Showing posts with label 50 Women Game Changers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 50 Women Game Changers. Show all posts

5.31.2012

Gourmet's 50 Women Game Changers in Food: # 50: Julie Powell


No doubt the name of our final game-changer is familiar; we've all either heard about or seen the movie Julie and Julia, based on the book, which was based on Julie's blog.

Fittingly, Julia Child was our first game-changer and so Julie Powell is our last. 
I want to thank Mary from One Perfect Bite for hosting this amazing and educational series.  I also want to thank all of you, who took the time to wade through extra long posts and comment when I know what busy lives you lead.

Good blog friend Val from More Than Burnt Toast has kept a list of everything we've done in these 50 weeks. Wow! I'm putting the link HERE so you can go back and check recipes. I'll also add it to my sidebar. Thanks, Val!

Researching the 50 women has been an extraordinary and enlightening experience and these women have inspired us to extend our comfort zones to include cuisines from around the world. It's also been fun meeting other bloggers and reading their take on the Game Changers and the recipes each has chosen to feature. I've been so impressed with all of them.
I sincerely hope that you've enjoyed meeting Gourmet's 50 women Game Changers too.   
Kudos to you, Mary! 

                                                                                          ***********************************

Julie Powell was born in 1973 and raised in Austin, Texas. She attended Amherst College, graduated in 1995 with a double major in theater and creative writing. With an eye for adventure Julie and her husband to-be, Eric, moved to New York City, where Julie  worked a variety of temp jobs. She and Eric married; he was an editor of Archaeology magazine.

During Julie's last job with the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (which was responsible for distributing funds post-9/11) she created a unique blogging project, "The Julie/Julia Project". This was a blog chronicling her attempt to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's famous cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking. This was a huge undertaking for two reasons: Julie barely knew how to cook an egg and she had a small poorly equipped apartment in Queens. 

Her blog audience slowly grew and it resulted in a book deal for Powell with Little, Brown and Company. Powell reformatted the work she had done on her blog and crafted the 2005 published book Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen . (The book was later retitled Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously)

Julie's popularity led to a movie deal for an adaptation of her story in 2009, making the movie we're all familiar with, based on her weblog. Julia Child was reported to have been unimpressed with Powell's blog, believing her determination to cook every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year to be a stunt. Child's editor, Judith Jones, said in an interview:

"Flinging around four-letter words when cooking isn't attractive, to me or Julia. She didn't want to endorse it. What came through on the blog was somebody who was doing it almost for the sake of a stunt. She would never really describe the end results, how delicious it was, and what she learned. Julia didn’t like what she called 'the flimsies.' She didn't suffer fools, if you know what I mean."

Shortly after she finished writing Julie & Julia, in which she speaks adoringly of her "sainted" husband, Eric, Powell and her husband both had affairs that nearly destroyed their marriage. 




Powell's second book, Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession details the effects on her marriage of the affair,  as well as her experiences learning the butcher trade. Powell calls her affair "the thing I used to pull my marriage apart for a while, but I do not recommend infidelity as a way of dealing with marital problems. It did turn out to be the thing that made us examine what exactly was going on and rebuild our marriage."

She and Eric are still together. They have no children. With her marriage on firmer ground, Powell is ready for a new challenge: She's writing a novel.

"Fiction was what I always wanted to write, but it's early days on that," Powell says. As for the story line, "food plays a big role. It's sort of about our various neuroses about food. My glib description of it is that it's a post-apocalyptic comedy of manners set in New York." 

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This final post certainly gave us a multitude of recipe choices! All of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. :) I chose to feature a very simple dish, using an ingredient I love. Fresh, crisp leaves of Belgian endive are most often found in tossed green salads but also commonly used as a vehicle for dips. Unfortunately, it's a pricey little vegetable, but a little goes a long way. I add some endive to my salad every day. You'll find after 2 hours in the oven, the whole cigar-shaped heads result in a slightly bitter, yet buttery flavor and a silky texture. Braised endive, an easy side dish that goes beautifully with fowl or veal, gives you a chance to surprise your guests and it's great for the holidays, a welcome counterpoint to cranberry sauce and the sweeter side of the buffet table. 

