the backyard navel

Things I Miss in January

2012-01-24T09:36:00.000-08:00

Today I'm missing fresh strawberries from Mick Klug (might've been the best thing I ate all year during one stretch);

and pea soup with asparagus and watercress and shallot;

and tomatoes, like in this panzanella we made in August.

Missing them, and yet looking forward to having them again in just a few months. Here's to January!

i can only hope i'm a coosa (a response)

2011-08-30T08:25:00.000-07:00

the coosa that alicia made for us last week.

i wondered what it would be to get me back on the blog again, and here it is. coosa. which you'll discover by the end of this post, couldn't be more fitting of an entry to get me back in the saddle.

what is a coosa? well, that depends on who you're asking. for the past week in our home, coosa has been on our dinner plates, stuffed with spiced ground beef and rice and sitting in a broth of tomatoes. but simply, coosa is a lebanese word for squash. but then again, it's just not that simple.

alicia and i were married on august 6 in the clarence e. lewis arboretum at michigan state university. it was an incredible weekend, with family coming out of the woodworks to bring in the celebration with us. and family is what i'm getting at here.

for the aboods, alicia's lebanese side of the family, coosa is a word with many layers. for one, coosa is a little squash. as a kid, you could've told me a coosa grew from the planted thumbs of green giants, and i might've believed you. that's what they look like. a green giant's thumb. for another, and i speak from experience here, coosa is a timekey. when alicia and i sat down to eat the coosa she made last week, i could tell the dish had taken her to a place i'd never been—and eating it with her was the closest i might ever get. in that memory of a place, alicia's grandfather was there and so too were his siblings, the cousins, the rest of the family—the dish was full of memories for her. it was a special moment for me to take part in, especially in light of our marriage. but then there's the variations on coosa. if one abood cousin were to bring his or her coosa dish to another abood cousin's house, i'd put money down that the comparisons would start spilling out the moment the lid was pulled off the squash filled pot. the broth is too thick. you don't puree your tomatoes? and that squash... you over stuffed the squash. it shouldn't split open like that. and where's the cinnamon? i can't taste the cinnamon! what'd you do to that rice, sweetheart? it's puffed up like a wet sponge! and so on. one coosa is different from another.

but then there's cousin maureen, and her father. and she's the reason alicia cooked the coosa last week. maureen wrote a series of blog posts about coosa, capped off by the beautiful story about how her father called her and her siblings coosa the way other kids are called pumpkin. "now we always ask the delicious little children in the family: 'are you a coosa?!' and they laugh and smile, and know exactly what we mean." her blog post is titled "are you a coosa?" follow that link and read her story. it'd be a shame not to.

and that's the magic of food. at times, food simply fills a need. it can be a peach in the morning or a slice of cheese in the afternoon, just to appease that pang of hunger. but then food can be a whole lot more. in this case, food tells a story about my new family. and in a way, my writing on this one dish called coosa, is symbolic of my marrying alicia a few weeks ago.

just look at that picture at the top of this post. most people have never seen a dish like this before. so where did it come from? and why is it in my house? the story is there, and it's just beginning.

family farmed expo

2011-03-17T04:07:00.000-07:00

tomato mountain had a table last year via tammy green's photostream.

a few months ago a friend approached me about helping out on the social media for a three-day conference of sorts held in chicago called the family farmed expo. since late january, i've been doing just that. and the expo? it begins today.

looking back on the early posts of this blog, long before i had a business and did much more on twitter than scratch my head at the short and blabbering tweets that came from my own account, i never would've dreamed to be working on an event that billed itself as "a three day conference, trade show, and food festival for farmers, businesses, the trade, individuals, and families." the joke internally is that it's sort of like the SXSW of local food. but it's the 5am hour, i'm awake, and soon enough i'll be down at the expo doing my social media thang, live tweeting my little fool heart out. what a thrill for me to be working so closely with local foods, artisan food makers, and family farms.

i'm hoping i'll have moments to pause and reflect, even report, on the expo and the incredible programming that will run the next three days—but to be honest, i just don't know what to expect. this might be three days of marathon training for all i know.

in the meantime, follow along as i work my way through the schedule with @grantkessler and @localfoodwisdom while the three of us put our heads together and converge to bring as much live content to the @familyfarmed twitter handle as we possibly can.

and let's hope we serve the expo well, huh?

