwood and shards of broken pottery take him, and an equally impassioned fool — say, a woman in love — to go along and carry the rocks on her back.



This is how it was with the little-known sculptural home that is Eliphante, three acres of fantastical domes, shacks and follies created over 28 years by Michael Kahn and his wife, Leda Livant. Here there is the residence, which has 25-foot ceilings and incorporates rocks and scraps from construction sites; there, a studio, one wall of which is the Ford pickup that brought the couple west; and a labyrinthine art gallery called Pipedreams, in which every painting has its own environment.


All photos by David Kadlubowski

The building that gave the compound its name has a long, trunklike entrance made of rock and an irregularly mounded roof. “Aaah, Ella-fahn-tay,” a friend joked soon after it was built, giving it a playful faux-French pronunciation.

The couple began building when they first arrived here, although they did not own the property, and they continued to do so until the progressive brain disease, which killed Mr. Kahn this December at age 71, robbed him of the ability to speak.

Read the entire story in the New York Times.

Hot chocolate on a stick

Lars Klove for The New York Times

They look like the kind of chocolate lollipops SpongeBob SquarePants would have in his cupboard. But they are actually Petrossian’s hot-chocolate-on-a-stick, a clever way to make the warming winter drink. Scald a cup of milk for each serving, pour into mugs, then give each person a pop, which melts as it is stirred in.

Read more of this article in the New York Times.

Visit the website of Petrossian to order and learn more.

Jazzman, Milford Graves, Helps to Heal with Rhythm

Milford Graves, 63, a jazz drummer who made his mark in the 1960's with avant-garde musicians like Albert Ayler, Paul Bley and Sonny Sharrock, performs only occasionally now. He spends about half his week teaching music healing and jazz improvisation classes at Bennington College in Vermont, where he has been a professor for 31 years. He spends much of the rest of his week in his basement researching the relationship between music and the human heart.

After descending the psychedelic-painted stairway into his laboratory, visitors are faced with a collection of drums from around the world, surrounding a network of computers. Wooden African idols spiked with nails rub up against medical anatomical models. Amid a vast inventory of herbs, roots and plant extracts sits an old wooden recliner equipped with four electronic stethoscopes connected to computers displaying intricate electrocardiogram readouts.



In 1967, Mr. Graves was honored in a Down Beat magazine critics poll as the year's bright new talent. He had offers of lucrative gigs from artists like Miles Davis and the South African singer Miriam Makeba.

But after years of hard living as a jazzman, Mr. Graves began studying holistic healing, and then teaching it. He became fascinated with the effect of music on physiological functions.

"People with ailments would attend my performances and tell me they felt better afterward," he said.

Curious about the heartbeat as a primary source of rhythm, he bought an electronic stethoscope and began recording his and other musicians' heartbeats.

"I wanted to see what kind of music my heart was making," he said.



Read the entire story in the New York Times.

Visit Milford Graves website for more information on the man, his music and his studies.

Moondog in New York

Bochum, West Germany.
For 30 years he was a landmark for New Yorkers. Decked out in a bizzare mock-Viking outfit, a horned helmet on his head and a spear in his hand, he stood on the corner of 54th Street and Sixth Avenue, majestically ignoring the giggles and wisecracks, selling his poems and copies of his sheet music and playing what one critic called "delicate Coplandesque rhythms" on weird instruments of his own design. He called himself Moondog, after a dog he liked, and was unfailingly courteous and patient with the curious. Although handicapped by total blindness from an explosion when he was 16 years old, Moondog wasn't just another one of the crazies wandering aimlessly through the metropolis, but a dedicated nonconformist who insists he pursued his unorthodox street life for the sake of his music. Over the years he acquired a lot of friends, some of them with real clout in the music world, like Artur Rodzinski, conductor of the New York Philharmonic. However, repeated attempts to get him off the streets and into a more conventional mode of life foundered on Moondogs's fierce protection of his freedom.But Moondog, whose real name is Louis Hardin, isn't standing on street corners anymore. At the age of 62, in an uninspiring little town in West Germany, Moondog has found a home.A Composer's Paradise"I am living in a composer's paradise"