Endives Braisees ala Flamande
From Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child




Ingredients:
12 endive -- wash & trim
1/2 cup water
1 tbsp lemon juice
4 tbsp butter

Method:
Arrange endives in single layer in casserole. Add salt, water, juice, and
butter. Spread waxed paper over to keep them moist and to prevent burning.
Cover and simmer slowly on top of stove for 20 minutes or until almost tender
and liquid reduced to half. Cut a piece of parchment paper to fit over the endive. Bake in 325° oven for 2 hours or until pale golden and almost all liquid is gone.



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5.24.2012

Gourmet's 50 Women Game Changers in Food: # 49; Alexa Andrzejewski, Soraya Darabi, and Ted Grubb


Do those three names sound familiar? They didn't to me. These people ARE Foodspotting. I know this series is about women game changers, but Mr. Grubb was there at the beginning (even before Soraya Darabi), so I think he deserves to be up there in the title as well.

What exactly is Foodspotting? It's a smart phone app and website that allows users to post and discover nearby mouth-watering restaurant dish recommendations through photographs. 

Whose idea was it? Foodspotting was an idea formulated by Alexa Andrzejewski as a result of not being able to find good Okonomiyaki (Japanese pancakes) in San Francisco. Before launching Foodspotting in January 2010, Alexa was a User Experience Designer for Adaptive Path, where she helped both startups and enterprises craft great experiences through strategy, research and design. Her first food-related venture was making and selling miniature food for American Girl dolls when she was 8. 
Alexa's basic idea was to make a field guide to global food. To learn about bootstrapping (Bootstrapping is starting up an enterprise, especially one based on the Internet, with minimal resources.) her project, she joined Women 2.0 and started aggressively networking, talking about her plan to catalog restaurant dishes. 

She then met programmer Ted Grubb, who had been working as a designer & developer since the late 1990s. Before Foodspotting he helped start multiple companies including Get Satisfaction, where he built its friendly face and high quality user experience from the ground up. Ted thought Alexa's idea was a good one but thought this should be made into an app for smartphones.

"People love to photograph their food, and share their great meals with friends," Andrzejewski says. "So we put a name on that phenomenon: Foodspotting."

Grubb decided to learn iPhone programming himself, and he created a prototype Foodspotting app. The duo took top honors at San Francisco's Start-up Weekend.

They soon met and added New York media darling Soraya Darabi—who loves food, travel, photography and emerging technology and was an early foodspotting devotee. She became an advisor to the company and is now a co-founder. Soraya previously worked for Epicurious.com, but most notably The New York Times where she successfully launched the social-media presences of The Times and created digital partnerships for them with platforms including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Despite initial investor skepticism, and nine months of bootstrapping, the trio was able to raise $3 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures. That's allowed the company to expand to ten employees: two in New York City, and eight in an open-air-café-inspired office in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood. To stay connected bi-coastally, Skype and SocialCast are open constantly on everyone's computers. Currently, it's developing partnerships with companies, such as The Travel Channel and Zagat, which uses Foodspotting photos on its website and has compiled guides—and created a badge users can earn—for Foodspotting. 

In 2010, Alexa and Soraya shared a spot on The Daily Beast’s “Women Who Rule the Web” list.


How does Foodspotting work?  You can join their website, but their free iPhone app is what you'll use most. Once you feed your location in, it comes up with photos of some dishes at restaurants in your specific area. This was somewhat successful, but I was discouraged by some of the restaurant choices and had to force myself to think in terms of the dishes themselves, which is what Foodspotting is all about. 
A city search of my town didn't come up with much. No question but the larger the city, the more variety, which makes perfect sense. So when I met my son in Ft. Lauderdale for dinner, we tried again. We entered specific (you can't be too general here) food items like Beef Stroganoff, salted caramel ice cream etc. Choices came up. Restaurants we were familiar with, but don't frequent; we've lived here a long time and know the restaurants pretty well in this area. After some research, we soon realized it was common for one person to upload multiple photos, frequently of dishes from the same restaurant, which led us to believe this hasn't caught on quite yet.
If you were visiting NYC, for example, would you ask Foodspotting for a specific dish? I wouldn't. I'd want to know how the restaurant in general was rated. But I admit I can see what Alexa meant...if I was craving rhubarb ice cream in NYC, it wouldn't hurt to give Foodspotting a shot. 