826chi guest post series: meat tostadas

2011-03-07T13:17:00.000-08:00

bean and chicken tostadas from stef noble's photostream.

this is it. the last post from the 826 kids before i jump behind the bar and make a fool of myself tomorrow night—which, having mardi gras like i will, should make up for the embarrassment, yeah?

pablo closes the series out with thoughts on meat tostadas. it's been great to see the culture that comes through these pieces, even in foods as simple as rice and beans or ceviche. it shows the importance of cooking at home, and how easily these stories and recipes and memories are passed from one generation to the next. "they are special," pablo says, "because we can all be part of this tradition, too."

thanks for following along with the kids, and here's hoping i see you tomorrow night. who knows, i might even be in an extra good mood and buy everyone a round... no promises.

Meat Tostadas
Pablo C.

It’s almost dinner time and I am hungry. I smell the yummy smell of the meat tostadas. It makes me feel warm. It makes the kitchen smell good but different. It makes me feel happy in a strange way.

What’s in these tostadas is the sweet avocado, lettuce, and tomato. It has cheese (chihuahua) also. How I help prepare it is I put the tomato, cheese (chihuaha), and avocado, and then serve it. This food tastes like a meat bowl.

This food is special to me because it’s a carried tradition from my family. This food came from my great grandma, who made this food every Sunday to honor the church’s time for us. My mom still makes it every Sunday, but still makes it on weekdays because it’s good. I help my mom make this food because I want to help her and be part of the tradition. They are special because we can all be part of this tradition, too.

This food describes me by telling that I am traditional and it reminds me of my ancestors. This food is something I will never forget and I will try to keep it in my family for my whole life long, and show it to my kids to stay in tradition forever so they can learn how food can also be part of our traditions.

826chi guest post series: i love rice!

2011-03-02T06:32:00.000-08:00

rice and beans with corn via the boastful baker's photostream.

the third in a series of guests posts from a group of kids that visited the 826 chicago headquarters and wrote about food.

the whole point to this guest series was to get more voices than my own telling short stories about foods that have a familial connection. with the last post i shared, i wrote about a connection between the two stories. and we see it again here with thoughts on rice and beans.

this all started because i'm guest bartending at prairie fire to raise money for 826 chicago, and i asked if 826 would like to share any of the kids' stories on the blog. when you read something like "rice tastes like little people in your mouth screaming to get out" from aaliyah c., you start to feel pretty damn good about asking for these stories. that's a heavy metaphor for a kids' writing exercise. awesome stuff.

a bramble via ian l grundy's photostream.

and since my bartending gig was cancelled last month because of snowpocalypse, we rescheduled for next tuesday—which happens to fall on mardia gras. so i've changed my cocktail to "the bramble" to bring a little cajun color to the night (maybe i should have beads, too...). it's a classic louisiana drink, layered on the rocks with bourbon, lemon, currant liqueur, and soda—even a non-whiskey drinker would keep ordering more and more of these they're so good. i'll be serving the drink from 6-8pm on tuesday, march 8, and any money raised for the night will be matched to hopefully give 826 chicago a decent chunk of change.

and finally, here's aaliyah, on rice and beans...

“I love Rice!”

By Aaliyah C.

The reason I chose rice and beans is because my family and I love rice. It is part of my culture. We like to make rice with different things, like rice with beans, rice and plaintains, and many many things. We make something different every day. Rice tastes like little people in your mouth screaming to get out. Rice smells like whole grain things. When I touch the rice it feels weird but I still eat it anyway. When I see it I wanna gobble it down. It sounds like nothing. Sometimes on special occasions we make it extra special to me and extra good, yummy. My family and I love rice and I hope we don’t stop making it!

a movie, food speak, and some grub

2011-02-09T06:12:00.000-08:00

apples in fall shadows via green city market's photostream.

about a year ago i was just standing at the right place at the right time when a friend introduced me to jim javenkoski. jim is a midwest man, through and through, and the devoted daddy of twin two year-old boys who go with their pop every saturday morning to green city market. jim also holds a phd in food science, studying both at the university of wisconsin and the university of illinois, and is a supreme advocate for local foods and the small family farm. and he's on a mission.

every month jim holds a locavore dinner at a chicago restaurant and spreads his local food wisdom through the sensory experiences that follow—he suggests certain farms and products for the chefs to use, and in the process, these dinners have featured product the chefs might have otherwise never known about or purchased. and to top it off, the farmers are invited to the dinner to not only eat and drink, but speak about the foodstuffs and the stories therein. it's a rare chance for any regular guy like me to rub elbows with the farmers who feed me year round.

and this month jim's throwing us a curveball. he's hosting a movie screening.

beth eccles, center, led the RIA and balsan restaurant crew on
a tour of green acres farm in september, and i tagged along.

the film is called "INGREDIENTS", and a copy of it is sitting in our dvd player right now. a food documentary that went straight to disc and never had life in the theaters, the film shifts between ohio, oregon, and new york city, focusing on the relationships between the small family farm and the cooks who have committed to working with the ingredients those farms put out year-round. this film gets to the very heart of what i write about on this blog, what jim advocates at his dinners, and what is slowly catching the eye of more and more americans.

