Yesterday on BAB we highlighted the year's food news in food safety, D.I.Y. food, food politics, school food, and street food.

The top ten for 2010 continues:

Phat Beets Produce is a food justice collective in Oakland - the Beet Crew. Photo by Zachary Matthews

Late in the year in a cover story on class Newsweek explored the growing gap between the haves and have nots on the food front. "The Dinner Divide" noted that we are a nation where Gourmet Ghettos and food deserts co-exist, often in close proximity in places like the Bay Area. The sad truth is that while many of us indulge our "passion" for local, organic chow, an increasingly larger group of Americans simply don't have access to enough healthy food to eat. Meanwhile, another European is attempting to help Americans in need feed themselves, namely Spanish native and James Beard Award-winning chef Jose Andres, who heads up the nonprofit DC Central Kitchen, which offers professional culinary training for formerly homeless, addicted, or imprisoned adults.

Local angle: Actor Dan Hoyle skewered, among other things, hipster San Franciscans obsession with pristine produce with a politically-correct pedigree in his solo show at The Marsh The Real Americans. Meanwhile, Phat Beets Produce, a volunteer-run collective, launched a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box, nicknamed the "Beet Box," in Oakland, to help under-supported small farmers and get produce to people who don't live near a farmers' market.

Eataly in NYC. Photo by Megan Gordon

Lest this list be accused of being too parochial, let's turn our attention to food news out of New York City this year. There was lots, much of it of a legislative nature. Depending on your perspective, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is either a crusader for the people's health or a publicly-funded no-fun-nik: The city took a stand on sodium, introduced letter grades to evaluate restaurant cleanliness, tried to prevent food stamps recipients from using benefits to sip soda, a controversial move (even among anti-hunger and public health advocates) and outlawed alcoholic energy drink Four Loko. Furthermore, a calorie count initiative in restaurants begun in the Big Apple went national on menus across the country this year.

There was fun stuff too: Hello Eataly, a high-end food emporium boasting all things Italian, launched late summer by the city's reigning food Mafia, covered in a photographic homage recently on Bay Area Bites by Megan Gordon.

Local angle: San Franciscans welcomed Manhattan transplant Anthony Mangieri and his much-lauded Una Pizza Napoletana to town.

Jonathan Safran Foer at KQED holding his book, Eating Animals. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Meat mattered this year. The culinary conversation among carnivores, omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans continued as people pondered whether they could morally eat sustainably, humanely-raised animals and wrestled with conflicted or confused feelings about carnal consumption. Now more than ever, how much and what kind of meat we eat reflects our ethics, environmental values, economic status, as well as class, culture, and convenience.

That said, butchers made a comeback, hosting cleaving parties from coast to coast. Meanwhile, the Meatless Monday campaign, which asks folks to forgo meat once a week for health and the environment, garnered the endorsement of celebrity chef Mario Batali, long-known for serving plates laden with animal protein.

And in books and online vegetarian gals chronicled their carnal adventures as they discovered the joys of the flesh.

Then, just as the year drew to a close, New York Magazine announced that vegetables are the new meat, despite significant evidence to the contrary. Make of that what you will.

Local angle: A queen of vegetarian cuisine, East Bay resident Mollie Katzen, came out with a cookbook that included meat dishes, a decision she found herself explaining in every interview about Get Cooking.

While across the bridge the butcher's shop in Bernal Heights Avedano's Holly Park Market, run by a gaggle of self-taught gals, typifies the new-style yet old-fashioned meat market, offering cleaving classes using traditional tools and selling only local, sustainable meats. And the Oakland Unified School District hopped on the Meatless Monday bandwagon.

Macarons - Photo by Stephanie Stiavetti

Now to dessert (with all due respect to the First Lady). Move over cupcakes macarons are the new trend treat.