But here's my problem with Foodspotting.....exactly who is selecting the dish to photograph? Does this person eat out a lot? Is he or she well informed about cooking and food? Will we share the same tastes? Why should I take their word for anything? Even if the photo looks enticing, it all comes down to who's doing the tasting. I'm skeptical. I realize Foodspotting is in its infancy and needs a LOT more input from foodies. Which it's probably getting this week via our game-changer group. 

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I noticed one of our favorite restaurants, Café Maxx in Pompano Beach, FL., has a couple recipes on Foodspotting. Several years ago, we were there for Christmas Eve and one of the dessert choices was a Gingerbread Trifle. It was sensational. I asked one of the owners, Darrel Broek, if he would get me the recipe. The pastry chef was nice enough to email it to me and I made it for the blog. Because it was in 2009, I bet you won't remember it, so I'm posting it again. It's a multi-layered recipe...not difficult, just time consuming. But so worth it. I've served it several times over the holidays. Of course, Foodspotting wasn't in existence when it was served at Café Maxx, but it's exactly the kind of recipe that ought to be included.

Gingerbread Trifle
Courtesy of Café Maxx, Pompano Beach, Florida


Components:
Cubed gingerbread- toast before serving
Vanilla Pastry Cream
Spiced Cherry Sauce
Whipped Cream
Candied Pistachios

The Gingerbread:
Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
6 eggs, room temperature
3.6 cups flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons ginger
1 teaspoon cloves
2 teaspoons cardamom
1 teaspoon salt
14 ounces melted butter
1 1/2 cups half and half cream, room temperature

Method:
Preheat oven to 350°. Butter two loaf pans and sprinkle lightly with bread crumbs.
Combine the melted butter and half and half. Beat the sugar and eggs until very thick. Add the dry ingredients. Add the butter mixture to the flour. Mix. (It will be a very runny batter.) Bake for about 45 minutes. 





The Vanilla Pastry Cream
Ingredients:
3 cups milk
3/4 cup sugar
2 ounces butter, cold, diced
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 eggs, room temperature
2 yolks (save one of the whites for the pistachios)
1/4 cup cornstarch

Method:
In a saucepan, heat the milk and sugar.
In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs, yolks and cornstarch well. Temper the milk into the eggs and return to the heat. Whisk briskly until the mixture has thickened. Quickly, remove from heat and pour into a mixer bowl, using the paddle attachment. Add the diced butter and vanilla and beat until somewhat cool. Put into a container and cover with plastic wrap, making certain the plastic wrap touches the custard top. Refrigerate until ready to use.

The Spiced Cherry Sauce
Ingredients:
1 bag of fresh black cherries
2 cinnamon sticks
5 whole cloves
1 star anise
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon water

Method:
Pit the cherries and put all the ingredients in a saucepan over medium heat.
Cook about 20 minutes. Cool, put into a covered container and refrigerate until ready to use.




The Candied Pistachios
Ingredients:
1 egg white
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 to 2 cups pistachios

Method:
Preheat oven to 350°.
Whisk the first three ingredients together, add the nuts and toss. Lay out on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Bake until you can smell the nuts.

To Assemble the Trifle:
Cut the gingerbread into 1 inch cubes and toast. Layer the pastry cream, spiced cherry sauce and gingerbread in a glass dish. Top with whipped cream and sprinkle with pistachios.




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5.17.2012

Gourmet's 50 Women Game Changers in Food: # 48, Cat Cora


Catherine "Cat" Cora was born in 1968 in Jackson, Mississippi.  Her father Spiro was Greek and Cat grew up around the restaurant industry with both a father and grandfather in the business. Her Greek national heritage, and southern Mississippi roots have resulted in a creative and unique blend of influences. Cooking and eating were the center of her young life; meals at the Cora house often combined spices from the South with fresh cheeses and home-cured olives sent by relatives from the island of Skopelos. 

Although her serious interest in cooking began as a teenager (at the age of 15, Cat had developed a business plan for her own restaurant), after high school, she pursued a traditional college degree in Exercise Physiology at the University of Southern Mississippi. Julia child was an early mentor and encouraged her to leave Mississippi for New York, where she followed her dream and attended the  Culinary Institute of America in New York’s Hyde Park.