the dinners usually set you back about $75, but this time around the cost drops all the way down to $25 a pop. which, just to hear jim speak and see the film is worth the price of admission, but jim's sweetened the deal a bit. matt maroni and gaztro-wagon, the pioneer of chicago food trucks, will be dishing out his naanwiches and munchies for the movie, there'll be an open bar featuring local brews, and after the film, beth and brent eccles of green acres farm and marianne sundquist of in fine spirits—she hosted and cooked for the most recent locavore dinner—will host a panel discussion moderated by jim.

here's a short clip of the film's opening, anchored by none other than berkeley local food maven, alice waters:

the event is tuesday, february 22 at 6:30pm at logan square kitchen, a rentable and shared space that's helped artisan food makers find a certified kitchen for the foods they sell at green city market. and i think it goes without saying, i'll be there.

826chi guest post series: my amazing summer

2011-01-27T06:33:00.000-08:00

ceviche in peru via .mayli.'s photostream.

yesterday it was hawaiian pork chops. today, it's ceviche.

this is the second in a short series of guests posts from the kids at 826 chicago, and while in just two posts the kids are finding a connection to these family table foods, there's also a common thread that's formed. on the surface the kids identify with the foods enough that for an exercise that calls for "recipes and reflections," we've seen two that span a generational gap in each family. what's beneath the surface though is that the kids aren't quite developing the understanding of this significance. the question isn't being asked, "what story is behind my mother's ceviche? how did she learn to make it?" instead the reflection we get is scene specific to the memory: watching the clouds pass overhead, dropping the bikes before going inside, and drinking lemonade.

which is refreshing for me to see, because it's easy to forget we once were at that point, too. a time when enjoying a simple thing like fresh ceviche, and sharing it with friends after a day in the park, was all it took to make the best day of the summer. it's called innocence—or naïveté or, calling a spade a spade, just plain youth—and it's given me pause to think back on those moments when i finally did ask the questions as to why a thing was what it was, and how did it get there, and why was it in our home?

call it sentiment, but i get a kick out of wondering what that ceviche will mean to tiffany ten years from now. my guess is that summer day will be a forgotten memory, but the stories of the ceviche, the time spent with her mother learning how to make it, will surface.

“My Amazing Summer”

By Tiffany M.

It was a nice beautiful day. I was hanging out with my best friends Jackie, Lorely, and FiFi. We were lying down on the grass in the park. We were watching the clouds, relaxing, and there was a wonderful breeze. Jackie, FiFi, Lorely and I then got hungry. So we decided to go back to my house for lunch.

We took our bikes and rode them as fast as lightning because we were so hungry. When we got to my house we dropped our bikes and went inside. We sat on the couch drinking lemonade and trying to decide what was for lunch. Then I faced them and said, “Why don’t we have ceviche?” Jackie, FiFi, and Lorely agreed. So my mom helped me cook the ceviche. Jackie, Fifi, and Lorely gathered half a pound of cubed fish, 5 limes, 1 big red onion, half of a green pepper, 1 small tomato, 1 teaspoon of salt, ¼ teaspoon of pepper, 2 spoons of vegetable oil, and a bunch of cilantro. We cut all the ingredients and mixed it up. I served everyone and we ate it all. It WAS DELICIOUS!! This was the best summer day EVER!! THE END.

826chi guest post series: hawaiian pork chops

2011-01-26T06:23:00.000-08:00

the infamous index card recipe from gherringer's photostream.

to be totally candid, i couldn't wait for wednesday morning to roll around so that i could begin posting this guest series from a group of kids who recently took a field trip to the 826chi center with a theme of "recipes and reflections." when i approached 826 about raising money for them when i guest bartend next week, i had no idea there was a food theme in their program. here's the prompt they offer for teachers on the theme:

Everyone loves food, but what does it really mean? During this field trip, students bring a family recipe and discover how food holds more meaning than just the ingredients in the recipe. Students work with volunteers to write reflections, incorporating memories of the recipe and its place in their lives. At the end, volunteers type the stories and the class is mailed a class book with their class photo on the back.

so much of what i've found through this blog is rooted in the premise of this simple exercise. there are endless stories to tell surrounding our food—which is why i can't get my fingers to type fast enough to introduce to a new way of storytelling on this blog. writing on "hawaiian pork chops," and the first in what will be a series of posts from the 826 kids, here's dylan's reflection on his family's recipe...

"Hawaiian Pork Chops"

By Dylan C.

