Vibrant India

Play culinary casino with your next meal and let fate decide your flavor. We’ll say it over and over again at FTHQ, playing with your food makes it taste better. Lady luck adds a bit of mystery and mayhem to that fun. Last time we rolled ‘em we wound up with a baked lemon, dandelion green salad. Double down on that.

Here at FT HQ, we’re used to chicken of the fried, roasted, baked, and, well, eaten variety. But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk up the alternatives, like David Ezra Stein’s “Interrupting Chicken”, an illustrated story-within-a-story book geared towards the sleepy little chicks in your life. Let’s hope this funny, not-so-cautionary tale about a young chicken named “Chicken” who can’t stop interrupting his bedtime story succeeds in easing your clutch into quick and uninterrupted slumber instead of, well, the opposite. If, on the other hand, you’re reading this to your brood in Bushwick after a drink and draw, all bets on sleep are off. You know as well as we do you’ll finish the story at Roberta’s.

10 years ago I read a book called “The History of Food” which chronicles human eating habits from the hunters and gatherers we started as through the birth of restaurants and into today’s modern industrial food complex (disaster). A History of Food in 100 Recipes sets out to drop the same knowledge but in a more approachable less academic prose. There’s pretty pictures too which softens some of the more aggressive and outright despicable turns in our food history. For anyone who wants to not only what we eat but why we do, this is a great read.

We’ve been drooling over Dennis Prescott’s IG for the last few years. He has this knack of making everything look so perfectly crisp and juicy that we theoretically lose our minds and literally salivate. That pavlovian response has now been chronicled in a 125 recipe book, Eat Delicious, that reveals not only the food. Dennis also reveals his photography approach, technique and gear in achieving the ultimate in food porn perfection. Although he calls himself a chef first and photographer a close second we might be so mesmerized with his images to even take a bite. In a recent interview he said, “My passion is cooking and photographing large, feast-style scenes that highlight the community table.” That gets us right in the soul. Hey Dennis, any time you want to shoot one of our feasts, open invite buddy. If you’re not already a long time @dennistheprescott follower here’s your moment to jump in both digitally and with a printed home version you can drool all over in private.