"I am living in a composer's paradise," he says to a visitor in a sound studio in Bochum, where his music is being recorded. "I am surrounded by musicians, I get my meals on time, I'm warm, and most of all I'm free for my music." He speaks like a man who has suddenly realized the joy of no longer having to cope with the very problems of existence.Sitting next to him, watching fondly and proudly, is the architect of his new life, a slight blond woman of 27, named Ilona Goebel. She and the musician met three years ago in a small town in the Ruhr valley.Moondog (Miss Goebel calls him by his given name Louis) came to Germany in 1974 under the auspices of one of his early New York admirers, the organist Paul Jordan. Mr. Hardin had been invited to conduct a concert of his works played by Mr. Jordan in Frankfurt, and has simply never returned to New York."I felt at home here, in the country where so many great composers have lived and worked," he said. "I went to Bonn to the house where Beethoven was born. I sat at the spinnet where he composed some of his great music and I felt I was in spiritual communication with him.When Ilona Goebel first saw him, Moondog was standing on a street corner in Recklinghausen, dressed in his familiar Viking cape and helmet, selling copies of his poems. The somewhat startled citizens thought he was an out-of-work actor costumed as an "alt Deutscher"

Read the full story in Moondog's Corner.

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Sidewalk Hero, On the Horns Of a Revival
By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH

Plenty of chamber music festivals have featured works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Or Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner.

But a festival that includes music by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ives, Carter and Kirchner, all playing second fiddle to the classical works of Moondog?

''Moondog Rising,'' which takes place on Friday and Saturday at Advent Lutheran Church in Manhattan, is surely the first. The Viking of Sixth Avenue, as he was known, would be proud.



From the late 1940s to the early '70s Moondog was as recognizable in the New York City landscape as the Empire State Building, and nearly as striking. A tall blind man with long hair and beard, wearing a handmade Viking helmet and primitive cloak, he regularly stationed himself at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, which cops and cabbies knew as Moondog's Corner. Dispensing his poetry, politics, sheet music and recordings (some on boutique labels, some on majors), he was sought out over the years by beats, hippies and foreign tourists, but also by the media and celebrities, from Walter Winchell and ''Today'' to Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali and Martin Scorsese.

''Everybody who was anybody met Moondog,'' Robert Scotto, author of ''Moondog,'' a biography published this month by Process Books, said recently. ''And everybody had his own Moondog.''

Even after he moved to Germany in 1974, where he remained until his death in 1999 at 83, he was remembered in New York as an emblematic street character, though not as a serious classical composer. As the British music critic Kenneth Ansell observed in the mid-'90s, while jazz greats like Count Basie and Charlie Parker admired Moondog's idiosyncratic forays into their world, ''the classical orthodoxy has not rushed to embrace him.''

Robin Boomer, a cellist and the organizer of Moondog Rising, said: ''Most of the people I know from the classical music world don't know Moondog at all. He hasn't made it into the canon.''

Part of the problem is that Moondog was so prolific and eclectic. Working in Braille, often composing under his cloak on the sidewalk, he wrote in an impressively wide range of styles: percussion-driven exotica (he made his own triangular drum-and-cymbal instrument, the trimba), avant-garde jazz, folkish madrigals, Bach-like neo-Baroque rounds and canons for chamber orchestra, symphonies for full orchestra, and a layered minimalism that influenced his young collaborators Steve Reich and Philip Glass. (They can be heard playing with Moondog in the 1960s on a sampler CD included in Mr. Scotto's book, for which Mr. Glass wrote the preface.)