The Wall Street Journal reported on French fretting that these formerly high-end confections (not to be confused with chewy coconut sweets with a similar spelling known as macaroons) are finding their way onto shelves at such mainstream American stores as Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. The soft, sandwich-like cookie, which resembles a pastel-hued minature hamburger, has also been popping up in patisseries and restaurant menus around the country. Natch, the blogosphere weighed in, with negative reviews for the meringue-style pastries on offer at Starbucks, and an amusing update that cupcakes are the new macarons in Paris. Go figure. For you D.I.Y.ers: Pastry chef Hisako Ogita's I Love Macarons details how to make the crunchy and chewy morsels at home.

Local angle: These dainty nibbles can be found in Bay Area bakeries including Miette in the Ferry Building, Paulette in Hayes Valley, Pamplemousse in Redwood City, and Bouchon Bakery in Yountville.

Bay Area Bites blogger Stephanie Stiavetti sung the praises of these egg white, ground almonds, and sugar concoctions in a week's worth of recipe posts on her own blog.

10. Virtual Food

Social media and cyberspace continued to impact food consumption. As noted previously (see item #5 in Part One), Twitter + new wave food trucks = content consumers and cooks. Everyone seemed very app-y happy, with Mark Bittman, the Food Network, and even Gourmet (R.I.P.) embracing the new technology. Not all old-school media, though, marveled at the development. (Ruth Reichl, writing on Twitter, ironically, called the move a "pity.") Regardless, cooking, eating, and drinking apps found fans: There are apps for wine enthusiasts, environmentally-friendly eaters, and ethnic edible adventurers, among other food-focused iFinds. And, although some people doubted it would come to pass, cookbooks made the leap to ecookbooks in a big way in 2010.

Local angle: Budding Bay Area food businesses turned to social media to cash up their new edible enterprises. Examples include Awaken Cafe in Oakland, and an olive oil press and cheese-making venture that utilized Kickstarter to, well, kick start their companies in Berkeley. Early ecookbook adapters include Marin-based chef Eric Gower.

And over at 7x7 food editor Sara Deseran wondered out loud what a lot of local food writers have been thinking: With the explosion in new media -- think Yelpers, bloggers, and Tweeters -- is San Francisco suffering from a gluttony of information on all things edible?

What say you readers: Are there too many citizen scribes (not to mention a healthy helping of professional writers) weighing in on the minutia of every meal made in this city? Or does this town have an endless appetite for food news?

And that, folks, was the year in food.

Over Thanksgiving, I flew to New York to share Thanksgiving with my extended family. After the feast itself, I had a pretty lengthy list of places I wanted to try and dishes I had to taste before leaving the city. And when it comes down to it, Mario Batali's Eataly really deserves its own post. It is quite something--all 50,000 square feet of it.

Eataly is touted as the largest artisanal Italian food and wine marketplace in the world, and you certainly sense that upon walking in. The place is overwhelming in its variety, selection, and hungry crowds.

Back entrance to Eataly

What Mario Batali and partners Joe Bastianich, Lidia Bastianich (and a few others) have done with Eataly is successfully create a high-end marketplace that has distinct sections so it almost feels like a large, airy hall with its own pizzeria, fish market, cheese market, handmade pasta, fruits and vegetables, and wine and coffee bar. There are seven separate restaurants and they're trying to keep it that way, avoiding Eataly taking on more of a food court kind of vibe. We actually experienced this first-hand when my sister and I tried to finish our slice of pizza at the tables where you order your cheeses and meats. Apparently, so not acceptable.

The nice thing about Eataly is you can literally walk through and gawk and savor without purchasing a darn thing. It's an experience in and of itself. Besides our light lunch, we didn't actually buy anything (although there were dozens of opportunities to do so). I can certainly imagine if you lived in the neighborhood, it'd be a fabulous spot to pop in and pick up some homemade pasta or freshly pulled mozzarella. But I think on your first visit, it's all you can do just to take it all in.

There's the cheese. Oh, the cheese.

The friendly folks at the cheese counter

As if the cheese counter isn't enough, you turn around and there's a nice gentleman hand pulling mozzarella. You must try the mozzarella. It's to die for. It's just a little bit salty, ultra creamy, and perfectly soft.

Mozzarella!

