Serenity now!

Cookbooks often read better as literature than as technical lab manuals. That shouldn’t stop us from reading them, or from improvising our recipes.

We no longer learn to cook solely from generations-old oral traditions. Our recipes don’t tend to get handed down from village bakers, local brewers, or blood relatives. So, when the holidays hit, chances are we’ll head to the bookshelves for ways to make stuffing or cranberry sauce. This approach is not without its pitfalls. As John Thorne—the “outlaw cook” known for his renegade newsletter, Simple Cooking, which has developed a devoted cult following—wrote, “Cookbooks can be wonderfully entertaining and informative, but I don’t like bringing them to the stove with me.” The same could be said for laptops or iPhones.

Cookbooks, it seems, sometimes serve better as bedtime reading than they do as lab manuals for cookery. Adam Gopnik writes in this week’s New Yorker: “Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved.” After all, cooking well involves a knack that you can’t pick straight off the page.

So why not forget about following recipes altogether and watch the the Food Channel’s girl next door whipping up a luscious tomato salad. And then order take out? When blogger Jason Kottke discovered that the mouthwatering recipe for ramen in David Chang’s new cookbook required kombu and five pounds of pork bones, he said the book acted less like a cookbook and more like a Trojan horse for luring new customers into Chang’s restaurants.

Another problem with cookbooks is that following recipes to the letter inhibits the impromptu adaptive stuff that happens when you have to substitute, improvise, or fix your mistakes. The British food writer Nigel Slater compared recipes to wearing a straight jacket or compromisingly tight Spandex. Exacting recipes transform the engaging, romantic alchemy of cooking back into a laborious, anxiety-ridden chore.

There’s little doubt that certain recent cooking tomes of biblical proportion (some weighing in at up to 12 pounds) don’t really seem designed for kitchen instruction. They’re meant to tell stories, whether those stories are about perfecting techniques or about creating unreproducible seared duck breasts. Except for the exacting science of molecular gastronomy, which takes persnickety-ness to its furthest extreme with spheroid balls of solidified tea and freeze dried lobster tails, more cookbooks are shedding absolute, codified recipes in favor of instructions designed to inspire culinary improvisation.

Which brings us to one of the biggest recipe food fights in recent memory: The battle between Chris Kimball of Cook’s Illustrated, on one side—representing the professional tried-and-true, thoroughly tested recipe measured down to the last ounce, in one corner—and the online food wiki, Food52, on the other—representing the open-source, evolving, experimental recipes from any home tinkerer’s kitchen. Kimball has been criticized for dry, bloodless writing, whereas Food52 can come across as just another collection of half-baked recipes—a modern form of the community cookbooks put out by the Ladies Auxiliary. Next month, the two are hoping to stage a showdown that will settle which method makes the best recipes.

The primary point of their standoff may—like cookbooks themselves—be entertaining storytelling. Cooking ultimately comes down to the cook—not a recipe. Home cooks who can’t derive a good meal from a cooking magazine won’t do better using intuition alone—or a wiki model. But, hey, if there’s conflict and resolution, it’s a good recipe for a book, a home-for-the-holidays meal, or a protracted online food fight. I know I’ll be watching.

Luckily for me and all travelers, the TSA knows how complicated deciding what fits into the ever-nebulous “gel, aerosol, and liquid” category, especially with holiday specific items, so they’ve published this helpful list of holiday foodstuffs not to bring on the plane:

• Cranberry sauce
• Creamy dips and spreads
  (cheeses, peanut butter, etc.)
• Gift baskets with food items
  (salsa, jams and salad dressings)
• Gravy
• Jams
• Jellies

• Maple syrup
• Oils and vinegars
• Salad dressing
• Salsa
• Sauces
• Soups
• Wine, liquor, and beer

Also, no snow globes. Remember, knowing is half the battle.

Via TPM.

The test drive found some kinks still to work out (sometimes the generator becomes not silent, but very, very loud), but this is a pretty exceptionally good review of what could be the car that changes a lot of things—both for the environment and the American automotive industry—when it’s released in nine months.

And here is an accompanying slideshow of Volt porn.

Ped Shed over Drive Shed

This is part 19 of a continuing brainstorm on the future of cities, inaugurated at the CEOs for Cities Velocity conference in September, 2009. We’ll post a new idea each day until we run out, at which point we’re counting on you to come up with something smart. Do you have a good idea for improving your city? Add it in the comments below, or tweet it to @GOOD with hashtag #cityideas—we’ll publish the best ones. Monday’s idea: Google Analytics for Government.

