GOOD NEWS: After months of hanging out on an unofficial wait-list (which really just amounted to my obsessive checking of a certain Web page to scan for an opening), I have been accepted into the ranks of recipe testers for the James Beard Award-winning site, Leite’s Culinaria. I’m over the moon about this.
If you’re not already familiar with Leite’s Culinaria, I suggest you check it out. Founded and published by David Leite (acclaimed food writer and author of a kick-ass cookbook, The New Portuguese Table) the recipes and writing deliver on the promise in the site’s tagline, “Hot food, dry wit.” It’s one of my main go-to sites. Of course, my browser has lots of culinary sites bookmarked—many good ones exist—but it’s both true and frustrating that sometimes you have to choose between fabulous food (or photography) and great writing. It’s not easy to do both well. The thing about Leite’s Culinaria is that you do get both, consistently.
So, having been a fan for a while, I am now part of the team. I have long wanted to find a way to regularly (without culinary school) expand my cooking repertoire and also to do this in someone else’s service. Working for a professional outfit such as Leite’s Culinaria, though done on a volunteer basis, will no doubt pay off big—currency in this case amounting to continuing education through trial and error with new (to me) recipes, plus a whole lot of deliciousness stocked in my cupboards, fridge, and freezer.
For my first month of testing, I’ve settled on two recipes: Stonewall Kitchen’s Crustless Breakfast Quiche (from their breakfast book, published by Chronicle), and Japanese Sweet Bean Cookies from The Asian Grandmother’s Cookbook by Pat Tanumihardja (Sasquatch Books). Quiche without crust gets my curiosity up: Can such a thing be good? Isn’t the crust the best part of the quiche? As for the Sweet Bean Cookies, their appearance on the recipe tester’s list coincided with a desire I’ve had lately to make mochi with bean paste. These are hardly the same thing—the paste here is surrounded by a sweet biscuit/cookie dough, not by a ball of glutenous rice flour as with mochi—but they will no doubt satisfy my (masochistic?) wish to attempt the level of perfectionism found in Japanese desserts. Plus, the paste in question is lima bean paste, and you have no need to mention limas twice to anyone with a drop of Dixie blood in the veins. I’m there.
My intention is that I’ll blog occasionally about these recipe-testing adventures. I’m not allowed to post the recipes themselves, since permission to reprint has been granted by authors and/or publishers to Leite’s Culinaria proper and not to me personally, but I can describe my own experience in testing them. What I’ll also do in time, as I build up my list of tested recipes, is create a page of links that reference those I think are worthy of a “Tester’s Choice” designation. Look for that page to come sometime in 2010.
In the meantime, I’ll just end with a big dose of gratitude to David Leite and to Linda Avery (Executive Food Editor at Leite’s Culinaria) for having me along for the ride. I expect this trip to be full of the kinds of detours (from my daily life and usual cooking patterns) that result in the best food discoveries of all: those “off the beaten path” specialties you stumble upon when you decide to put down the map and just drive where your taste buds take you.