Then came some real-time training which included a series of chef jobs in New York under the guidance of notable chefs like Anne Rozensweig and Larry Forgione.  She also made a career stopover in France where she was worked with Roger Verge, chef/owner Le Moulin de Mougins, and Georges Blanc, chef/owner of Georges Blanc restaurant. 

After returning to New York again, Cat became sous chef at The Old Chatham Shepherding Company under Chef Melissa Kelly. Next she headed West to Northern California, where she served as Chef de Cuisine at Napa Valley's Bistro Don Giovanni.


Cat made her TV debut in 1999, as co-host of Food Network’s Melting Pot with Rocco Di Spirito. She went on to host My Country My Kitchen: Greece, Date Plate, and was one of the featured hosts on Fine Living’s Simplify Your Life. A documentary, Cat’s In The Kitchen, was also made about her first James Beard dinner in April, 2002.

Preceding Iron Chef America, Cat co-hosted Kitchen Accomplished on Food Network. She also appeared in NBC’s Primetime Miniseries, Celebrity Cooking Showdown, where celebrities were paired with famous chefs and competed in a timed cook-off à la Iron Chef America.

In 2005, Cora was tapped as the first female Iron Chef on the Food Network’s popular Iron Chef America Show.  Chef Cat Cora's appearances as an Iron Chef has made her a household name.  She has three cookbooks to her credit titled, Classics With a Twist, Cooking From the Hip, and Cat Cora’s Kitchen (which was her first and was inspired by her Greek and Southern heritage and contains many of her family’s favorite recipes). She also boasts a line of branded products that includes cookware, knives, wooden utensils, and cutting boards.  

Cora expanded on her passion for food by forming Chefs for Humanity.  The charitable organization founded by Cora is a grassroots coalition of chefs and culinary professionals guided by a mission to quickly be able to raise funds and provide resources for important emergency and humanitarian aid, nutritional education, and hunger-related initiatives throughout the world.

Openly gay, Cora has four sons – Zoran, Caje, Thatcher, and Nash – with her partner, Jennifer Cora. (Jennifer bore the first three; Cat gave birth to Nash three months after Thatcher was born.) She currently resides in the Santa Barbara, California area with her family.

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I've always wanted to make an olive oil cake and with her Greek background, I thought this would be a great choice for a Cat Cora recipe. I wasn't thrilled with the result, not that it didn't turn out exactly the way it was supposed to, but I guess olive oil cakes are not going to be on my favorite dessert list. I cut way back on the olive oil after reading comments on the recipe; no need for more.

Ladi Tourta (Olive Oil Cake)
Recipe courtesy Cat Cora




Ingredients:
3 large eggs, beaten 
2 cups granulated sugar 
12 ounces extra-virgin olive oil  (I used 8-9 ounces)
10 ounces milk 
2 ounces orange liqueur 
2 ounces fresh orange juice 
3 teaspoons lemon zest 
2 cups all-purpose flour 
1/2 teaspoon baking soda 
1/2 teaspoon baking powder 
1 teaspoon kosher salt 
4 ounces blanched almonds, finely chopped 
Powdered sugar, for garnish


Method:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 10-inch cake pan. 


In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, olive oil, milk, liqueur, orange juice, and lemon zest. Sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix the dry mixture into the wet mixture. Whisk until well blended. 
Fold in the almonds. 
Pour the mixture into the buttered cake pan. Bake for 1 hour. Place on a rack to cool. Run a knife around the edges and place it on a plate. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve.






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5.10.2012

Gourmet's 50 Women Game Changers in Food: # 47, Zarela Martinez


Zarela Martinez was born and raised on a cattle ranch in the Mexican border town of Agua Prieta in the Mexican state of Sonora.  Her mother, Aida Gabilondo, authored a cook book so it's no surprise Zarela learned the secrets and recipes of Mexican cooking by watching her talented mother. She graduated from El Paso’s Loretto Academy and attended finishing school in Guadalajara.
She began cooking professionally in El Paso in the late 1970's. She married, had twin boys, parented two step-kids and opened a catering business.

