Nov 20, 2007 03:30 PM
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New York, 1:42 PM
Tue Feb 9
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Publishers Marketplace is reporting that Nosheteria.com blogger Adrienne Kane has sold her first book, to be titled 'Cooking and Screaming,' to Simon & Schuster imprint Simon Spotlight Entertainment. We'd never heard of this blog, but we like eating food, so we decided to check it out. Of a recently purchased handful of satsumas and persimmons, Adrienne writes, "Soon the fruit beckoned to me, and it told me it wanted to play with that lonely endive in the fridge. And play they did, quite beautifully, together on the chartreuse salad plate. I love a salad with fruit, not a fruit salad mind you (though they are stupendous as well), but a salad that has the mystical interplay between sweet and savory, and that is what this salad had." She's a regular Danyelle Freeman! As Josh and I ate lunch at our desks, we wondered: how hard could it be to write about food in the style of these ladies?
I pondered this as I took my first mouthful of Despaña's 'El Quijote' sandwich or "bocadillo." Its name, a reference to the hero of Miguel de Cervantes's famous novel 'Don Quijote de la Mancha,' seems to indicate that this sandwich might be inclined to tilt at windmills, eg, attempt to surmount seemingly impossible challenges. While the challenge of 'being delicious' is not actually insurmountable, this sandwich might make you think otherwise.
While it may be true, as Cervantes writes, that "A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty," it's hard to imagine that even this sandwich's creator could love it. The bread is chewy, like a piece of chewing gum. This chewiness makes it tough to bite into: tough, like a tough piece of overcooked meat or a fruit leather or something else with a hard, chewy texture.
The sandwich's contents are delicious, though: salty cured pork loin and manchego cheese contrasting with sweet quince paste like light and dark, black and white, weak and strong, hot and cold, loose and tight, or peace and war. Like old and young, or men and women, or good and evil, basically. The two things played off each other well. The cheese and meat was the yin to the quince paste's yang, or possibly vice versa.
Still, overall, I thought this sandwich could've been better.
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