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    ‘Does This Taste Funny?’: How Stephen Colbert’s Family Cookbook Came to Be

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    Comedy defangs the taboo, so Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert have decided, at last, to tell the dreaded spoon story. The two have celebrated milestone anniversaries, welcomed three children and one dog, and now released the cookbook “Does This Taste Funny? Recipes Our Family Loves.” Secure in that solid foundation, Mr. Colbert and Ms. McGee Colbert conceded the time had come to revisit what has come to be one of the defining moments of their union.It goes like this: The Colberts were just married and living in Chicago, where Mr. Colbert launched his career performing with Second City, when Ms. McGee Colbert took a metal spoon out a drawer and scraped it across the surface of their pristine set of Calphalon nonstick pans.Off in the distance, but almost visible from the porch of their home on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina where this interview took place, Fort Sumter marks the ground where the Civil War broke out in 1861. The stakes of this inciting incident were only somewhat less consequential.“We move into this apartment,” Ms. McGee Colbert recalled, “and I think we’re going to be chopping basil and cooking together and drinking wine and listening to Chet Baker.” Her new husband wasted no time disabusing her of those notions. “He’s like, ‘You shouldn’t do that,’” she said.“I believe I said, ‘How about a wooden spoon?’” Mr. Colbert countered, head in hands.Ms. McGee Colbert dropped her weapon and withdrew. She took one look at the man to whom she had pledged her troth and declared that there would be no more “having a fabulous time” in the kitchen. Mr. Colbert could have his mise en place and sparkling cookware. In the parlance of “Top Chef,” she packed her knives and went.“I was like, ‘I’m out,’” Ms. McGee Colbert said. Next to her on a rattan couch in the humid Charelstonian summer, Mr. Colbert wiped his brow and groaned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Stephen Colbert’s Family Cookbook Came to Be

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      Comedy defangs the taboo, so Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert have decided, at last, to tell the dreaded spoon story. The two have celebrated milestone anniversaries, welcomed three children and one dog, and now released the cookbook “Does This Taste Funny? Recipes Our Family Loves.” Secure in that solid foundation, Mr. Colbert and Ms. McGee Colbert conceded the time had come to revisit what has come to be one of the defining moments of their union.It goes like this: The Colberts were just married and living in Chicago, where Mr. Colbert launched his career performing with Second City, when Ms. McGee Colbert took a metal spoon out a drawer and scraped it across the surface of their pristine set of Calphalon nonstick pans.Off in the distance, but almost visible from the porch of their home on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina where this interview took place, Fort Sumter marks the ground where the Civil War broke out in 1861. The stakes of this inciting incident were only somewhat less consequential.“We move into this apartment,” Ms. McGee Colbert recalled, “and I think we’re going to be chopping basil and cooking together and drinking wine and listening to Chet Baker.” Her new husband wasted no time disabusing her of those notions. “He’s like, ‘You shouldn’t do that,’” she said.“I believe I said, ‘How about a wooden spoon?’” Mr. Colbert countered, head in hands.Ms. McGee Colbert dropped her weapon and withdrew. She took one look at the man to whom she had pledged her troth and declared that there would be no more “having a fabulous time” in the kitchen. Mr. Colbert could have his mise en place and sparkling cookware. In the parlance of “Top Chef,” she packed her knives and went.“I was like, ‘I’m out,’” Ms. McGee Colbert said. Next to her on a rattan couch in the humid Charelstonian summer, Mr. Colbert wiped his brow and groaned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Russell Morash, ‘This Old House’ and ‘The French Chef’ Producer, Dies at 88

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      Hailed as a pioneer of D.I.Y. programming, he oversaw groundbreaking how-to shows on public television in the days before HGTV and YouTube.Russell Morash, a public television producer and director who helped turn a cookbook author, Julia Child, into America’s chef and transformed bathroom tile replacement and roof repair into addictive TV with “This Old House,” died on June 19 in Concord, Mass. He was 88.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Marian Morash, who said the cause was a brain hemorrhage.Hailed as the “father of how-to television” by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which gave him a lifetime achievement Emmy Award in 2014, Mr. Morash helped usher in the D.I.Y. era with the enduring instructional shows that he helped create for the Boston PBS station WGBH.“The French Chef,” which debuted in 1963, with Mr. Morash as director and producer, and which became Ms. Child’s vehicle to mass-market fame, changed the way American’s thought about food with her distinctly American approach to French cooking. And “This Old House” proved an instant hit in 1979, and remains a ratings powerhouse after 45 years. As of last year, the show and a sister show, “Ask This Old House,” together had received 20 Emmy Awards and 119 Emmy nominations.Long before the Food Network, HGTV and other outlets created a how-to revolution on cable, Mr. Morash seized on the idea that craftspeople with no television experience could become stars of the small screen by sharing their insider tips and insights.“This Old House,” for example, made household names of Bob Vila, who previously ran a home renovation business, and Norm Abram, a carpenter whom Mr. Morash had originally hired to build a workshop in his backyard in Lexington, Mass.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harry Hamlin Got Into Gardening Because of ‘The Martian’

