Pennington's Foodstory

In my world, there is no place for a TV in a restaurant.   I’m not talking sports bar, I’m talking about an actual restaurant (tables, chairs, silverware, etc.) where one goes for food, ambiance, and to enjoy the company of others.   I think a TV takes away from the restaurant experience and distracts the diner from all of the fore mentioned items by switching their attention to some rectangle on the wall. I go to restaurants mainly for the food. I cook nearly every night and there are times I welcome the break. When I go to a restaurant I really want to relax and enjoy the conversation and not get sucked in to whatever the place wants to air, be it sports, the news, game shows, or reality television. I want to hang out and talk with the people I came in with. I’ve seen it so many times where a whole table will be silent with all of their heads pointed in the direction of the TV. Now if a restaurant really sucks, they may want to distract people away from the shitty food...

“Fat is flavor” is one of the key terms a cook learns at the beginning of their career, regardless of what we know about cutting certain types of fat out of our diets to remain healthy.   In a cook’s world today there are many trendy fats that are getting all the press.   No, I’m not talking about trans-fats, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, and the like; I’m talking about butter, lard, bacon fat, duck fat, olive oil, beef tallow to name a few. When I first started cooking, I used lots of butter and olive oil in my food mainly because I was reading classic cookbooks that had those fats as the cornerstone for most of their recipes. As I noticed a shitload of weight gain and higher than normal cholesterol, I began to back off a bit and get a little smarter about how I used various type of fat.   Nowadays I use butter and oil sparingly and add them mostly at the end of a dish to add a little shot of flavor.   Of course there’s that lubing the pan issue to keep th...