For this year's holiday show, we'll hear how a chef celebrates at home with his family. Our guest is Alfred Portale, chef and co-owner of New York City's Gotham Bar and Brill. Chef Portale loves Christmas but, like all of us, his life is crammed with work, family, and travel. He tells us how he's rethought the Christmas feast he prepares for his wife and daughters, and shares his recipe for Roast Cod with Savoy Cabbage, White Beans, and Black Trufflefrom his new book, Alfred Portale's 12 Seasons Cookbook.
It's our annual entertaining show and we've got tips from the experts for when you have little time and energy but want to entertain with style, simplicity and fun. Caterer Ina Garten, proprietor of the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store in the ultra chic Hamptons, creates take-out and party food for the likes of Steven Spielberg and Martha Stewart. And she has plenty of down-to-earth advice for catering your own parties with maximum style and minimum cooking. Her recipe for Virginia baked ham makes an easy, delicious and spectacular presentation.
We're off for a look at New Orleans bars this week with resident historian and photographer Kerri McCaffety, author of Obituary Cocktail: The Great Saloons of New Orleans. The Big Easy has more bars per capita than anywhere else in the country and each of these architectural and cultural treasures harbors true stories more fascinating than folklore. Try the recipes for a Sazerac, the brandy concoction that was the Exchange Alley rage in 1853 or an Obituary Cocktail, a version of the martini with a splash of absinthe.
According to history professor Rebecca Spang, author of The Invention of the Restaurant, it used to be that going out to eat was not something anyone did by choice, and in 18th Century Paris restaurants weren't about eating at all. It's an intriguing bit of history that Ms. Spang will share.
This week Faith Popcorn, consumer trends forecaster to the Fortune 500 and co-author of EVEolution: The Eight Truths of Marketing to Women, gives us a look at how food will be marketed in the future. Ms. Popcorn has always been ahead of the curve with trends like "cocooning" and "the pleasure revenge." Now she brings us EVEolution, and it's all about a new power base in consumerism. She claims the food companies are clueless.
We're off on an adventure this week to places you may not get to on your own. John Willoughby sweeps us away to Istanbul for Turkish food and a stay at the charming Empress Zoe Hotel, then world traveler and tea purveyor Sebastian Beckwith takes us trekking into the backcountry of Laos in search of the birthplace of tea.
We're taking you from the cosmos right down to your coffee cup this week with Sidney Perkowitz, professor of physics at Emory University and author of Universal Foam. Professor Perkowitz will explain how foam is the link between your cappuccino and the cup you drink it from to the chair you sit in and the stars in the night sky. It's quite a trip.
They've been linked to some pretty serious temptation and trouble—they did, after all, play a key role in that messy Garden of Eden business—but the illustrious apple still came out on top as the world's most popular fruit according to our guest Frank Browning. As the author of Apples and co-author of the cookbook, An Apple Harvest: Recipes and Orchard Lore, Frank has studied nearly every dimension of the fruit, from myth to science. He'll share a bit of the apple's uncommon and surprising history and give us a recipe for Braised Chicken, Norman Style.
Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, is considered one of the top restaurants in the world, and today we've a conversation with its creator Alice Waters about how she runs a dream restaurant. Naturalist Diane Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses, talks truffles, wine wit Joshua Wesson is back with his wine bargains, and Michael Ruhlman, author of The Making of a Chef, tells us what he learned went he went undercover in the CIA (Culinary Institute of America!).
A culinary revolution is happening in Ireland these days due, in part, to a thriving economy, a new confidence among the Irish people, and the availability of superb local ingredients. Anya von Bremzen, Contributing Editor for Travel & Leisure magazine, stops by to tell us about some of therestaurants, inns and pubs she recently discovered on a trip into the Irish countryside. You'll want to pack your bags and take off.