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      “If he can do it on Mars,” said the actor, now starring in the cooking show “In the Kitchen With Harry Hamlin,” “I can do it in my backyard.”The actor Harry Hamlin pronounces “Bolognese” the way Italians do, with the final “e” enunciated. His niece, the chef Renee Guilbault, says it like an American, with that last syllable ending in an “s.”But potato, potahto. With “In the Kitchen With Harry Hamlin,” their five-part cooking series on AMC+ and IFC, they find a happy meeting place — including on the subject of the aforementioned pasta sauce, which ignited a squabble on the reality series “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” back when his wife, the actress Lisa Rinna, was one of its cast members.“Everywhere I go, people say two things to me: ‘Oh God, I love your wife’ and ‘Where can I get your sauce?’” said Hamlin, 72, who also stars in “Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches,” on a video call. He also discussed space travel, the High Sierras and his grandfather’s Canadian gin-drinking hide-out. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Weekly Acting ClassesI’ve been in class my whole career. I chose this profession because it’s impossible to perfect. You can’t become an expert. OK, someone like Meryl Streep, she’s an expert. But I’m going to be a perpetual student. And I learn stuff every week because I’m sort of a character actor stuck in a leading man’s body.2Clean EnergyIt’s the holy grail. It’s how human beings will get their energy for the next 100,000 years, provided that we survive that long.3Hiking the High SierrasIf you’re alone, the animals aren’t afraid of you. The deer come up to you, and the bears don’t run away from you, which can be a problem. So it is quite an amazing experience to trek solo. I go up to 12,000 feet and get to places where even mountain goats would have a hard time getting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Jon Bon Jovi Did After Losing His Voice

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      Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More

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      Inside the 2024 Oscars Party

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      At the Governors Ball after the Oscars on Sunday evening, the writer-director Christopher Nolan and the producer Emma Thomas stepped off a raised dais after having their multiple Oscars engraved and were greeted by the party’s chef, Wolfgang Puck. In honor of the night’s biggest prizewinners, Puck was serving a selection of British food: Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and fish and chips were presented to the couple, who were both delighted by a taste of home.Onstage at the ceremony, Thomas said she had dreamed her whole life about winning an Oscar. When Nolan was asked at the party if he had held the same dream, he exclaimed, “Absolutely.”The normally reserved Nolan said he had felt emotional up on that stage, even though he maintained his composure. “The people that know me know when I get emotional,” he said. “Just ask Emma.”Christopher Nolan with two of the seven statuettes awarded for “Oppenheimer” on Sunday.True to form, Thomas added, “If he didn’t leave right when he did he would have started ugly crying.”“And we will leave it there,” said Nolan, before he was whisked away to greet more well-wishers.America Ferrera was still vibrating from Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” performance and Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell’s rendition of “What Was I Made For.” Both of those performances “were just simply stunning,” she said. “I think Ryan is so brilliant and really created something so unique and special with his performance.”Robert Downey Jr. with his best supporting actor Oscar, also for “Oppenheimer.”The Governors Ball, held at the Dolby Theater, is the official post-Oscars celebration.Simu Liu, who took part in the number, said: “It was an incredible, surreal moment to be onstage. And also, this came together extremely quickly.” When he got the call from the interlude’s choreographer, Mandy Moore, he said, he and his fellow performers Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans and Kingsley Ben-Adir hit the group chats, “and were like, ‘Oh my God, are you doing this? We have to do this.’”On the night, Liu added, “we were so nervous. Doing any sort of live TV is nerve-wracking, and then to do it in that room? There’s not many rooms that are more intimidating.”“There was such a moment of elation when we were done,” Liu said. “I think we pulled it off.”Da’vine Joy Randolph, left, who won for best supporting actress.The French director Justine Triet, with the Oscar for best original screenplay that she won with her husband, Arthur Harari.Anita Hill, for one, won’t forget the movie that inspired it anytime soon. Hill stopped Greta Gerwig on Gerwig’s way to find her husband, Noah Baumbach, to tell her how important “Barbie” was to her. Gerwig, embarrassed by the attention, said with a smile, “We are just making movies over here.”Yet Hill had more to say on the subject. “Clearly she has done an outstanding job and I hope that’ll be an indication to the industry to open up more opportunity to women and people of color,” she said, also mentioning the screenplay win for “American Fiction.” “There’s still not enough,” she said, “but I think this is an important time.”Sterling K. Brown, left, holds the statue that Cord Jefferson, right, won for best adapted screenplay.The party’s menu was overseen by the Austrian chef Wolfgang Puck.The four-time Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe.The celebration on Sunday was the 65th edition of the Governors Ball.According to the Academy, 1,500 guests were invited.Eugene Lee Yang, who voiced one of the characters in “Nimona,” a best animated feature nominee.Winners and nominees in each category, as well as presenters and other participants in the ceremony, get invited to the party.Billie Eilish with the only Oscar for “Barbie”: best original song, awarded to Eilish and Finneas O’Connell for “What Was I Made For?”Cillian Murphy, left, who won best actor for his performance in “Oppenheimer.”Charlotte Kemp Muhl, at the after party.The Swedish composer Ludwig Goransson, left, who won best original score for “Oppenheimer.” More