1983 was a big year for Zarela. An encounter with chef Paul Prudhomme (who became her mentor) while taking a cooking class in New Orleans led to her being invited to cook for an event at the renowned Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York, alongside such culinary luminaries as Alice Waters and, later, Wolfgang Puck. Then New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne published several of her recipes under the heading “Memorable Dishes from a Mexican Master Chef."  Another big break followed the same year when she was invited to cook for then U.S. President Ronald Reagan. She designed the food menu for Queen Elizabeth II at California’s Ronald Regan Ranch. That's quite a list of achievements in one year; Zarela was making a name for herself.
That same year she left the border (and her rocky marriage), loaded up the station wagon and with her twin sons, drove to New York and a dream of having her own restaurant. She once said she was so determined to make it in the Big Apple that, if need be, she would sell burritos in Central Park.

But there was no need to go that far: Zarela's reputation preceded her and she quickly made her mark as menu-designer and later executive chef for Cafe Marimba, "the first serious attempt to recreate the regional cuisine Mexican as authentic as possible in New York."  A loyal following of diners and food writers responded eagerly when she decided to start her own restaurant, Zarela, in 1987.



" I was attempting to cook contemporary interpretations of Mexican food. Then after I had traveled around Mexico extensively, I asked myself, Why reinvent? Since then I’ve dedicated myself to exposing New Yorkers to Mexico’s rich culinary heritage, and I think I’ve been successful."
In her continuing commitment to bringing regional Mexican food to New York, Zarela has launched a program for the Mexican Cultural Institute called Food is Arte with ongoing events designed to promote Mexican culture through its food and traditions from different states in Mexico. Her mission is to make her culture known and understood; Ms. Martinez has recently been named to the board of the Mexican Cultural Institute. Her website www.zarela.com is an invaluable resource for lovers of Mexican food and culture and her how-to videos on basic Mexican cooking techniques and flavor principles featured on www.youtube.com are fun and informative.

Zarela has always been dedicated to good health. She walks up and down the stairs of her home (Her home is a beautiful 4-story brown stone in midtown Manhattan and is full of Mexican and Latin American art, retablos, and talavera. She also collects cloth napkins from every city and state she visits in Mexico.) at least ten times a day plus walks everywhere as part of her health routine. Zarela also embraces a unique exercise program of pilates, martial arts and  Xi Gong yoga that strengthens mind and body. She loves to sing, dance, entertain and has always loved to have people in her home. She cooks no matter what the mood. Doors have opened and chances have been taken and success achieved with Zarela’s robust appetite for life. 

In February of 2011, "I slowly came to the realization that I needed to close my restaurant Zarela after 23 years. But the last two years have been hell—the economy shot, rent increased to  27,000 a month, prices of goods kept  rising, customers short of money and getting there Mexican fix at taco trucks and a slew of small, inexpensive restaurants that have popped up all over the city. I started to doubt whether regional was the right food for the time." Zarela found jobs for nearly all her employees, who she considers family. As well as the economy, there were also some personal problems: Zarela had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.

She now says she’s gone from being a notable food star to being the mother of rising Food Network star Aarón Sanchez. (Sanchez was born in El Paso and studied culinary arts at Johnson and Wales University before beginning his career as a chef at Patria in New York. He's the co-star of Food Network's hit series Heat Seekers and Chopped and is the chef/owner of Centrico Restaurant and Tacombi, located in New York City, as well as Mestizo Restaurant, located in Kansas City. Aarón is among the country's leading contemporary Latin Chefs.)

Zarela downplays her health concerns, because she hasn’t let them stop her. She has a larger-than-life personality matched with uncanny business savvy, and is tenacious to the core. She came to New York as a single mother with just enough money for the down payment on an apartment, and reinvented herself as a Latina culinary trendsetter. She says she will continue catering, teaching, making presentations and public speaking. "I always tell women to have other options in case they lose their job and I practice what I preach. I have been lucky to make my career as chef, consultant, and businesswoman an never-ending source of joy and fulfillment.”