After you check out the cheese, there's meat to be had. From housemade prosciutto to perfectly cured salumi, this is a tough area to pass up. And this is obviously in Batali's genes.

The vast array of cured meats & the meat counter at Eataly

And then, of course, there's the pizza and foccaccia. You can see the gentleman on the top right there preparing the foccaccia dough and that's my little sister Zoe doing a taste-test. She approved. We both did.

Pizza and foccaccia at Eataly

Everywhere you turn, there are little nooks and communal tables for folks to sit down and enjoy their meals, snacks, or quick tastes. This was my favorite part of Eataly, actually. It's very non-committal in terms of actually having a meal. They encourage trying a little of this and a little of that and coming together and sharing them. You see families splitting up and getting samples of things and coming back to show off their finds. And then, of course, you see families just sitting down and having a traditional meal in one of the restaurants.

Sharing a post-thanksgiving Italian lunch

My mom and sisters and I ended up parking it by the cheese counter, sharing a plate of house-cured meats and a variety of cheeses and olives. It was the perfect little mid-afternoon pick-me up.

Our lunch at Eataly

After you do a little grazing, there's always dessert and coffee.

Beautiful espresso machine and sweet dessert options

I actually noticed many people pulling up to have a quick espresso before delving into the market. Smart. You're going to need the stamina. But if you're in the right head space (that it'll be crowded and you don't have the place to yourself), Eataly is not to be missed. It's a visual smorgasbord of the best Italian packaged goods and prepared foods I've ever seen under one roof. If you are in New York and you're even remotely interested in food, this is stop #1.

Eataly
200 Fifth Avenue
(at 23rd Street)
New York, NY 10010
(212) 229-2560
Hours: Market 10am- 11pm daily; for to-go and restaurant sections of Eataly, check the website for more detailed information

24 lbs of Early Girl Tomatoes

I have a confession to make: I've been on a bit of a tomato bender.

I just can't help it. They are just so irresistible. I've been popping cherry tomatoes like pills, sneaking slices and dices of heirlooms into every meal, and lusting after Early Girls.

I recently came across this Mario Batali clip, and learned that there is a word for my ailment. The Italians call it Scorpacciata.

It means, essentially, a feeding frenzy…specifically, on something that is in season. In Batali's words, it's when something comes into season, and you "go at it with a vengeance." You have it in every way that you can, you commit to it, you gorge on it, eating as much of it as possible, because in the real world, that one shining item is only available, in its prime deliciousness, for a small window of time.

Ah, see? The Italians have been doing it for so long, they have a whole word for it. That makes me feel better.

To help feed my feeding frenzy, I turned once again this year, to the Ladybug Truck, Mariquita Farm's bulk buying club. I showed up early at the drop-off point (a.k.a. Piccino), and indulged in a lovely brunch al fresco to take the edge off.

Brunch at Piccino Cafe

Roasted Fruit Bruschetta (chewy, crispy slices of house-made bread, slathered with honey butter and topped with roasted strawberries and pluots, basil, and a drizzle of crème fraiche) and Salsiccia Pizza (house-made sausage, red onions, mozzarella, topped with two perfectly soft-baked eggs) got me feeling pretty good.

The Ladybug Truck

And then my supplier came. Score. I procured my 24 pounds of Early Girl gold and got my canning underway. There is nothing in the world like pulling out a jar of canned fresh tomatoes in the dead of winter, and getting a little jolt of summer again.

Peeled tomatoes

I couldn't wait to taste my loot and made a batch of sauce right away for that night's dinner. A simple and utterly satisfying meal of angel hair pasta and Early Girl Tomato Sauce. This sauce is made with four ingredients: peeled Early Girls, a clove of garlic, a spoonful of sugar, and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Cross my heart, that's all you need. And here's a secret: add a little cream at the end and you've got Tomato Soup!

You may recall another recipe for Tomato (Butter) Sauce I shared not long ago...well, I'm not saying that one tomato sauce is better than the other. I love them both the same, in different ways. Like jeans. There are skinny jeans, and there are comfy jeans. There are work jeans, and there are going-out jeans. I could carry this comparison on for a while, but I think you get the idea.