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      Gordon Ramsay Isn’t Going Anywhere

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      With a new season of his series “Next Level Chef,” reality TV’s most enduring antihero still reigns supreme. How long can he keep it up?Gordon Ramsay insists he never wanted to be the bad boy. His image as the brash, bellicose chef and restaurateur, as the master of the culinary meltdown, was, he said, largely a matter of getting off on the wrong foot.Ramsay was introduced to British viewers on “Boiling Point” (1999), a five-part series on Channel 4 chronicling his turbulent efforts to open his first restaurant. At around the same time, BBC Two launched “The Naked Chef,” a breezy, upbeat cooking show starring the young chef Jamie Oliver. The two shows, and the two chefs, could hardly have seemed more different.On the one hand, you had Ramsay, a surly perfectionist, firing a waiter for drinking water in view of customers. “And then literally at the same time, on another channel, there was Jamie,” he recalled in an interview last week, “this floppy-haired Essex boy, sliding down the banister doing one-pot wonders.”“The nation fell in love with him,” Ramsay said. Whereas with himself, he added, “the nation wondered what the hell was going on.”Ramsay’s explanation may not entirely account for his enduring infamy as an explosive TV tyrant — it wasn’t Oliver, after all, who named Ramsay’s signature series “Hell’s Kitchen,” and he hardly forced Ramsay to bludgeon countless chefs and restaurant owners with colorful jeremiads for the past 25 years on air. But that Ramsay still brings up old rivalries when discussing his reputation is revealing, a glimpse of the competitive intensity that has been crucial to his continuing success.That competitiveness is one reason that the host of roughly two dozen shows over the years, including “Next Level Chef,” returning on Sunday for its third season on Fox, still devotes so much of his down time to watching other food shows. It’s why, during the pandemic lockdown, he threw himself headlong into social media. And it’s also why, at 57, Ramsay has no intention of calling it quits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nom Nom Nom. What’s the Deal With Cookie Monster’s Cookies?