Zarela Martinez Cook Books:
Food from My Heart – Published in 1992, the book was nominated the James Beard Foundation as the best book of the year.
The Food and Life of Oxaca – This cook book was published in 1997 and got positive reviews for fabulous Zarela Martinez recipes.
Zerala’s Veracruz – Published in 2001, the book was the escort to the PBS series ‘Zarela! La Cocina Veracruzana’.
 Awards and Honors:
New York Association of restaurants has awarded Zarela Martinez for her remarkable service to food industry.
She has also been awarded for her business ventures by Hispanic magazine.
In 2006, Zarela Martinez has received "The Orgullo de la Comunidad” award along with her family for the Coalition for Hispanic family.

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For Zarela Martinez, I chose to make a definitely out-of-season Pumpkin Cheesecake. :) It was part of a Mexican Thanksgiving dinner served at Zarella by she and her son, Aarón Sánchez. It was totally ambrosial. And after all the pumpkin cheesecakes I've made, I had to stop and consider why that was. Could it be the condensed milk? The results were silky smooth. The pumpkin seeds made for a good crust too. I sprinkled some toasted ones on top.
Be sure to save the recipe for next fall...it's a winner.

Pumpkin Cheesecake
Provided by: Chefs Aaron Sánchez, Zarela Martínez 
Ingredients:
For the crust:
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds, ground
1 cup graham-cracker crumbs
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon canela (Mexican cinnamon)
1/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons butter

For the filling:
1 1/2 pounds cream cheese
1 cup sugar
15 ounces canned pumpkin purée
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
3 whole eggs plus 1 yolk
1 cup condensed milk

For the topping:
1 pound sour cream
1/4 cup sugar

Method:
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. 
The crust: Combine pumpkin seeds, graham-cracker crumbs, spices, and sugar thoroughly in food processor and pulse; add the butter and pulse until combined. Line a 10-inch springform pan with the mixture, and bake for 12 to 15 minutes until set. Set aside to cool.

The cheesecake: Reduce oven to 300 degrees. Beat cream cheese with sugar in a mixing bowl. Stir in pumpkin purée and spices. Add the eggs and yolk one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add condensed milk, and beat until thoroughly combined. Transfer to the prepared springform pan, and bake for 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours. Allow to cool for 30 minutes. Combine sour cream and sugar thoroughly for the topping, and spread evenly over the top of the cheesecake. Bake for 15 minutes, allow to cool, then refrigerate.




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5.03.2012

Gourmet's 50 Women Game Changers in Food: # 46, Gael Greene


Gael Greene was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1933 where she says she was raised "in a cocoon of Velveeta." She attended the University of Michigan and got a BA in Literature, Science and the Arts. During college, she worked for her father in his dress shop but her heart was set on living in NYC; she thought a job she'd had as a stringer in Ann Arbor, Michgan for Time and Life and the Detroit Free Press would make it easy to get hired. But....

"No New York newspaper would hire me fresh from college in 1956—I had applied everywhere and sent countless résumés—so I was languishing at home in Detroit, Michigan, the most junior staffer at United Press."

Someone finally offered her a one-week tryout at the NY Post .  Then she got a second week, then a month, then three months, and she finally said: "Hire me, or I'm going to Italy, where the men are so wonderful," so they said, "Okay, you're hired."

Gael was at the Post for three years, as a general assignment reporter. She covered everything, features as well as murders.
"I actually covered Elvis when he passed through in a train on the way to Germany." (To read about her famous Elvis story [and a few others] in an excerpt from her memoir, Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess, click HERE.)

She also freelanced for Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, and McCall's. Then one day she got a call from Clay Felker (original New York Magazine Editor). He asked if she'd be the restaurant critic for New York magazine.

"I was shocked; I don't know where he got the idea except that I had written one piece on the re-opening of La Cote Basque. I said to Clay, 'I can't afford to work for you, I hear you're not paying very much until the magazine starts making money, and I'm making so much money writing.' He said, 'People are begging for this job so they can charge all their meals to us.' Before he could change his mind, I said yes."

Gael continued to freelance but her then-husband [Don Forst] said, "Why don't you stop doing all this freelance stuff and write your book." She'd been talking about writing a novel for ages. So she began working on Blue Skies, No Candy and pretty much stopped doing a lot of the freelancing and just worked for New York magazine. Her first novel became a best seller. 



New York was the first city magazine and Gael's reviews were the "go-to" place for information about food and dining out. Ms. Greene documented the city's growing obsession with food. She became famous for concealing her identity from restauranteurs, reserving and using credit cards under other names, and wearing hats that covered her eyes in photographs, on television and in public appearances.