What I'm saying is…sometimes you need a little butter comfort in your life. And sometimes you need pure, fresh, healthy, goodness.

So, what are you waiting for? Farsi una scorpacciata! Quick, before it's too late!

Spaghetti with Early Girl Tomato Sauce

Early Girl Tomato Sauce
As Bay Area gourmands like to say, it's all about the ingredients. These dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes are so intense and sweet, they make for an incredibly simple, utterly delicious tomato sauce. I've also been known to add a splash of cream at the end and turn this into Tomato Soup!

Makes: Enough to coat ½ pound spaghetti

Ingredients:
About 1 quart container of peeled Early Girl tomatoes *
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

Preparation:
1. Heat up a tablespoon of olive oil in a saucepan and add the minced garlic. Sautee to soften the garlic, making sure not to brown/burn.
2. Puree the tomatoes in a blender or food processor
3. Add the tomatoes, sugar, and balsamic vinegar to the saucepan. Let simmer until sauce thickens.

* If you are working with fresh tomatoes, remove the skins by dropping the tomatoes in boiling water for 1 minute. Remove and run under cold water. You should then be able to easily peel the tomatoes.

Chef Gordon Drysdale is back in the kitchen, at the newly opened Café Des Amis, a Union Street restaurant project that he has been working on via his role as Chef & Partner for the locally owned Bacchus Management Group. Drysdale is also in charge of the kitchens at Pizza Antica locations, which recently opened a Santa Monica outpost. Drysdale still fields requests for his trademark dish of Brussels sprouts salad, which he calls an unlikely best seller, "It's like having rutabaga on the menu, with 100s of thousands of people asking 'when will it be on the menu?'" adding he's happy to have a popular dish that resonates. The dish first caught notice in the late 1990s, at his much celebrated Gordon's House of Fine Eats.

The Favorites
Drysdale has lived in the Homestead Valley area of Mill Valley for years, with his wife Susie, and two pre-teen sons, Miles, and Monroe. The Rochester, New York native describes the area as "old timey and cool, very Kerouac-ish." He admits that he likes to dine out with the family when he has a day off, but given the chance, "I'd probably go to Benu tonight if I could, like everyone else." The chef has visited Royal Thai Restaurant in San Rafael at least 900 times in the past twenty years, and he orders the same three dishes each visit. "Tofu with spicy green beans and basil; wheat gluten with potato and yellow curry; and ground pork with lime and chili. My older son, Miles gets his own order of the ground pork dish, and Monroe digs into the chicken satay." This restaurant gets the highest praise from Drysdale, who said, "it's the most consistent restaurant I've eaten anywhere. In my life.'

Cactus Café in Mill Valley is where Drysdale likes to eat a house salad with "what tastes like a marjoram laced dressing, very interesting. It comes with a quesadilla, and is very simple. For a son of authentic British stock, this is very easy to take."

Drysdale deadpans, "We're always looking for some variation on the theme of white for Monroe: pasta, pizza, and French fries." Mamacita in the Marina keeps his sons happy, where carnitas tacos with guacamole grace the table.

Special Occasions, Sweets
For his wedding anniversary in October, Drysdale and Susie go to Manresa. Chef David Kinch’s food is "lighter, with more 'unexpected' going on. And the sommelier does the most amazing wine pairings with the food. It's a raw deal that Manresa only has one Michelin star." The two also trek to Powell's Sweet Shoppe in Los Gatos, to buy sweet treats for their sons in a store that "has almost an Eisenhower feel to it.' Miette in the Ferry Building is another go-to for the sweet fixes.

"If I every have another New Year's Eve free, I'd spend it at Bix" where he was the opening chef for the Doug Biederbeck-Real Restaurant Gold Coast spot. He and Susie spent many a memorable night there, and "it's flat out magical, and hard to beat expectations here. Doug Biederbeck really draws it out on New Year's."