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      If you have ever wondered what the “Sesame Street” muppet is really eating, we have the answer.Years ago, a reader wrote probing for details on a mystery that had vexed him: What’s the deal with the cookies that Cookie Monster eats?The email said nothing else. I chuckled and filed the note in the cupboard of my brain where such things go. Until I realized something: Me want cookies. And me want answers.Cookie Monster, for those of you who skipped childhood, is a classic muppet on “Sesame Street.” He is a scraggly, blue fellow with bulging eyeballs, who has for decades been singularly obsessed with chaotically chowing down on cookies. The crumbs end up almost everywhere except his mouth, an effect that looks like a high-speed blender without a top.The character was created in the 1960s by Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, for a General Foods Canada commercial. Cookie eventually moved to “Sesame Street,” where he presumably found a good rent-stabilized apartment.It turns out the cookies are real — sort of.They are baked at the home of Lara MacLean, who has been a “puppet wrangler” for the Jim Henson Company for almost three decades. MacLean started as an intern for Sesame Workshop in 1992 and has been working for the team ever since.Lara MacLean, a puppet wrangler for the Jim Henson Company and the maker of the cookies that Cookie Monster eats, at the company’s offices in Queens.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesOne of the ingredients: instant coffee. Also: pancake mix, Puffed Rice and Grape-Nuts.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesMacClean dips her hand in water and flattens the cookies. They need to be thin enough to explode in a shower of crumbs.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesThe recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue.The cookies do not have oils, fats or sugars. Those would stain Cookie Monster. They’re edible, but barely.“Kind of like a dog treat,” MacLean said in an interview.Before MacLean reinvented the recipe in the 2000s, the creative team behind “Sesame Street” used versions of rice crackers and foams to make the cookies. The challenge was that the rice crackers would make more of a mess and get stuck in Cookie’s fur. And the foams didn’t look like cookies once they broke apart.For a given episode, depending on the script, MacLean will bake, on average, two dozen cookies. There’s no oven large enough at Sesame’s New York workplace, so MacLean does almost everything at home.This leads to the occasional awkward interaction, such as when MacLean once had to make huge batches of cookies for a series of Cookie Monster film spoofs.“My landlord came in my apartment at that time and I had all these cookies around and I was like, ‘I’m really sorry, I can’t offer you a cookie.’ And he probably just thought I was really mean,” she said.After baking.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesApplying hot brown glue for the cookie’s chocolate chips.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesOn set, when Cookie is shooting, MacLean said the “best-case scenario” was for the crumbs to end up all over the place.Sal Perez, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” said, “You’ve got to be careful for the shrapnel that comes out when he’s munching on the cookie.”Cookie has been portrayed since 2001 by David Rudman, who took over the role from Frank Oz. Rudman’s right hand moves the mouth, which is eating, and his left hand holds the cookies. Both work in concert to break the cookies, which means the cookies have to be soft enough to fall apart.Jason Weber, the workshop’s creative supervisor, recalled Rudman complaining about a tough batch: “My hands are so sore. Don’t make them like this ever again.”Rudman said soft cookies are best, adding, “The more crumbs, the funnier it is.”“If he eats the cookie, and it only breaks into two pieces if it’s too hard, it’s just not funny,” he said. “It looks almost painful. But if he eats a cookie and it explodes into a hundred crumbs, that’s where the comedy comes from.”MacLean has perfected a recipe that is “thin enough that it’ll explode into a hundred crumbs.” Rudman said. “But it’s not too thin that it’ll break in my hand when I’m holding it.”The finished cookies. Not everyone realizes they are meant only for muppet consumption.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesSometimes shoots don’t go as planned. Cookie appeared on “Saturday Night Live” in 2010 when Jeff Bridges was hosting. During the opening monologue, Bridges sang a duet with Cookie. The cookie that Bridges was supposed to offer Cookie broke in Bridges’s pocket, so when he took it out, he only had half the cookie. So Bridges pulled out the other piece and improvised.“Not only a half, but a whole cookie!” Bridges said.Rudman responded as a delighted Cookie: “Twice as good!”Cookie doesn’t just eat the cookies. He eats the plate they are on and has recently expanded the menu to include fruits and vegetables. Occasionally he devours inanimate objects like mailboxes. There is a small gullet in his mouth, so Cookie can actually eat something the size of a small fist. Bananas, apples and small hats go down easy, but most of the cookie crumbs end up outside his mouth.Not everyone realizes that the cookies aren’t meant to be eaten. Adam Sandler appeared on a 2009 episode of “Sesame Street” and decided to share in Cookie’s delight by spontaneously eating a cookie with him on set.“As soon as the cameras cut, he was like, ‘Bleeeech,’” MacLean said.Rudman said he told Sandler not to eat the cookies: “I think he got caught up in the moment,”It’s hard not to. The 54th season of “Sesame Street” just premiered on Max. Cookie is almost 60, but the core of his character endures.“He has sort of this base instinct that I think all of us have, even the youngest of us have,” Perez said. “One of our first instincts is like: ‘We see a cookie. We see a thing that we love and we just want it.’” More

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      ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ Review: A Beautiful Collaboration