The recipe for Hawaiian pork chops runs in my family. They taste really good and also they are easy to make. We make them for holidays or just days that we just like to have good food. It tells people that I really like yummy food. Also every time I hear “Hawaiian pork chops” my mouth waters, especially when my dad makes them. Some ingredients are brown sugar, ketchup, salt, pepper, and plenty more. The holiday we usually make it on is the Fourth of July. When I hear the word I get really hungry. When we make them everyone can help themselves—or at least if you hurry up.

charity guest bartending for 826chi

2011-01-25T05:30:00.000-08:00

this isn't my drink, but it'll look something like it,
ward eight via cookthinker's photostream.

a week from tonight, for two hours, i'll be wearing my bartender pants. thing of it is, i've never worn those pants before. i don't even know what they look like. so one can only hope pants like those have pockets full of whiskey, right?

i'm guest bartending. i've been fortunate to cross paths with sarah stegner at prairie fire here in chicago, who is both co-chef and owner of the restaurant. every tuesday night the restaurant hosts a guest bartender, inviting them to serve a cocktail of their own recipe, with any tips raised going to a charity of that person's choosing. when sarah asked me a while back if i'd come in and do this, i didn't really hesitate to say yes.

i'll be pouring out a ward eight, which is a classic whiskey drink with somewhat of a story. the drink is named for a boston politician appointed to state government in 1898, and it was the voting margin in boston's ward eight that helped push him over the top. and the restaurant that created the drink? locke-ober. a place that is alive and kicking pretty strong near beacon hill still today—and brings the story full circle, with our short-lived boston roots. but i'm calling mine a ward826.

most major cities in the u.s. have an 826. l.a. has one, and so does boston. and there was one down the street from alicia and i in chicago last year, and we didn't even realize it—which made us feel pretty small, with our mfa-creative-writing-gung-ho-literary-student-loan-debt-enthusiasm and all. that's because 826 is a non-profit writing and tutoring center, for children.

"the facade of 826chi. the boring store is a front for the spy store is a front
for the after-school writing program," via rcavalcante's photostream.

the 826 centers are a product of writer dave eggers, whom a lot of people know from his book a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. when i was writing more, his mcsweeney's collection of stories and essays was the one publication i wanted to see my work published in. the writing is off-the-grain, unique, and the kind of stuff we'd all be better off with stumbling across just a bit more.

a student reads in november via 826 chicago's photostream.

so even though i've worked closely with taste of the nation and am more recently working with green city market and the upcoming family farmed expo, there wasn't much hesitation when i decided to go to 826chi with my tips for next tuesday night. and they reciprocated. so much so that they've shared a few samples of student writings from a recent "recipes and reflections" field trip to the center. the kids bring a family recipe with them on the trip, and the point is to discover how food holds more meaning than just the ingredients in the recipe. if you've read this blog before, that should sound just a tad familiar, no?

everything looks better upside down, via 826 chicago's photostream.

so for the rest of the week leading up to my stint behind the bar at prairie fire, i'll be featuring an entry a day from the kids.

and in the meantime, if you're in chicago, make plans for next tuesday night. i start pouring my ward826 (whiskey, oj, lemon, and grenadine i'm making myself) at 6pm and won't stop until 8pm. and the kicker? the auer family foundation has stepped up as a matching donor for the night—so whatever tips are raised, we're now throwing the kids twice as much.

cheers to that.

guest blog: sustainability, and how one restaurant works with, and supports it, part two

2010-11-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

The third post in a series of guest posts from the team at RIA and Balsan in the Elysian Hotel, Brian O'Connor gets down to the anatomy—sometimes hair pulling—of sourcing product, and specifically seafood, that's sustainably harvested. This blog exists because I wanted to know the stories behind where my food was coming from—and this post hits on that note, to the T. For more on Monday's dinner, go here.

The dining room at RIA.

OK, now that we’ve set the ground rules for sustainability, how do they translate into real dishes at a real restaurant?

Yesterday I mentioned the challenge of a longer supply chain. At the restaurant we try to know everyone from whom we purchase product. We visit our local farms and hang out with the farmers at the market. Our Sommelier, Dan, gets regular visits from winemakers and makes his own way out to their properties as much as possible. While we’ve had a few chances to drop in on oyster farms in the northwest and we can work out a trip on a fishing boat now and then, it’s difficult in the middle of the country to build the kind of direct relationships we’re used to with the multitude of mariners who regularly catch our fish.

So what can we do to make up for it? “We have to know, and trust, our purveyors,” says our Chef de Cuisine Danny Grant. He singles out a handful: Pierless Fish, Ingrid Bengis Seafood, and especially Mika Higurashi at SONA (which stands for Sustainability of Natures and Aquaculture). “I know I can tell Mika what I am looking for and she will find the highest quality and the best source.” It’s a lesson learned over and over in this business: personal relationships are the path to success.

