Un-Alinea'd

My sister Maris gave me the most amaaaaazing Chanukkah present - the Alinea Cookbook. I have hardly begun to really read the thing up close or log in to the special, cookbook-owners only website, but I have surveyed it and have formulated some thoughts. See below.

For those of you who don't know about Alinea, it's a cutting edge so-called "molecular" cooking restaurant in Chicago that is so stratospherically expensive and so hard to get a reservation at that most of us will never eat there. But we can, through the cookbook, get a glimpse of what goes on in a restaurant that produces cuisine that is part French Laundry, part Willy Wonka and run by a man who outdistances even cancer survivors like Lance Armstrong - see this article in the New Yorker . It's pretty mind blowing how someone can be an executive chef while taste-blind. Most people would just give up.

The book has received many reviews, in fact both the Times and the WSJ reviewed the cookbook this past week - but I haven't read either and I'm going to throw my two cents in anyway.

It's inspiring and creative and definitley makes one want to go out and buy immersion blenders and other gadgets, but after awhile, one begins to think that the presentation of the food is just...creepy. It looks like is something characters in a Hieronymus Bosch painting would eat. The base-line recipes sound simple and elegant, but the accompaniements look like things one could purchase at the Chicago-Chinatown branch of exotic candy store Aji Ichiiban, home of munchies delight (it finally has a website! See the Octopus special).

After reading through the recipes, I had to ask myself "Is it really that exciting to eat at a restaurant that spends a lot of time making its own fruit leather and geeking on presentation like a food stylist on speed?" Maybe...if you really like fruit leather and gel candies and vaguely sexual Robert Mapplethorp-like food. As a Cincinnatian, somehow I should be opposed to all of that. Especially the Mapplethorp part.

Still, Bartleby and I were inspired enough to spend our afternoon pretending we were in the kitchen of Alinea. He might not have been aware of the subtext. I bought a bunch of fruit leather (organic, from Trader Joe's) and a really weird looking dried tropical fruit mix. We cut the leather pieces and started to experiement. Bartleby wanted to know what it would taste like warm, so we tried microwaving it and discovered it tastes really good heated for eight seconds. As far as presentation, you can see from the pictures that now festoon this blog (shot by Bartleby) that we just might be contenders in the world of molecular cooking or food photography. Look out Chicago. Here we come.