Read the entire article in the New York Times

And Now From Germany, A Bed by Remote Control

There are many ways to describe the high-tech hideaway bed called the Zoom- Room: A mattress that is stored vertically behind cabinets or an entertainment center, and that, with the push of a remote control button, slips down the wall and out into the room like an enormous upholstered snake. A German-made bed that rests on bowed beechwood flats and uses a mechanism reminiscent of an automated garage door, if you can picture a garage door mechanism upside down. An irresistible piece of equipment with which to torment a cat.



Then there’s the description offered by Peter Medvin, the owner of Zoom-Room, who is importing the bed from Germany. “I call it the James Bond Seduction Bed,” says Mr. Medvin, who has two in his Miami apartment, which doubles as the Zoom-Room showroom. “No one knows it’s there. It just looks like a home entertainment center, the perfect place to hang the wide-screen TV. Then you open it up and there’s this huge wow factor.”

A former investment manager on Wall Street, Mr. Medvin, who is 51, first saw the retractable bed at a home-design show in Montreal about six years ago. He was living in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and the bed seemed ideal for guests. It was, however, manufactured by a German company, B & M International, and was difficult to import. Mr. Medvin managed to do so, paying what he recalls as $11,000 or $12,000. When a friend asked for help in buying the bed two years ago, Mr. Medvin, approaching 50 and ready for a life change, signed a deal with B & M to become the bed’s United States distributor. The beds, which are available with or without custom cabinetry, range in price from $6,495 (for a twin without cabinetry) to $9,995 (for a king-size bed with cabinetry).

Information: Zoom-Zoom
JOYCE WADLER

Find and read more in the NYTimes/Home & Garden.

Edgar Meyer, Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas- Concert Review

Anyone expecting straightforward bluegrass from Jerry Douglas on dobro, Edgar Meyer on bass and Sam Bush on mandolin or fiddle got just a little bit of it on Wednesday night. At the end of the trio’s concert at Zankel Hall, the musicians breezed through a banjo tune. Before then, nearly all the music they played was poised comfortably between genres: deeply rooted in bluegrass technique but toying with the parameters and options of string-band music.

The trio’s members were as attentive to structure and sonic detail as any chamber-music ensemble, while their tunes conjured mountain music’s Celtic roots along with blues, reggae, jazz and the modes of Eastern European or Middle Eastern music. Between the exquisite compositions, they cracked jokes.



The three musicians have calibrated the ways they share textures; in one piece, mandolin and dobro pinged 16th notes back and forth, perfectly staggered at top speed, and in another, a bowed drone on Mr. Meyer’s bass brought out somber resonances.

But the trio was after more than good-timey grins and thrills. Their music was thinking all the time, just not getting pretentious about it.



Read the entire review in the New York Times.

The Secret Thoughts of Travelers Have Been Revealed to Frank Warren

By FRANK WARREN

ABOUT 10 years ago I was sitting next to a young woman in the window seat on a flight to Washington. During the flight, I noticed she was writing postcards. I peeked at the words she was writing and discovered she was an author on a book tour sending notes to her friends.

It seemed so romantic and exciting to me. Even though I never spoke to her, I have to believe that serendipitous encounter is one reason I started a community art project called PostSecret and why I am now traveling on my fourth book tour.

It should be noted that I don’t actually write books; I compose them from the postcards that are mailed to me. I essentially invite strangers to anonymously send me untold secrets written on homemade postcards. So far, I have received more than 150,000 inspiring, remorseful, funny, hopeful and even sexual secrets from around the world on every topic imaginable.

Not surprisingly, travel experiences were one of the secrets that people felt they needed to share. And now, when I travel to talk about the PostSecret Project, I never feel alone. The secrets I read stay with me, like baggage. When I enter a shuttle bus, wait by my gate or sit on a plane, I am reminded of the anonymous voices sharing with me their latent animosities, soulful confessions or the hidden acts of kindness that happened to them while traveling.

One postcard I received had a hilarious picture of two pilots jauntily walking through an airport in crisp suits. We all have seen these people. We have all been annoyed by these people. The secret on the card read, “Stop walking through the airport like you own the place!”

