Wednesday, May 12, 2010

THE FOOD SPEAKS FOR ITSELF: Current Top Chef Masters champion Rick Bayless is cooking for 200 at next week's state dinner honoring the President of Mexico, and talks to the Times about the special difficulties of cooking for POTUS, including the inability to pre-prepare sauces and order/bring ingredients on your own. Bayless' salsas (available at your local Whole Foods) are top-notch, and I suspect dinner guests (and any crashers) are in for a most-excellent meal.

7 comments:

  1. Well, he is going to pre-prepare sauces, just on-site.

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  2. The Pathetic Earthling11:40 AM

    Good as Rick Bayless is, does the President of Mexico really want Mexican food? I have a friend who edits Manga for Dark Horse Comics and often speaks about Japanese anime and manga for both conventions and main-stream media alike, and one of the ongoing problems he sees is fans and conventions who take Japanese convention guests out to dinner -- and inevitably take them out for sushi.

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  3. Mexican Everyday is my absolute favorite cookbook. It's great to have a chef of Bayless' quality who actually provides slow cooker recipes, as well as others that use prepared salsa and other readily available ingredients.

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  4. Joseph J. Finn3:39 PM

    Woah, slow cooker recipes? I'll have to give that a shot. Anything you specifically recommend?

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  5. It's not all slow cooker, but there's quite a few. My go to recipe is Chicken Pipian, which is the Salmon Pipian recipe but with chicken. Pretty much recipe lists variations on the theme at the end. My favorite slow cooker recipe is probably the Pork Tinga or Chicken a la Veracruzana, but there's lots of stuff I haven't tried.

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  6. gretchen10:44 AM

    I wondered that too. Presumably, the President of Mexico has access to killer Mexican food without having to come to DC for it. I get that it's a cool way to honor him, but if I were POTUS and went to Mexico City, I'd want Mexican food, not "American" food. Actually, that's kind of an interesting question -- when POTUS travels internationally, do they feed him local cuisine or American food?

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  7. Another vote for Everyday Mexican - everything I have made thus far has been a winner from that book.

    Yes, I also wondered about serving Mexican food for the Mexican president. Huh.

    When I have guests over, I carefully consider what would be special or unique to them. As such, our White People friends get Indian food, our Indian People friends get White People food (usually baked ziti, which I can make spicy with or without meat)

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