So now that we’re more comfortable outsourcing our direct purchasing to a trusted wholesaler, what do we buy? Let’s walk through a dish we’ll be serving Monday night: Sea Scallop, Caviar, Octopus, Fumet Blanc.

A RIA dish: Scallop and Octopus. With
turnip, sturgeon caviar, fumet.

The above is a chilled appetizer of gently poached scallop and octopus with hakurei turnip, American sturgeon caviar and a classic fumet emulsified with a touch of crème fraîche. It features a variety of seafood, each of which can be sustainably sourced.

Ingrid’s Diver-Harvested Scallops

Sea Scallops are a success story for sustainable seafood. In the 1970s industrial scallop capture nearly destroyed the natural population of Atlantic scallops. By the 80s the US began to restructure its scallop fisheries, introducing catch limits and rotational fishing and even closing off entire areas to harvest. The tenacious scallops showed their resilience and populations rebounded faster than anyone imagined.

Scallops have little inherent vulnerability. They are small, mature quickly and reproduce in large numbers (females produce 15-60 million eggs). Additionally, biomass has been closely watched since the 80s and populations are known to be large and strong. While East Coast US fishing regimes are not always thoroughly enforced, the fisheries have been managed reasonably well.

However, there remain concerns about by-catch and habitat damage due to the trawling used to capture the majority of commercial scallops. These trawls scrape along the ocean bottom, regularly upsetting the balance of the ecosystem and also capturing skate, flounder, sea turtles and other marine life.

From a diver's eyes via piggyhiggins' photostream.

Thankfully, a responsible alternative exists: scallops hand-harvested by divers. This less-invasive method avoids much of the ecosystem damage and by-catch while also functioning on a day-to-day basis. Instead of large ships dredging up scallops and then holding them aboard for a week or two before returning to land, the “diver” scallops are harvested in the morning and brought ashore in the afternoon. By the next day we have them in the kitchen.

When they come ashore, Ingrid Bengis-Palei or one of her employees is waiting for them. Ingrid Bengis Seafood was a pioneer in the Northeast quality and sustainability revolution of the 80s and 90s (she’s been called the Alice Waters of seafood for her role). She knows most of the Mainers who gather seafood in the icy waters around Deer Isle and she works with them to find the best of the best. As so often happens, the individual touch so important to sustainability also brings us product of the highest quality.

Wild Spanish Pot-Caught Octopus

Like lobster pots in New England, these pots help Spanish fisherman
effectively catch wild octopus, via catrien's photostream.

Researching Octopus is a great way to dive into the complexities of sustainability. A variety of octopus fisheries exist worldwide, each of them managed differently. A quick glance at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s seafood card finds international wild octopus listed as “avoid.” Uh oh. However, the Aquarium publishes more detailed Seafood Reports that approach the issue with an academic level of detail and flesh out more specifics for each fishery. The major reason octopus gets a red “avoid” is because it is nearly impossible, sitting at a sushi counter or browsing in a grocery store, to reliably tell the provenance of the product. With a bit of research, though, one can find sources of responsibly caught octopus.

Our relationships help us find these sources. We get our wild octopus from Spain, where fisherman head out daily to pull in their pot traps. The octopus has a relatively short lifecycle and produces hundreds of eggs, which means it has little inherent vulnerability. Overfishing does not occur and the inland pots catch mostly mature octopus with negligible by-catch. The true size of the stock is unknown, but fishing levels have remained constant for nearly 30 years in a well-watched regime. The remaining environmental concerns revolve around uncertainty: little is know about the octopus’s role in the larger food chain.

Additionally, Spanish fisheries have been remarkably creative in responding to the ecological and economic challenges of modern fishing. Spanish institutes often develop and fund those Sardine-counting studies I mentioned yesterday and the Spanish have been at the forefront of modernizing aquaculture to restore marine environments (more on that in my final post).

Petrossian American Sturgeon Caviar

Petrossian is a caviar staple, and a staple in our kitchen, too.

Unlike the scallop, the wild sturgeon is not a success story. Sturgeon are long-lived fish and they tend to reproduce rarely. They are inherently vulnerable to overfishing.

Worldwide stocks remain at levels so dangerously low that many governments have outlawed their capture. Black market fishing continues, often catching the fish only to open them and remove the gleaming black caviar inside. As stocks near extinction (and the remaining fish tend to be chock full of PCBs and Mercury), the US has banned the import of Caspian Sea sturgeon caviar.