Another secret that arrived on a baggage claim ticket read: “You called me an idiot so I sent your bags to the wrong destination. WHOOPS! I guess you were right.”

The homemade cards can be just as creative as the deep secrets they carry. Written on an unused airsickness bag: “Sometimes when I fly I wish the plane would crash and I would be the only survivor. Then I would make money on the book or movie.”

On a photograph of empty terminal seats, I received the very sad missive: “Airports make me the most suicidal.” On a boarding pass, I read a secret of love lost, “I would have left home and flown 2430 miles with you if only you had asked.”

Read the entire article in the NewYorkTimes-Business Section

Thoughts of a Bellman

I Just Roll With It.

"The person who brings up the bags and opens the room for you should get $1 or $2, unless you have a whole trolley of luggage, when it should be more." - New York Times


Of course, you can always require three whole trolleys for your numerous and heavy boxes and shrug it off with, "I'd tip you but I'm all out of cash." I just keep it polite and hope that tomorrow is a better day.

Anyone hiring?

Visit his blog at ChezBez

Fisk University and Museum of Wal-Mart Heiress Agree to Share “Radiator Building — Night, New York,”

Fisk University’s board of trustees has agreed in principle to share ownership of its prized Alfred Stieglitz Collection with the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas in exchange for $30 million, the two sides announced on Tuesday.

The agreement, subject to approval by a chancery court judge, would entitle the university and the museum to display the 101 works in the collection for equal amounts of time, they said. Crystal Bridges is scheduled to open in Bentonville, Ark., in 2009.

The founder of Crystal Bridges, the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton, also pledged $1 million to renovate and maintain the Fisk gallery that houses the collection and to finance an art internship.

The board’s vote on Monday, which came after more than a year of litigation over the fate of the artworks, could help remedy Fisk’s financial problems, the university’s board said.

“This settlement represents a great opportunity for Fisk to emerge from this lengthy and complicated process on the strongest financial footing that we have been on in decades,” Reynaldo P. Glover, the board chairman, said in a statement.

Still, the fate of the art-sharing agreement is far from certain. The Tennessee attorney general, Robert E. Cooper Jr., who has a say because the collection was a charitable donation, must still weigh in; he has said he would prefer that the collection remain full time in Nashville, where Fisk is based.

Georgia O’Keeffe, widow of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, gave 97 of the pieces in the Stieglitz Collection to Fisk in 1949, and donated more several years later. Other works from Stieglitz’s enormous collection went to institutions including the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Fisk sought court permission in late 2005 to sell two works from the collection — “Radiator Building — Night, New York,” a striking Precisionist canvas from 1927, by O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley’s “Painting No. 3” — to boost the university’s sagging endowment.

But the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., which functions as O’Keeffe’s estate, filed suit to block the sale, arguing that Fisk was violating its agreement with O’Keeffe to maintain the collection. In a proposed legal settlement this year the museum agreed to buy “Radiator Building” for $7.5 million, and allow Fisk to sell the Hartley work.

While that settlement was pending, Crystal Bridges made its $30 million offer to share the collection. Citing the value of that bid, a chancery court judge rejected Fisk’s settlement with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum this month, saying it was not advantageous to the people of Tennessee. Then the O’Keeffe Museum dropped its suit, saying it did not want to pose further difficulties for the university.

In her ruling the chancery court judge, Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle, made clear that she considered the Crystal Bridges offer to be superior to the settlement.

But the latest deal could renew debate in the case over what is best for Fisk and for Tennesseans, who would have diminished access to the collection under the proposal, some experts in art law suggest.

“If you step back, and your test is what’s in the best interest of the people of the State of Tennessee, I don’t see how you do this without putting it up for bid,” said Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer in New York who specializes in art law. “That’s the only way to know for sure.”

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum had previously pledged to oppose the deal. But on Tuesday the president of the museum’s board, Saul Cohen, appeared to soften that stance, saying that Crystal Bridges had sweetened its original overture with the addition of the internship and the $1 million renovation.

Read the entire article in the New York Times.

