It’s almost Memorial Day, when regular folks don their aprons, step into their backyards and transform into grill masters. Learn how from the following magazines.
Food Network Magazine finds its TV-channel stars’ loyalties split between $109 standard backyard Weber grills and the Big Green Egg, a charcoal smoker that goes for around $1,200. Or you can gawk at Guy Fieri’s custom-made 72-inch grill-and-griddle monstrosity. This thing has a pulley system and looks like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story. The issue offers recipes for burger and dog toppings like Vietnamese banh mi slaw and chipotle cheese sauces.
But what to grill? Every Day With Rachael Ray magazine is heavy on the how-to for holiday weekend chefs but doesn’t have much else. The mag has a solid tear-out booklet featuring chef Elizabeth Karmel’s grilling recipes for meats. The sauce recipes include red-eye rub (made with espresso) for steak and jalapeño-bacon marinade for pork tenderloin. Most of the recipes require a trip to the supermarket, unless you have a fully stocked gourmet kitchen.
If you want to go upscale for your burgers, check out Food & Wine’s recipes that “Andy Warhol would’ve created if he’d been working with Dairy Queen instead of Campbell’s Soup cans” (whatever that means). Its version of the US classic includes a star anise pod, coriander and caraway seeds. It can also take up to three days if you want to make your own mayonnaise. The highbrow mag also goes deep into Argentina’s mountainous wine country, where gaucho steaks and savory beef-and-onion empanadas are grilled on “medieval-looking metal structures for roasting whole animals.”
Fine Cooking has limp tips for grilling (“Pay attention” and “check for doneness early” make it sound as though they’re new to this grilling phenomenon). The recipes here don’t boast a lot of imagination, save for a grilled vegetable sandwich that would make vegetarians happy. For those who have never lit a grill, there’s a guide to prevent you from singeing off your eyebrows—but for everyone else, it’s just a lot of filler.
Jill Abramson’s surprise ouster as executive editor of the New York Times is yet another questionable maneuver by publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. Likewise, we’re wondering why The New Yorker media reporter Ken Auletta, who led the pack as he blogged on the mess last week, isn’t weighing in for this week’s print edition. Auletta tangled with the Times over whether Abramson had been paid less than predecessor Bill Keller, and the subsequent clarifications got messy. Meanwhile, this week’s “Talk of the Town” piece is written by Ben McGrath, and offers little more than water-cooler gossip. Is Auletta’s boss worried that he got it wrong? Either way, his absence stinks of something like Sulzbergerianism.
New York’s Gabriel Sherman tells us that Pinch had tried last Monday to get Abramson to go quietly, telling her, “We want to make this as easy as possible for you.” She shot back, “I’m not going to say I’m stepping down.” The rest is history, with her being replaced by newsroom nemesis Dean Baquet — the guy who championed front-page stories that she dismissed as “boring,” according to Sherman. “What seems clear is that Baquet, explicitly or not, forced a choice,” Sherman notes. If this is true, count on this horror show continuing to haunt both Sulzberger and Baquet for a long time coming. In the meantime, let’s hope “boring” doesn’t engulf the pages of the paper.
Time’s cover story on rape on US college campuses promises a look “inside the new push to keep students safe,” detailing a federal investigation of the University of Montana in Missoula. What’s odd here is that the story fails to mention the explosive situation at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Jameis Winston is caught in a controversy over rape allegations against him that never resulted in criminal charges. The Winston case raises troubling questions about the culture of our college campuses. This story, while laden with provocative and disturbing stats, reads more like a white paper on a subject that should be grabbing us by the jugular.