My pile of night­stand books at the moment includes Tim Fer­riss’ The Four-Hour Chef (avail­able as a free audio­book here), a flashy tome meant in part to teach the sim­plest cook­ing tech­niques that yield high degrees of ver­sa­til­i­ty, impres­sive­ness, and deli­cious­ness. But its real inter­est lies in the sub­ject of learn­ing itself, and so it also cov­ers rea­son­able-invest­ment-high-return tech­niques for mas­ter­ing oth­er things, like lan­guages. As I read Fer­riss’ account of his own expe­ri­ence devel­op­ing strate­gies to quick­ly learn the Japan­ese lan­guage right next to so many pho­tographs of food and the prepa­ra­tion there­of, my brain could­n’t help but com­bine those two chunks of infor­ma­tion — and then pro­ceed to make me hun­gry.

I had a mind to go straight to Cook­pad, Japan’s biggest gen­er­al recipe site that we fea­tured back in 2013, when it had just launched an Eng­lish-lan­guage ver­sion. Now we have anoth­er rich recipe resource in the form of The New York Times Cook­ing data­base, an archive of 17,000 recipes, also acces­si­ble through its very own free iPhone app. Call up Japan­ese food, and you get a vari­ety of appeal­ing dish­es and sauces from the sim­ple and easy (chick­en teriya­ki, yak­iso­ba, egg­plant with miso) to the more elab­o­rate (squid sal­ad with cucum­bers, almonds, and pick­led plum dress­ing; and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s fried sushi cakes) to the new-wave (miso but­ter­scotch, Nak­a­gawa’s Cal­i­for­nia sushi, and Japan­ese burg­ers with wasabi ketchup). Above, we have a video that accom­pa­nies the Yak­iso­ba With Pork and Cab­bage recipe.

Have a look around, and you’ll see that the site also offers a num­ber of use­ful func­tions for those who make a free account there, such as the abil­i­ty to save the recipes you want to make lat­er and a rec­om­men­da­tion engine to give you sug­ges­tions as to what to make next. But still, even though sites like these guar­an­tee that none of us will ever go hun­gry for lack of a recipe, we can only do as well by any of them as our actu­al, phys­i­cal cook­ing skills allow. For­tu­nate­ly, the Times also has our back on that: as we post­ed last year, you can get a han­dle on all of that with their 53 instruc­tion­al videos on essen­tial cook­ing tech­niques. And so we real­ly have no excus­es left not to learn how to make Japan­ese food — or any oth­er kind. As for all those lan­guages, now…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cook­pad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launch­es New Site in Eng­lish

53 New York Times Videos Teach Essen­tial Cook­ing Tech­niques: From Poach­ing Eggs to Shuck­ing Oys­ters

Michael Pol­lan Explains How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life; Rec­om­mends Cook­ing Books, Videos & Recipes

MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once (Free Online Course)

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Har­vard Profs Meet World-Class Chefs in Unique Online Course

How to Make Instant Ramen Com­pli­ments of Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion Direc­tor Hayao Miyaza­ki

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Paul McCart­ney became a veg­e­tar­i­an in 1975, thanks to his wife Lin­da, who cam­paigned for ani­mal rights before it became fash­ion­able, and lat­er wrote inter­na­tion­al­ly best­selling veg­e­tar­i­an cook­books. Decades lat­er, Sir Paul still remains com­mit­ted to the cause, encour­ag­ing peo­ple to skip eat­ing meat once a week — see his Meat­less Mon­days web site — and per­suad­ing fig­ures like the Dalai Lama to walk the walk. Above you can watch the Paul McCart­ney-nar­rat­ed film, Glass Walls. It works on his the­o­ry that “if slaugh­ter­hous­es had glass walls, every­one would be veg­e­tar­i­an.” That is, if you saw how most every car­niv­o­rous meal starts with absurd amounts of suf­fer­ing suf­fer­ing, you might ques­tion whether you per­son­al­ly want to sup­port this.

Glass Walls will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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There’s a lit­tle culi­nary alche­my hap­pen­ing in this video shot in Aqa­ba, Jor­dan. It involves cof­fee and sand. And “Broth­er Gantry” on Red­dit has it all fig­ured out. He explains:

He’s brew­ing cof­fee using tech­niques tra­di­tion­al­ly used to make Turk­ish Cof­fee...

Fill­ing each of those ves­sels (called a cezve) part­way is water, very fine­ly ground cof­fee, and pos­si­bly sug­ar. Because this is hap­pen­ing in Jor­dan there might also be a lit­tle car­da­mon in there and/or no sug­ar.

Nor­mal­ly to make prop­er Turk­ish cof­fee you heat it to a point where it just begins to bub­ble, but under a rolling boil, so it begins to foam up into the neck of the cezve before reduc­ing the heat and allow­ing the foam to die, repeat­ing the process 3 or 4 times before the mix­ture is poured into small cups (fin­can) and you’re left with a won­der­ful­ly strong, thick cof­fee with sus­pend­ed grounds which quick­ly set­tle to the bot­tom. Sand over a flame tra­di­tion­al­ly used in the process as a sort of “adjustable dou­ble boil­er” cups left on the sur­face stay warm and the heat used for brew­ing can be adjust­ed by the depth of the cezve in the sand with­out hav­ing to wor­ry about the tem­per­a­ture of the heat source itself.

The guy in this video seems to be mod­i­fy­ing a lot of the steps to make some­thing like a “reg­u­lar strength” cof­fee more the­atri­cal­ly using tra­di­tion­al equip­ment (e.g. he starts with much less ground cof­fee in the pot, judg­ing from the col­or to begin with, over­fill­ing it, not tak­ing time to let the foam die down but pour­ing out some the brew­ing cof­fee into a cup to reduce the lev­el, and pour­ing the results of a cezve made for sev­er­al cups into a nor­mal sized cof­fee cup instead).

Find more infor­ma­tion on mak­ing Turk­ish Sand Cof­fee at Secret Cof­fee Drinks.

via Digg

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hon­oré de Balzac Writes About “The Plea­sures and Pains of Cof­fee,” and His Epic Cof­fee Addic­tion

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Print­ed Cir­ca 1652