Produce and The Big Mac
The Marin Farmers Market is "for my money, the one to beat," said Drysdale. "There's some charm to the Ferry Plaza... a lot of great things go on there." Drysdale packs a bag lunch in his car daily, with "annoyingly healthy" carrots, celery, and apples. "But in that bag, there's always chocolate," he said. "I am a recent devotee and passionate fan of TCHO." Chocolate is a guilty pleasure, and once a year, he and Susie have a ritual Big Mac with extra pickles from McDonald's. Adding pickles "makes sure they are making it right then and there, right." Still, "I may never do it again," and am loathe to admit it is an item he consumes, even once a year.

Chefs & Cookbooks That Inspire
"I am a lifelong, ardent and passionate believer in Alice Waters. Of course I am," said Drysdale, adding, "Who isn't?" He loves the Chez Panisse Café, and the simple pleasure one gets there, that "you can't get anywhere else. A perfect peach, lightly chilled. Some may deter, but I love a perfect peach sometimes. The Chez Panisse Café cookbook is wonderful, and I can't wait for the December-January run of steelhead to do steelhead roe."

Drysdale has been using Jasper White's Cooking from New England cookbook for twenty-five years, and also loves the books and restaurants of Mario Batali. Paula Wolfert is another favorite resource, for her "cool, weird recipes that make me go 'Huh, wow, okay."'

I suppose we can thank Anthony Bourdain for the stereotype of the wild man chef. In Kitchen Confidential, his descriptions of "whacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees...and psychopaths" haphazardly gobbling substances and screwing on flour sacks between shifts made cooking in a restaurant kitchen seem like both the worst and best job imaginable. He romanticized the depraved hangover-to-hangover existence of a clock-punching turner-and-burner even as he cast his world in a hyper-realistic light, widely disseminating a broad colorful portrait of the journeyman chef, specifically a male one, that quickly congealed in the public mind. He popularized an archetype young chefs may even aspire to emulate -- like fledgling rock singers copping Jagger's pout and other well-traveled performance tropes.

In July 2009, Lev Grossman wrote of Bourdain in Time:

"It was invisible then. Now we recognize it right away: this is Anthony Bourdain's world...He changed our whole cultural idea of what a kitchen is. Pre-Bourdain, it was a warm, cozy, maternal place. Now it's a profane, brutal, masculine crucible, where human frailty is rendered away like so much tasty bacon fat."

Of course, Kitchen Confidential didn't tell chefs anything they didn't already know. I also doubt the book would have been such a sensation had it not arrived at a time when cooking and eating were becoming popular fodder for entertainment on the Food Network, and chefs were more and more in the public eye. Today, celebrity chefs are brands -- swollen, polished amplifications of the managerial personalities they cultivated actually manning kitchens. I'm not trying to write a college paper here, but I have noticed (as have many others) that nearly all of the high-profile celebrity chefs are men. While female Food Network hosts -- like Rachael, Giada, and the newly minted Melissa-- focus on saving time, shopping frugally, and feeding families -- clear extensions of the domestic arena -- male celebrity chefs focus on the craft itself, food for its own sake, cooking as an endless array of skills to acquire and adventures on which to embark in the carrying on of tradition and technique. They can approach food from an intellectual perspective. You learn about salumi. You study pizza. You get your education one cream-laden sauce at a time. You come of age in a French kitchen helmed by a venomous, insult-spewing maniac. You soak up abuse like a crostini, work awful hours, and get paid little to no money, but it's what you expect -- because you're an apprentice. You have to be man enough to take it. Some day, you'll be an executive chef yourself, and you'll have your own cadre of serfs to kick around. Until then, you mince onions and practice cursing. While women obviously pass through similar rites of passage in kitchens all over the world, in the realm of food entertainment, they're relegated to clipping coupons, dumbing down complicated dishes to satisfy some producer's market-tested vision of the American housewife, and attracting no shortage of she-can't-really-cook mockery from their male counterparts. Older female celebrity chefs -- like Lidia Bastianich, for example -- are motherly and comforting. They learned to cook from their mothers, and that's what they're sharing with you.