In the US wild sturgeon are making a comeback and there is even one viable (and heavily regulated) commercial fishery in the Columbia River. The meat of these fish is delicious. For caviar, however, we turn to aquaculture—fish farming.

After years of research and failed experiments, in the 1980s scientists in California finally succeeded in raising sturgeon in captivity. Since then, commercial sturgeon aquaculture has taken off and currently exists in three states with plans to expand to others. As these operations improve, caviar packers have begun to partner with them to cure, pack and age the sturgeon roe in the quest to create a product comparable to the legendary Caspian caviar.

Petrossian has been selling caviar since the 1920’s, when they worked with Cesar Ritz to establish caviar as a symbol of luxury. While there is a certain status conveyed by the tiny eggs, we like them because they are delicious—well cared for, aged and packed.

Petrossian sources their sturgeon roe from Stolt Sea Farms in Sacremento, California. As might be imagined, aquaculture avoids the sustainability concerns of wild seafood such as population vulnerabilities and overfishing. By-catch isn’t really a problem when one is raising only fish for harvest.

There are, however, other environmental concerns associated with aquaculture (more on this in the next installment!) and Stolt does a fine job addressing them. The sturgeon are raised in water that is re-circulated, avoiding the escape of farmed fish or waste into natural ecosystems. The waste is processed and sold as fertilizer. The one remaining challenge in current sturgeon aquaculture is that the fish are carnivorous and eat more seafood than they produce.

One Dish, 1200 Words

The heartbeat of the kitchen...

OK—I hope the anatomy of a single dish’s sourcing helps to illuminate some of the thought that goes into selecting our seafood. Are we perfectly sustainable? Of course not. Are there trade-offs and compromises involved in our decisions and sourcing? Certainly. But by utilizing the resources we have and cultivating relationships with like-minded people, we can take great steps toward operating a more responsible restaurant.

One of the most common refrains in discussions of sustainable seafood is that transparency is key. We need transparency from the folks catching the fish about their methods and the status of their fisheries. We need transparency from our purveyors regarding the provenance of the product. And we need to remember that our guests need transparency in order to make well-informed decisions. We don’t list every single purveyor on our menu, but we do our very best to ensure our team knows the source of every single item on the plate.

By the way, the hakurei turnips come from Heritage Prairie Farm in La Fox, Illinois.

guest blog: a contest!

2010-11-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

This post is the second in what has now evolved to be four guest entries from my friends in the kitchen at the Elysian Hotel—and today we're hearing from Executive Chef Jason McLeod. On Monday night they're hosting a 'ocean-friendly' seafood dinner at RIA, in partnership with the Shedd Aquarium's Right Bite program. The dinner is $150 per person, so this is quite the bounty for whoever wins... but for me, I'm helping spread word of an issue I care deeply about.

Common in South America, this little guy will be spreading the
ocean-friendly message Monday at RIA, via Oleg Volkov's photostream.

It's official. Not only will we be cooking with some gorgeous sustainable seafood Monday night, but we just found out we'll have some very special friends visiting us throughout the dinner, too. Some, how do I say this, unique friends... and I think it's safe to say it'll be the first time either will have set foot in the Elysian. Actually, I doubt they get out much in Chicago at all.

Roll out the red carpet, people—we'll be joined by a Red Foot Tortoise and a Blue Tongue Skink. And I know, those names are great, aren't they?

I don't know about you guys, but this takes me way back to my childhood. We were lucky enough to have a zoo that made trips to our school with all sorts of cool stuff from the zoo and that day was always one of the best of the year. I mean, getting up close to animals and reptiles and birds I'd never seen before and skipping out on class? That's the real deal, man.

Needless to say, this news had the staff giddy with excitement—which got us thinking. We need to have some more fun with this. To spread the message to more people. So, because we're now on twitter and constantly plugged in to that always spinning network, we're gonna open up two seats to the Shedd Dinner via a little contest... and whoever comes out on top? Those seats are theirs, on us.

The Blue Tongue Skink will be there Monday night, too. Common
in the Land Down Under, we'll have one in the dinning room.
via floridanaturephotography's photostream.

And here's how it's gonna work...

Part 1. Correctly answer the following two questions in the comment section of this blog post (correct answers will be published on the blog upon receipt):

1) Our ocean-friendly dinner menu will be featuring sea scallops. This tasty seafood is considered what species?

(*UPDATE* No need to go crazy specific here, just tell us if it's a bird or reptile or... you know.)

2) The ocean-friendly dinner menu will also include Dungeness crab. This crab is named after a region found where?

3) What luxurious seafood was once considered to be 'poverty food,' fed to prisoners and servants? Some servants even demanded contracts that they could be fed this food no more them three times per week.