Hocus-Pocus, and a Beaker of Truffles

By DANIEL PATTERSON


A TRUFFLE by any other name may smell as sweet, but what if that name is 2,4-dithiapentane? All across the country, in restaurants great and small, the “truffle” flavor advertised on menus is increasingly being supplied by truffle oil. What those menus don’t say is that, unlike real truffles, the aroma of truffle oil is not born in the earth. Most commercial truffle oils are concocted by mixing olive oil with one or more compounds like 2,4-dithiapentane (the most prominent of the hundreds of aromatic molecules that make the flavor of white truffles so exciting) that have been created in a laboratory; their one-dimensional flavor is also changing common understanding of how a truffle should taste.

When I discovered truffle oil as a chef in the late 1990’s, I was thrilled. So much flavor, so little expense. I suppose I could have given some thought to how an ingredient that cost $60 an ounce or more could be captured so expressively in an oil that sold for a dollar an ounce. I might have wondered why the price of the oils didn’t fluctuate along with the price of real truffles; why the oils of white and black truffles cost the same, when white truffles themselves were more than twice as expensive as black; or why the quality of oils didn’t vary from year to year like the natural ingredients. But I didn’t. Instead I happily used truffle oil for several years (even, embarrassingly, recommending it in a cookbook), until finally a friend cornered me at a farmers’ market to explain what I had should have known all along. I glumly pulled all my truffle oil from the restaurant shelves and traded it to a restaurant down the street for some local olive oil.

That truffle oil is chemically enhanced is not news. It has been common knowledge among most chefs for some time, and in 2003 Jeffrey Steingarten wrote an article in Vogue about the artificiality of the oils that by all rights should have shorn the industry of its “natural” fig leaf. Instead, the use of truffle oil continued apace. The question is, Why are so many chefs at all price points — who wouldn’t dream of using vanillin instead of vanilla bean and who source their organic baby vegetables and humanely raised meats with exquisite care — using a synthetic flavoring agent?

Part of the answer is that, even now, you will find chefs who are surprised to hear that truffle oil does not actually come from real truffles. “I thought that it was made from dried bits and pieces of truffles steeped in olive oil,” said Vincent Nargi of Cafe Cluny in Manhattan, which made me put down my pen and scratch my head. The flavor of real truffles, especially black, is evanescent, difficult to capture in an oil under the best of circumstances.

But, much as I did for years, chefs want to believe. Stories of sightings of natural truffle oil abound, like a gourmand’s answer to the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. One chef told me in an excited, slightly conspiratorial tone that Jing Tio of Le Sanctuaire in Santa Monica, Calif., who sells high-quality specialty ingredients to chefs, mixed his own oil to order.


Read the entire story in the New York Times

Hot Dusty Days, Long Rides and Mustangs

By BILL BECHER

MUSTANG. The word conjures up images of the Old West — a wild horse running free on the range in a big blue-sky world, a renegade. I watch as a tall mustang stallion escorts his six mares. He pulls his ears back in warning, and the other wild horses nearby scatter out of the way. The stallion stops and grazes while keeping a careful eye on his harem.

Once two million mustangs roamed the West, descendants of horses that escaped from or were released by early Spanish missionaries and explorers and later European settlers. Now it’s estimated that fewer than 50,000 wild horses live in remote areas of California, Nevada and other Western states.

For horse lovers, or anyone who wants to observe mustangs in a natural environment, the Wild Horse Sanctuary in Northern California offers two-day and three-day trail rides to see the horses on the organization’s 5,000-acre preserve near Lassen Volcanic National Park. This little-visited corner of California bears the scars of its violent geological past. Fields are littered with volcanic rock from previous eruptions. Lassen Peak, formed by a volcano, is visible from the sanctuary.

Dianne Nelson was bottle-feeding a month-old abandoned kitten when I met her on the porch of her ranch house at the sanctuary, in Shingletown, Calif. Mrs. Nelson is a co-founder of the sanctuary. And although caring for unwanted animals is her life, she stumbled into it by happenstance.