Everything on television is deliberately orchestrated, of course, but many of the common signifiers of male chefness -- the cursing, the drinking, the fighting, the screaming, the preoccupation with large pieces of meat -- whether expressed on camera, in memoirs, or reputation via third-person anecdotes -- endow a traditionally feminine role with coarse, conventionally masculine trappings. Producers want men to feel safe watching their shows. They don't want the women to appear shrill, unattractive, bossy, or otherwise threatening, or for the men in aprons to come off as effete. Over the course of six seasons of Bravo's Top Chef, some of the show's most reviled male contestants have been wheedling, effeminate men. Likewise, when Padma Lakshmi, host of Top Chef, did a tour of Spain for the Food Network way back in early 2000s, she was not tripping around, Bourdain-like, shit-faced on sherry, taking bullfighting lessons, making subtle references to gastrointestinal distress. Instead, cameras zoomed in again and again as she slowly lowered strips of fine jamon into her mouth, oohing and cooing, her face bathed in a soft, warm lamp-lit glow. In one segment, she rode a horse, in another, a donkey. She did go to a bullfight, which the bull managed to win against all odds. Relieved, Lakshmi repaired to a nearby restaurant, where she ate the balls of one of the victorious bull's less fortunate comrades.

Men who have become famous cooking and eating in the public eye go out of their way to project a masculine image, and their carefully constructed personalities stud every crevice of the machismo spectrum. Ginger-coiffed Bobby Flay, proprietor of what Grub Street deems the 13th largest chef empire, is a wise-talking Jersey dude. He's richer than an oil tycoon but he has real friends. How do you know? They come over to his modest-seeming house for sausage party cook-outs. Sometimes, when he's smirking his way through a Throwdown episode, he looks like guys I've seen at bars late at night, red-faced, a little sweaty, leering at ladies between shots of Patron. 8th on Grub Street's list, Mario Batali, corpulent, jolly, and orange-clogged, is renowned for Falstaffian excesses. With his Tourettic interjecting of idiotic catch phrases, Emeril Lagasse, locked with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Nobu Matsuhisa for #5 through #7, strikes me as a man who always speaks louder than he has to. With his Stray Cats-meets-Swingers-in-the-back-of-a-Sunglass Hut shtick, Guy Fieri apparently wowed audience members at this year's Great American Food and Music Festival in Mountain View with what Bay Area Bites contributor Stephanie Im called a "highly entertaining blowout performance complete with loud rock n'roll, gratuitous hot chicks on stage, big machinery, power tools, and pyrotechnics." The owner of 27 restaurants around the world, Gordon Ramsey has bounced over some financial ruts lately, but Grub Street still has him in the #1 slot. His shows are crude spectacles of theater Artaud, would find unwatchable. Ramsey berates chefs, spits food on the floor, and picks fights. Off-screen, he's compulsively disrespectful, particularly towards women. Bourdain? Well, he doesn't actually cook much anymore, but he drinks a lot on No Reservations and makes a point of eating anything put in front of him, regardless of how strange or off-putting it may be. When he's not going shooting with Ted Nugent, he's a culturally sensitive daredevil -- an Evel Knievel of antacid-defying degustation. I can eat this gigantic sandwich, these bulbous eyeballs, and this disgusting warthog anus, he seems to say -- could you? When he and Eric Ripert venture back into the Les Halles kitchen to char beef and sauce sole for Season Four's "Into the Fire" episode, they're in the war zone, brothers sloshing through the trenches, dunking freedom fries in spitting oil and hustling out steak au poivre as the foes -- the diners -- descend in overwhelming numbers. Interestingly, Jamie Oliver, who on several occasions has been the target of Bourdain's bullying, was the subject of a 2003 academic article published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies: "Oliver's Twist: Leisure, Labor, and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef". The writer, Joanne Hollows of Nottingham Trent University in England, frames Oliver as a construction of the masculine domestic cook. According to Hollows, in his professional capacity, Oliver avoids associating cooking with labor; instead, it's a fun, leisurely, and "recognizably manly" activity.

