Would You Pay $625 For A Cookbook?

Whether or not, quite a few of us would would, because the cookbook in question - Modernist Cuisine, by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet - already sold out its initial printing, and it hasn't even hit the shelves yet! Moreover, despite the fact that virtually nobody on Planet Earth has actually touched the 6-volume, 2400-page opus, it's already been called "the most important cookbook ever", inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame, and generated uncountable words in the foodie blogosphere, including tweets by Thomas Keller and just about every other important chef you can think of.

A nearly perfect French fry, from the oven

The extraordinary potato: A poisonous, inedible plant whose tuber provides one of the world's most critical food sources and is equally at home in a Michelin-star kitchen as it is in a McDonald's fry basket. Is there any food that is simultaneously simpler and more spectacular than a perfectly french-fried potato?

Eat Your Black and Orange

As usual, my keyboard is running several days back of my knife and fork, but at least you know where my priorities lie: Worry first about the cooking and the eating. Having spent two months watching the Giants' thrillingly improbable championship run like a little boy in the bleachers, here is what I served when the Giants brought home the Commissioner's Trophy on Halloween, a plate of black and orange food that didn't require an above-ground nuclear weapon test in order to occur in nature, and still tasted good.

Get Some Beer Snack Religion

Every once in a while, I'm lucky enough to find a combination of flavors that just works, a minor chord born of a Beatles-like marriage of flats and sharps. Many of the classics never tire, and I use and re-use them without apology - and then there are beer snacks, the holy grail of sports fans and wannabe man-cooks everywhere, the perfect balance of heat, salt, and icy bitter froth, a marriage to read about in the self-therapy section of an airport book nook.