The Hungry Detective

Perhaps you recall my man crush?

In the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco is a Chris Cosentino's restaurant, Incanto . I've eaten there once. It was yummy. I'm headed back to San Francisco in a month and will partake in Mr. Cosentino's 9th annual Head to Tail Dinner . As the tile alludes, Mr. Cosentino is a proponent of offal. Many are put off by this kind of cooking. I am less concerned with what goes into the food, and more concerned with how it tastes. Notably Mr. Cosentino has written a book on the topic that as yet has gone unpublished.  BEGINNINGS as one might surmise is all about the first course. Like most Italian cooking these days, the book will focus on simple rustic food preparation to begin a meal. I'm excited for this book, and hope it is the first of many for this charismatic Chef. The book is being published by Weldon Owen . It releases May 8th.

About a year ago, nearly to the day, a friend of my walked me to the rather unassuming outpost of   Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream in the city of San Francisco. When I am in Shake Town I eat, a lot. Sadly what flavor of ice cream I chose is now lost to time. However, I remember being taken by the wonderfully fanciful concoctions , and thankful that I was not lactose intolerant.   So there is some excitement that a cookbook  is in the offing from these Bay Area iced milk purveyors. There is a nice little write up and a recipe to boot over at Wired . A bunch of years ago a few other friends gave me the money to by a Cuisnart ice cream maker. Hmmm...

One of the things that has kept me interested in the printed word during my winter with crime fiction was cookbooks. At this point I do not have the proper words to describe the attraction as I cook very little from cookbooks or related food magazines. Pretty pictures and wish fulfillment are about all I have at the moment to explain my curiosity. I know some people find Top Ten lists odious and beside the point, but I like to call those people crazy. Top Ten lists are harmless fun. Here are seven recent ones for the best cookbooks of 2011. The New York Times list is insistent that their readership expand their global view of cooking. I love those weighty tomes about Middle Eastern cooking and the like. Perhaps it is a bit naive  to only praise these books for their pictorial beauty, but living where I do invariably means using Google to search for 'substitute for X exotic spice.' My picks from this list are Tender by Nigel Slater and Hugh Acheson's A New Turn i...

As hobbies go buying cookbooks fall right into my wheelhouse. Kind of expensive with limited future use. Regardless of my current interest in making the cookbooks I own and the ones I plan on buying in the future more practical, a cookbook like the one for Eleven Madison Park balances between being aspirational and being an art object. And while I''ll admit that the Eleven Madison Park Cookbook is not just meant to sit there and look pretty.... I think for most home cooks this book is meant to sit there and look pretty. And boy howdy she sure is gorgeous. Eleven Madison Park: The Cookbook from Eleven Madison Park on Vimeo .

This will mark the first of what I hope will be a bit of continuing feature of The Hungry Detective. THD was always meant to be a combination of two things I love. Crime fiction and eating food that is above my means. Things never really meshed along those lines, and the idea was abandoned. But as things became a bit fallow around here I was turning more and more to culinary adventures. Now making brownies may not seem that adventurous, and I would agree. But when your experience until now has been open box, mix in eggs, dump in pan, then improvising a double boiler suddenly becomes something more than ordinary. Over the course of the last few months I have a acquired cooking literature both large and small. And while cookbooks have the heft of authority, zines like PUT AN EGG ON IT are just as fascinating to consume because of personal nature of something small and boutique.  The MISSION STREET FOOD book first tells the story of how a line cook and his girlf...