There had been editors at New York who were stung by her pronouncements on which restaurants should be accorded how much attention, and Ms. Greene is still resented by some she criticized through the decade, none of whom would agree to admit it for publication. 

In 2000, she gave up her weekly chief reviewer’s role to write the Insatiable Critic column and run her independent Web site, InsatiableCritic.com She continued as a columnist until 2008, the magazine's 40th anniversary and then, practically without warning, was fired. Adam Moss, New York’s editor in chief, said Ms. Greene “was laid off — there is no elegant expression for it” because New York could no longer afford four food critics.

Ms. Greene said that when Mr. Moss gave her the news last Wednesday: “It was narcissistic shock: moi? I thought I was a brand at New York magazine. I’m the only editorial person on the staff left from the earliest days.”
Many were taken aback at the expulsion of the sensualist who influenced the way a generation of New Yorkers ate, and who served as a lusty narrator of restaurant life in New York for decades. (Gael plans to still have a few last words on restaurants and chefs on her website.)

Today, we're all critics and so much has happened, people take it for granted:
"It's amazing. That was Zagat's brilliance -- to figure out that people would like to be a critic and were ready to be critics. And people do eat out a lot now and they've been exposed in travel and in the sophistication of restaurants that are available... Everybody has an opinion."

In 1981 she co-founded Citymeals-on-Wheels, along with the teacher and food writer James Beard, to help fund weekend and holiday meals for homebound elderly people in New York City. She remains an active chair of the company's board, hosting an annual Power Lunch for Women.

Greene has received numerous awards for her work with Citymeals and in 1992 was honored as Humanitarian of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. She is the winner of the International Association of Cooking Professionals' magazine writing award (2000) and a Silver Spoon from Food Arts magazine.

Gael — who once wrote that “the two greatest discoveries of the 20th century were the Cuisinart and the clitoris” — said she has written about food as she has about sex: “How does it feel, how does it taste, and what is it about. If you are a sensuous eater, these things are important.”  People said I confused sex and food, but in fact, I have never confused sex and food. I like keeping them separate; they're just two great pleasures.
Ms. Greene, who says she is childless by choice, lives with her partner of 22 years, Steven Richter, a New York photographer. She also hopes to stay youthful, she said: “I work out five days a week. And use lots of blue eye shadow.”

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Gael says she believes she found this recipe in the NYTimes in the 60's. The vintage recipe called for shortening in the crust, but she's substituted butter. I found the piecrust delicious and have every intention of adding pecans and grated orange rind to my old faithful piecrust recipe when I make fruit pies. The filling, however, was rather a disappointment. Too runny. I've always depended on my mother's recipe for blueberry pie, which uses flour, not cornstarch, and I have greater success with it than I did with Gael's recipe. All blueberry pies tend to be somewhat runny, but this needed way more cornstarch. I think I'll stick with Mother's recipe.

Blueberry Pie with Orange-Nut Crust
From Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess, by Gael Greene


Ingredients:

For the crust:
2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
8 ounces unsalted butter, cold
2 teaspoons grated orange rind
1/2 cup finely chopped pecans or almonds
5 tablespoons ice water 
For the filling:
4 cups blueberries
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch

Method:
Preheat oven to 375. If you have a pizza stone, place it on the bottom rack.
Mix flour, salt and sugar in a processor. Cut the butter in small pieces and add. Pulse 10 or 12 times until butter is the size of a pea. Sprinkle 3 tablespoons sice water over and pulse until dough comes together. You may need to add more water one tablespoon at a time. Divide dough in half, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate one hour.
Remove one pastry disk 20 minutes before rolling. Roll out to fit a 9" pie plate. Freeze while making the blueberries and remaining pastry.
Pick over the berries, then gently toss with the sugar and cornstarch. Pour into the pastry-lined plate.
Roll out the remaining pastry. If you are going to do a lattice top, cut into strips. If you are going to do a solid top, cut 3 or 4 slits in the top. Moisten the edges and crimp to seal.
Place on the bottom rack for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 and move the pie to the middle rack and bake for another 20 minutes. The pie is done when the juices start to bubble and the crust is brown on the edges.

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