1. Hawaii Bans Shark Fins. According to the AP, Hawaii's shark fin ban -- which is similar to California's AB 376, currently up for a vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee -- went into full effect on July 1. While the law actually took effect last July, the state gave restaurants one year to serve all their stocks, and from here on out, violators will be fined $5,000 to $15,000. The response is as you'd expect: Some restaurateurs are bemoaning the fake shark's fin they now have to serve, while others think the law is long overdue. In related news, the New York Times reports that the Bahamas has just banned shark fishing in its waters.
2. Next up: Bánh cuốn? The Oxford English Dictionary has added banh mi to its lexicon, sans diacritical marks, which means we've officially adopted it into the English language. The dictionary's recommended pronunciation: bahn mee, which is pretty much how I pronounce it after my attempts to pronounce it with the correct tones and vowels flopped so badly.
3. Reading a hundred-buck book. After learning that the SF Public Library had purchased several copies of Nathan Myhrvold's multivolume $625 Modernist Cuisine, I placed a hold -- after all, my 1990s-era culinary training was in classic French technique, not immersion circulators, whip cream chargers, and meat glue.
Last week, the library sent me an e-mail letting me know it was splitting the set into individual volumes, and assigning one volume to each person on the hold list. My volume? Number 3: meat and vegetables. I spent all weekend reading about the structure of muscle fibers and trying to figure out how much it would cost to purchase the immersion circulator (many recipes call for two), vat of liquid nitrogen, and deep-fryer required to make the Nathan Myhrvold hamburger. (Definitely a cookbook to borrow for the pretty pictures, not the recipes.) Next challenge: figuring out how to get my hands on the other volumes.