You'll never see a man on a cooking show gasping and groaning over the way something tastes -- over-sensualizing their pleasure from food. "Oh that's serious," Bourdain will say, wiping some beastly innards off his face, taking a swig of Heineken. Emeril and Fieri will bark as if they're at a ball game. Batali will explain why something is good, rather than simply express how happy he is to eat it. Some kinds of cooking -- grilling, artisanal curing, brawny offal-centric preparations -- tend to have hyper-masculine devotees. Molecular gastronomy -- food science, art, and fantasy in a delicious jumble -- is safe too -- because it's so dramatically removed from the drudgery of home-cooking. Every now and then, you see a gentle man cooking on television, and the effect is jarring. In March, celebrated Manresa chef David Kinch schooled Bobby Flay on Iron Chef. Even though his restaurant is a destination, the soft-spoken and terroir-enthused Kinch will never have product tie-ins -- commercial mayonnaise, kitchen gear, spice rubs, etc -- on Flay's level -- even in the unlikely event he wanted to in the first place. He'd rather build "tide-pools" of fresh shellfish and sea beans languishing in dashi-laced green tomato broth and go surfing in his spare time. One of my favorite cooking shows was Charlie Trotter's original Kitchen Sessions on PBS in the late 1990s. Amid a loose jazz soundtrack, Trotter very softly presented his thesis: cooking is a cycle of improvisations where time-tested techniques meet endlessly changing circumstances and opportunities for adjustment. The food was high-concept, challenging but within reach. As a host, he was a soothing presence -- murmuring vaguely poetic asides, often looking away from the camera, frequently indulging in tangential digressions appropriate to his show's statement of purpose. Trotter has been very successful, but his show, at least in that incarnation, didn't last more than a year or two. Ironically, Trotter actually made a cameo in the 1997 movie My Best Friend's Wedding, in which he convincingly played the stereotype of a blustery chef, bellowing at an assistant: "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right!" It's a better joke now, twelve years later.

Next Monday May 5th you can join the Cinco de Mayo crush at local Mexican restaurants, or you can meet the authors of celebrated Italian and French book on food, instead. We suggest the latter, besides, the best community celebrations will take place on the weekend, such as San Francisco Cinco de Mayo San Francisco in Dolores Park on Saturday May 3rd from 10-5 or Cinco de Mayo Oakland on Sunday, May 4th in Fruitvale.

First up--Italy

Join Mario Batali, celebrity chef, and television personality at Il Fornaio for lunch to celebrate the release of Italian Grill, which combines his passion for Italian cuisine and tasty grilled food. No ordinary backyard bbq book, it includes appetizers, flatbreads, meats, seafood and vegetables along with his signature olive oil, citrus, wine, herbs, and garlic rubs. This luncheon is at Il Fornaio Restaurant in San Francisco, with food selections from the restaurant’s own excellent menu).

What: Lunch with Mario Batali

Cost: Tickets are $125 and include lunch and a signed copy of the book Italian Grill
When: Monday, May 05, 2008, 12:00 PM
Where: Il Fornaio Restaurant, 1265 Battery Street (inside Levi Plaza), San Francisco
How: Purchase tickets online

Next up--France

Clotilde Dusoulier the blogger behind the popular Chocolate & Zucchini blog returns to the Bay Area for a book signing. Her latest book, Clotilde's Edible Adventures in Paris is in stores now.

In her own words, "Clotilde's Edible Adventures in Paris is a window onto my Paris, this delicious stomping ground for the food enthusiast. It is the companion I wish I had for every city I visit, pointing me to the edible highlights and giving me the lowdown on the dining scene, the best food shopping haunts, and the locals' favorites."

What: Clotilde Dusoulier At Books Inc. in Opera Plaza
Cost: Free
When: Monday, May 5, 2008, 7 pm
Where: Books Inc. 601 Van Ness San Francisco
Why: Get a chance to meet Clotilde in person.