Food Wednesday & Sudoku

[lsanderson]

It Boils Down to This: Cheap Wine Works Fine
By JULIA MOSKIN

IN the beginning, there was cooking wine.

And Americans cooked with it, and said it was good.

Then, out of the darkness, came a voice.

Said Julia Child: “If you do not have a good wine to use, it is far better to omit it, for a poor one can spoil a simple dish and utterly debase a noble one.”

And so we came to a new gospel: Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink. More

Recipe: Sauternes Custard
Recipe: Port-Braised Duck Legs With Black Pepper and Dried Cherries
Navarre Toasts a Wider World
By ERIC ASIMOV

FOR 25 years one of the great wine stories has been the rapid transformation of sluggish, antiquated local production networks into dynamic winemakers to the world.

Nowhere has this been more striking than in Europe’s longtime vinous backwaters, regions that for centuries churned out the village plonk, which was usually sold in bulk. More

Recipe: Prunes in Red Wine

For Orange Zest, Substitute Kool-Aid
By CELIA BARBOUR

POKE around at allrecipes.com, as several million curious home cooks do each month, and you might stumble upon a recipe for Sesame Seared Tuna. It calls for high-quality tuna to be coated in sesame seeds, then cooked, fast and hot, and served quite rare. Visitors to this Web site have given the recipe five stars (the top rating), and 61 of them have posted comments about it, including the following: “This was really good and well liked by all. I did use chicken tenders, (2/person) in place of tuna.”

Wandering elsewhere on the site, you may come across the post from a cook who replaced the orange zest in a recipe with orange Kool-Aid powder, sprinkled straight from the package. More

The Allure of Baked Goods Brings Him Back
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

Seth Greenberg grew up baking with his father, William Greenberg Jr., whose sleek chocolate cakes, sticky buns, buttery cookies and distinctively decorated celebration cakes had a deservedly loyal following for decades. The Greenbergs sold their bakeries about a decade ago and Mr. Greenberg retired. But now Seth, who confesses to having missed the allure of butter, sugar and chocolate, has gone back into baking and is offering a limited array of temptations that can be ordered for delivery in Manhattan. More

Inside Japan’s Puzzle Palace
By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO, March 20 — Will there be another puzzle craze after sudoku?

Perhaps kakuro? What about nurikabe?

If so, chances are it will spring from a Japanese company called Nikoli, run by the self-proclaimed godfather of sudoku, Maki Kaji. More