Ruhlman’s Twenty: Chorizo Vinaigrette

I’d had my eye on Ruhlman’s Twenty, a new cookbook from Michael Ruhlman, for most of the fall, especially after seeing a post at Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutterer about Ruhlman’s championing of organizing principles in the kitchen, better known as mise en place. “Cooking is easier, faster, more efficient, more successful, and more fun when you think first, when you prepare and organize,” Doland quoted Ruhlman:

“This is not an additional step—it’s simply doing all that you would do throughout the cooking anyway. You’re just doing it ahead of time, spending less time between cupboard and counter, refrigerator and stove. Be sure your counter or work area is completely clear. Go to the refrigerator, pull everything you’re going to need, and set it out. Go to the cupboard, and pull everything there you’ll need. Gather your tools beside your cutting board, set the pans you’ll need on the stove, and get the oven hot if you’re using it. Think about the sequence of your actions. And then being to work, and as you work while you’re doing one thing, think about what you’ll be doing next and next after that.”

This is excellent advice for cooking, but of course it’s also excellent advice for any creative endeavor, and it’s something that I’m working on incorporating more fully into my life as I undertake some major new projects in the months ahead, which you’ll be hearing about as they become ready to reveal. There’s a second, equally important component to mise en place, though: “Put away everything that you don’t need.” It’s something that I’ve struggled with in the past, hanging on to books long past the time when it’s become obvious I won’t be reviewing them any time soon; moving into a new apartment a little over a year ago gave me an opportunity to purge, but I’m still working on dealing with the creeping piles, and I’m hoping to improve a lot in this aspect of my creative life, too.

Anyway, Ruhlman’s Twenty: I love that these are all very simple recipes, grounded in teaching me fundamental techniques that I’ll be able to experiment with at my own pace. The chapter on vinaigrette is a perfect example: I’m one of those people Ruhlman talks about, who never thought about vinaigrette beyond salad dressing, so the idea that it can serve as the base as a sauce to go with all sorts of cooked dishes was a real revelation. So the first recipe I decided to make from the book was a chorizo vinaigrette that calls for equal proportions of diced chorizo, red onion, red bell pepper, and jalapeno, sauteed in canola oil (although I used olive oil) with a generous helping of salt, then tossed in sherry vinegar once it’s cooled. I had no luck finding sherry vinegar in the grocery stores in my Queens neighbhorhood, but I did have a bottle of apple cider vinegar, and that substitution seems to have worked just fine.

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4 January 2012 | books for creatives, cooking |

Blogs: An Essential Part of Book Marketing?

In late 2011, I wrote a post about book culture, social media, and monetization, riffing off the public debate over marketing aspects to the popular FridayReads phenomenon. As I said then, “the question isn’t so much should [anybody] be making money off other people’s willingness to talk about their love of books online, but rather will they do so in as non-exploitative a manner as possible?”

Right around this time, I got an email from the marketing department at William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins, to which I didn’t pay attention because the “From:” line didn’t have an actual person’s name on it, and I know from experience that there’s usually nothing in an email like that I need to concern myself with. But then my friend Rebecca Joines Schinsky of The Book Lady’s Blog started talking about it on Twitter, describing its tone as offensively condescending to book bloggers, so I decided to dig it out and have a look. The opening was awfully glib:

First of all, thank you for reviewing books for us! We here at William Morrow value your involvement in the publication and marketing of our books. Your thoughts, opinions, and ability to reach readers across the world make you an essential part of the book publishing industry.

I didn’t much like that “reviewing books for us,” or a subsequent line about how, after letting the marketing department know which books we were interested in, “your job is simply to review the book within a month of receiving it and post your thoughts on your blog or site.” Because, you know, if the publishing company is talking about this like a “job,” and telling me how much they “value your involvement” and consider me “an essential part of the book publishing industry,” my instinctive response is, “Really? What’s the dollar amount you’d put on that, then?” (An apologetic follow-up email the next day managed nevertheless to continue this line of thinking, when the marketing team, apparently writing by committee, declared, “Each of you is vitally important to us and play an integral part in creating and sustaining the all-important ‘buzz’ factor when we publish a new book.” So now I’m integral to your marketing campaigns, eh? That’s got to be worth something…)

I don’t intend to single out individual members of Morrow’s marketing team, some of whom I’ve dealt with over the years (although probably not as often as I’ve been in touch with the publicists); it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some other Big Six imprint’s marketing department could just as easily have sent out a similarly tone-deaf letter at some other point in time—this is just the one that book bloggers actually happened to have at hand at that moment. Carolyn Kellogg wrote a thoughtful if somewhat alarmist analysis of the situation for Jacket Copy—thoughtful in its historical perspective on the evolution of the symbiotic relationship between book blogs and book publishers, somewhat alarmist in seizing upon an implication in Morrow’s original email that bloggers who weren’t reviewing the books they received in a timely manner might not see many more books coming their way. Here’s where Kellogg pins down the critical issue (emphasis mine):

“If that is really bloggers’ role—creating buzz for a publisher’s products—then it seems to me that publishers should be plying them with more goodies, if not paying them. But if the role of bloggers is different, to expand the conversation around books, things are a little more complicated. Does the number of readers a blogger has matter? Can and should there be room for disliking a book? Can and should book bloggers be book buyers, and are they? If some bloggers reject publishers’ freebies in order to establish their own freedom, should those that accept them somehow make that relationship clear? Should publishers make any demands on bloggers at all—and if so, are free books an even trade?”

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2 January 2012 | theory |