In 1974 she was helping her first husband round up mustangs under a government contract. When the Forest Service couldn’t find homes for 12 older stallions that Mrs. Nelson helped capture, they were destroyed. “I heard the shots,” she said, “and you don’t forget that.”

Read the entire article in the New York Times

The ‘Great Love’ of a Collector of Old Mansions

By KATHRYN MATTHEWS

SOMETIMES, your dream house finds you. That’s how Richard Hampton Jenrette, a co-founder of the investment banking firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, wound up owning Edgewater, Gore Vidal’s former home in Barrytown, N.Y. “It just seemed like fate,” Mr. Jenrette said.

As he told the story on an overcast May afternoon, Mr. Jenrette, a native North Carolinian who is now 78 and retired from his business career, surveyed Edgewater — a colonnaded classical revival house built in 1820 — from the bank of the Hudson River. The house sits on a small peninsula, lined with weeping willows, just 50 yards from the river. He first saw it, he said, on a late September afternoon in 1969. “I took a drive in the country, touring old houses, using ‘Historic Houses of the Hudson Valley’ as a guide,” he said referring to a classic photographic history by Harold Donaldson Eberlein and Cortlandt Van Dyke Hubbard. “My last stop was Edgewater. I didn’t know Gore Vidal then, so I kind of snuck down his driveway. The sun was setting. The river was rippling. Everything was lushly green. Suddenly, six majestic Doric columns loomed into view, and I saw Tara from ‘Gone With the Wind’ — this Southerner’s vision of a dream house. I was smitten.”

He returned to New York coveting this slice of paradise but not expecting that he would ever own it. Then came the fateful coincidence. Two days later, Mr. Jenrette’s friend Anthony Hail, a San Francisco decorator, called him out of the blue to report that Mr. Vidal was planning to sell Edgewater. “It’s to die for — you ought to buy it!” Mr. Jenrette recalled Mr. Hail’s saying.

Mr. Jenrette bought Edgewater for $125,000. He said that at the closing, which took place over a drink at Mr. Vidal’s apartment in Manhattan, he was greeted at the door by Shirley MacLaine, who told him, “Gore’s on the phone, but have a drink!” and poured him a vodka on the rocks. It was a thrilling end note for Mr. Jenrette, who had just seen Ms. MacLaine in the film “Sweet Charity.”

When the deal was sealed, everyone was happy. “Gore bought Edgewater in 1946 for $35,000, so he felt that he’d made a good sale,” said Mr. Jenrette, breaking into a Cheshire Cat grin. Today, on the local tax books, it is worth an estimated $4 million.

Read the entire story in the New York Times

Bamboo, bamboo...All the things to do with bamboo

My friend Chad Schott, of Drumzrguruven, makes his rainsticks and didgeridoos from bamboo. He cleans out the dead plants to keep a garden or a wild patch of it healthy and is fully aware of all the wonderful things it can do. I would love to see it become a greater part of our usage to replace things that don't grow as fast and don't have as much versatility.

~C.S. Webbspun

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This is part of an article from the New York Times. Click on the NYTimes to read the rest of the story.


BAMBOO is a versatile, ancient plant that shows up in creation myths as well as in pots on Manhattan terraces. It comes in clumping varieties that behave themselves and running “timber” types that spread by rhizomes — great for a grove, but not so good when they are planted as a property screen that escapes into a neighbor’s yard.

But it’s that very vigor that has environmentalists hailing bamboo as the new “It” plant for saving the earth.

Bamboo is a workhorse at sequestering carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen. It is a tough plant that manufactures its own antibacterial compounds and can thrive without pesticides. And its porous fibers make a cloth that breathes and is as soft as silk. In fact, there is such a stampede of fabric designers to China and Japan, where it is farmed and processed — no such industry exists in the United States — that in its May issue, National Geographic predicted that “this upstart fabric may someday compete with King Cotton.”