Today on Twitter we asked our followers when they last went to see a doctor or dentist and whether the visit was covered by health insurance. We collected some of our favorite responses below. We ask a question to our Twitter faithful once a day, so if you’re not yet following @GOOD, make sure to sign up and participate in the conversation.

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We aren’t sure if this is in the wild, or someone’s pet crab to whom the owner gave an offering of a broken bottle as shelter. Either way, it’s kinda cute and kinda frightening. It doesn’t take much of a leap of though to figure this might be increasingly what our ocean critters look like—from crabs using broken bottles to octopi and eels using various discarded baskets and jugs for homes.

Read more about the health of our oceans in the full post.

Designed by Inesa Malafej and Arunas Sukarevicius from Lithuania, the Dancepants converts kinetic energy from running or dancing into electricity for your MP3 player.

More info here.

The Fall is a photographic survey of our historic unconscious. Mosse traveled to intensely remote locations, from the Patagonian Andes to the Yukon Territories, and worked as an embed with the US military to produce work for this exhibition. The Fall is a rescue mission to try to locate our blasted sense of landscape and archeology, and reclaim the primeval waste for our imagination. Produced to an epic scale, each of the photographs in The Fall is a history painting for our times.

727, Santo Domingo, January, 2009.

C-47, Alberta, June, 2009.

Entropy has always been a painfully difficult concept for me to accept, yet it’s undeniable and unavoidable. There’s a grand sadness to the inevitability of material decay and transformation, which is masterfully captured in this series—just as it was in “Breach.” But that sadness doesn’t detract from the beauty of these photos. If anything, it adds to it.

Curtis Commando, Patagonia, November, 2008.

The Jack Shainman Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. “The Fall” will show from November 19 through December 23. You can see all the images on Mosse’s website.

There’s a Jack Johnson song called “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” and we all know these three R’s are a good place to start when it comes to living a more sustainable life. While recycling tends to get the most attention, reducing and reusing can be equally effective tools in the battle to get by without creating a mountain of waste in the meantime.

Take, for example, eating. We all eat. We eat on the go, at home, at restaurants, in the car, at the office, at school, alone, socially—meals are an integral part our lives. Meals are also an easy place to make a difference environmentally: nearly one third of the waste produced in the United States is from packaging, and food packaging accounts for much of that.

Start by paying attention to your grocery shopping. Look at the way things are packaged, and opt for items with as little packaging as possible. Choose glass or paper packaging over plastic and Styrofoam. Go to the deli section for meats and cheeses. Prepackaged meats and cheeses often come on Styrofoam and wrapped in plastic. The butcher or deli at your grocery store will usually wrap your purchase in a bit of waxed paper.

Purchase fruits and vegetables from local farmer’s markets or produce stands. If that’s not an option, avoid produce in plastic containers and skip the baggie—your selections can be weighed just the same at the register. If possible, avoid individually wrapped items altogether by buying in bulk. Bringing your own bags with you whenever possible helps a great deal. Leave a few in your car and by the front door so you can grab them before you go.

When packing meals or snacks, chose reusable options for packaging. Love My Planet Lunches is a great company that makes washable, reusable bags you can take on the go. Keep a coffee mug and water bottle in the car, at the office, or by the front door. When you get a drink, you can opt for your reusable bottles and avoid adding to the 2.5 million plastic bottles thrown away each hour. Some stores offer a discount for those who bring their own cups.

When getting a snack, take it without a bag or box. If you order a bagel, ask that they put the cream cheese on it for you. This eliminates the plastic knife and container for the spread. If you are ordering takeout or bringing home leftovers, ask that they not include napkins, utensils, coupons, or condiments. If your office orders in, keep silverware and cloth napkins in your desk. In general, use storage containers instead of plastic bags, foil, and plastic wrap. Bringing awareness to your daily life is the biggest step.

It’s inevitable that we will purchase packaged items and that will create some waste. But, we can do our part to change the amount of packaging and waste we put out. Quite often, making these changes will benefit your wallet as well. Price tags are affected by packaging. When you buy local or in bulk, you remove the added cost of packaging. Not only does the earth win, your wallet wins too. A lovely shade of green for everyone.

Guest blogger Milissa Skoro is an actress and works on the Leadership Council for NRDC. Photo (cc) by Flickr user oceandesetoiles.