Part 2. Post the following on twitter, tagging @riabalsanchefs in the post (tweets submitted before correct completion of Part 1 will not be accepted, first person to finish is dining with a plus one on us):

1) A photograph of any RIA dish featuring any of the above three types of seafood.

Follow the rules and finish first and you'll be hanging out with a Red Foot Tortoise and a Blue Tongue Skink, too—though, maybe don't dress like them?

And keep a look out for Brian's second post, following the first he posted the other day. He's been working his tail off on this project—and that's not easy when you have a restaurant to run!

guest blog: sustainability, and how one restaurant works with, and supports it

2010-11-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

On Monday, November 15, Ria restaurant, one of my newest partners, will team up with the Shedd Aquarium to present an “Ocean Friendly” dinner featuring a sustainably-sourced menu. For the next three days, Ria General Manager Brian O’Connor will discuss the complexities and concerns associated with sourcing sustainable seafood, a struggle difficult for restaurants, but one I hope more and more take on—and one I've written about at length in the past.

The Shedd Aquarium via setholiver1's photostream.

Hi there. Thanks to Johnny Auer for providing this opportunity to think out loud (or in type) about some of the challenges and rewards involved with sustainable seafood. I’ll be posting three times on the subject: today I’ll discuss the general goals and criteria of sustainable sourcing, tomorrow I’ll get into some examples we face each day in the restaurant, and then Friday I’ll do my best to describe the future direction I see the whole endeavor heading.

Sourcing sustainable seafood presents even more complex challenges than those associated with other sustainable food. The usual concerns associated with sustainable sourcing are there: environmental impact, methods of production, and of course quality of the product. Additionally, we have to worry about the uncertainty inherent in a longer supply chain, the stability of species populations and the length of their reproductive lifecycle, and even the effectiveness of public and private oversight.

Investigating the sustainability of our seafood presents other problems. We make it a point to regularly visit and communicate with our farmers, and we can see firsthand the methods used and even debate their effectiveness when necessary. Getting out to the Alaskan seas three times a year, however, is prohibitively expensive. If we were able, we’d still have a hard time tracking the vulnerability of population stock or seeing if the rest of the fleet fishing the species were as responsible as the boat we were on. The issue is vast as—well—the ocean.

Thankfully, we have the work of the Monterey Bay and John G. Shedd Aquariums to guide us. Through their Seafood Watch and Right Bite programs, they collect and distribute a wealth of information regarding wild and farmed seafood. Monterey Bay has even established a set of guiding principles and criteria for objectively judging sustainability. These criteria group fish into three categories: Best Choices (Green), Good Alternative (Yellow) and Avoid (Red). These evaluations are invaluable to the chef or restaurateur interested in sourcing sustainable seafood.

Shedd's Right Bite wallet card, download it here.

There are five Seafood Watch criteria for evaluating the sustainability of wild-caught seafood. They focus on the stability of the species itself, the effects of capture on the surrounding environment and the effectiveness of enforcing any necessary limits on catch. Here they are:

• Inherent vulnerability to fishing pressure

The more resilient a species, the less likely it is to be overfished. For this criterion we consider the growth rate of the fish, its fecundity (a great term for reproductive capacity), and its maximum age.

Compare a sardine and a coastal shark. Sardines begin reproducing as young as two years old and live 5-10 years. Additionally, they produce loads of offspring. Sharks mature in 8-15 years (longer for females), can live 30+ years and produce only a handful of young. The shark is inherently vulnerable to overfishing because it cannot reproduce as quickly as it can be caught.

Mediterranean sardines via anthony plewes' photostream.

• Status of wild stocks

This criterion evaluates how “endangered” a species is. We consider the overall biomass of the species and the rate at which it is captured. This is surprisingly difficult to assess accurately. (Imagine trying to count all the sardines in the Mediterranean: How do you find them all? How do you ensure you don’t count a sardine twice? These are just the initial challenges.)

Because of the difficulty accurately assessing wild stocks, the Seafood Watch program adopts a conservative position: uncertainty is assumed unsustainable. If we cannot be sure the health of a stock, it is considered unhealthy. As we will see in the coming days, this leads to some of the most interesting questions in the evolution of the program.

• Nature and extent of discarded by-catch

As anyone who has been fishing can attest, one can never be sure what is on the end of the line until it is reeled in. As the scale of fishing increases from basic hook-and-line to longlines with hundreds of hooks to football-field-sized trawls dragged along the ocean floor, it becomes more difficult to catch only the intended fish. Methods which reduce or eliminate by-catch are more sustainable.