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      For his 44th documentary, Frederick Wiseman journeys to the French countryside to examine the workings of a family-owned, Michelin-starred restaurant.Frederick Wiseman’s transporting documentary “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” centers on a dynasty of French chefs who live and work in a pastoral region in central France named Ouches, some 65 miles west of Lyon. There, amid rolling green hills and under the canopy of a century-old oak, the Troisgros family has a celebrated restaurant whose beginnings date back to 1930. The current paterfamilias, Michel, who’s in his mid-60s, has been cooking his whole life, and while you could say he makes food, it feels more like an expression of love.Making food sounds too pedestrian for the meticulously prepared, strikingly plated dishes that come out of the kitchen at their restaurant, Le Bois Sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), and certainly this is cooking on a rarefied level. It has long been acclaimed, receiving its first Michelin star in 1956 and holding on to its third since 1968. (It’s gone through several iterations and name changes.) Michel’s father and uncle, Pierre and Jean, were widely considered to be nouvelle cuisine pioneers, emblematized by a famous salmon and sorrel dish they invented. The chef Daniel Boulud includes the Troisgros salmon recipe in several of his cookbooks.“Menus-Plaisirs” is Wiseman’s 44th documentary and the first that he’s made since “City Hall” (2020), which notionally focuses on the administration building for the city of Boston. (In between “City Hall” and “Menus-Plaisirs,” he made one of his rare forays into fiction, “A Couple,” about Sophia Tolstoy.) Wiseman’s great subject is institutions, though more rightly the tension between organizations — with their spaces, norms and rituals — and the people moving through them. The bluntly descriptive titles of his movies are an authorial signature (“Hospital,” “High School,” “Boxing Gym”) and suggestively and purposely generic; one of the profound satisfactions of his work is seeing how he turns the general into the specific.Wiseman directed, edited and served as one of the producers on “Menus-Plaisirs,” which runs a heroic four hours (about a half-hour shorter than “City Hall”!). It’s absorbing from start to finish. Much of it takes place inside the bright, nature-inspired Le Bois Sans Feuilles, which is part of a larger complex set in a mid-19th-century estate that the family restored a few years back and includes a boutique hotel overseen by Michel’s wife, Marie-Pierre. Wiseman also pops into another Troisgros restaurant, Le Central, in the neighboring city of Roanne, making a more leisurely visit to a third, the nearby La Colline du Colombier, which is in the countryside.Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.The movie is arranged in distinct sections that suggest the rhythms of running a restaurant. The inaugural segment (call it Prep) introduces Michel and his sons: César, who cooks alongside his father and some dozen others at Le Bois Sans Feuilles, and the younger Léo, the chef for La Colline du Colombier. The sons run into each other at the market, where they’re hunting and pecking among the perfectly arranged leafy greens, bouquets of beets and radishes, and astonishing clusters of oyster mushrooms. In this section, the sons also meet with Michel to discuss menu options, and then the movie shifts to Le Bois Sans Feuilles.It’s there in this restaurant’s spacious, quietly humming open kitchen that the movie begins to gather momentum as Wiseman moves about focusing on one and then another station: One chef expertly filets a large salmon while another trims and butchers some ribs. Elsewhere, Michel and a sommelier discuss some outrageously priced Burgundies, and a brigade of servers ready themselves for the fast-approaching service. “Menus-Plaisirs” has all the virtues of a Wiseman movie, but its focus on beautiful food that’s prepared and served with equal beauty makes it especially seductive, even if you’re not keen on everything on the menu. I now know, for instance, more than I ever cared to about cooking veal brains.Once the customers arrive (call this section Service), the rhythms of the kitchen appreciably accelerate. Anyone who’s ever watched great cooks in action (in life or on TV) knows how enjoyable, even hypnotic it can be watching people with superb craft and technique at work, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Wiseman is sensitive to the sights and sounds of kitchens, including the tempos of chopping knives and the syncopated hiss and burble of pots on a hot stove. He also underscores the hard work on an individual level and when the chefs are in the flow together. These kitchens thrum with quiet intensity, not ego.As “Menus-Plaisirs” continues, its focus widens as the chefs meet with some of their providers — at a small cattle farm, a vineyard, a cheese cave — where the mutual respect is palpable and the talk is sincere and often turns to sustainability. Each of these interludes could be spun off into a separate documentary, but together they expand the prismatic portrait of a family for whom cooking is an aesthetic, a passion, an expression of love, an ethic. There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.Menus-Plaisirs — Les TroisgrosNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours. In theaters. More