We often look for hook-and-line caught fish as it not only limits by-catch (which is quickly thrown back), but also because the smaller scale tends to lead to better quality product. Each fish pulled aboard is cared for properly: the body is not packed awkwardly, bending and denaturing the flesh; it is processed as necessary and sent to us as quickly as possible; also, it provides a more direct link between the source of the product and the final dish. In addition to hook-and-line, diver-harvested and trapped seafood also tend to limit by-catch.

• Effect of fishing practices on habitats and ecosystems

This criterion directly addresses the double-whammy of massive trawling operations. As the anchors holding down the trawl net scrape along the ocean floor, entire ecosystems are disturbed and even destroyed. The smaller-scale the operation and the less invasive the method, the smaller the footprint left behind.

Additionally, this section looks at the role the fish itself plays in the larger ecosystem. Removing a creature that is a vital link in the food chain can have lasting consequences far beyond immediate physical damage.

What you might find when eating at Ria...

• Effectiveness of the management regime

For the final standard we take a step back and investigate exactly how all of the above criteria are managed and enforced. Many fisheries limit yields or methods of capture, but if there is no enforcement mechanism these limits are routinely ignored. Additionally, the disincentives must be strong enough to stop the offending behavior but not so strong they discourage good fishing practices.

Again, uncertainty is treated as unsustainable. Without a certifiable metric for measuring effectiveness, management regimes are assumed to be “good alternatives” at best. To address this challenge, a number of different operations have emerged, from completely government-controlled and operated to those formed by industry association and privately overseen. In time, we will be able to better assess how each of these designs works and hopefully take the best of each to move forward.

So that’s a (somewhat) brief introduction to how we think about sustainable seafood. The Seafood Watch guiding principles and criteria give us a great starting point to examine the product we are using in the kitchen. Sometimes small changes can make huge improvements in practice: switching from Atlantic to Pacific Halibut or dropping Monkfish off a menu immediately make it more sustainable.

The real challenge is in the gray areas. Should I use wild diver-caught scallops? If I know the person fishing my black bass and I am certain she fishes it sustainably, am I right to use it? These are the real questions we face each day in the restaurant and these are the questions I’ll address tomorrow.

See you then!

an 11 year old tells us what's wrong with our food system

2010-11-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

birke baehr is eleven years old. and he knows more about our food systems than you do.

watch. and learn.

"think local. choose organic. know your farm. and know your food."

i want to be an organic farmer when i grow up too, birke. chase 'dem dreams, boy!

whole foods and grass-fed beef

2010-08-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

the whisnant's of rain crow ranch, an all grass-fed and pasture raised cattle farm.

i think a lot of us enjoy retaining information. it's why the history channel and the travel channel and animal planet and every other odd and random niche of a network are on our tv listings, right? and now, we have social media. we have things called news feeds on facebook and streams on twitter. every minute of every day these feeds are updated with pictures and links and snippets of stories being told by someone, somewhere that we're not at that exact moment. while there are definite downfalls to this, there's also a tremendous upside. i'm retaining more random news and info than i ever have before!

which is why i was so excited to find a whole foods post in my news feed announcing a nation wide sale on grass-fed ground beef at every single one of their stores this coming friday, september 3. grass-fed ground beef. $3.99 per pound. just in time for labor day. are you kidding me?

cheeseburger time via whole foods.

but i was also skeptical. how in the world can whole foods pulls this off? how can the farmers afford it? and whose beef is this? who are those farmers? well, luckily, whole foods wasn't shy to share just exactly where the beef would be coming from for every single store in their repertoire. so i now know that the beef i'm buying this friday is coming from a 10,000 black angus cattle farm in missouri called rain crow ranch. it's a family farm run by a husband and wife (she has a doctorate and her husband studied in both agriculture and marketing) and their six kids. that's the kind of story i want to hear—and the kind of producer i want to buy from. read the list of farmers to find out where whole foods will be getting your beef from.

people have issues with whole foods ranging from things like cost to political opinions to issues with a lack of local product in their stores, i understand this. but if you're going to cook out this weekend, and you're buying ground beef anyway, then why in the world would you not take whole foods up on this?

and why grass-fed beef? hear it from the doctor (and mom) of the whisnant family:

"grassfed products have enormous health benefits. higher in omega-3 fatty acids, higher in cla, higher in vitamin e, higher in beta-carotene, lower in calories grass fed beef is one of the healthiest protein sources on the planet. though these health benefits can be measured by science they alone do not represent the true product. grass fed is as much a process as it is a product. it is a sustainable management philosophy that benefits not only the product but also the animal, the producer and the environment. grass fed beef as a product is the tip of an underlying mountain of strength and integrity rooted in family farms that put their hearts and hands into what they produce. each farm has its own unique story and history; i would like to share part of ours with you."

for more on rain crow ranch, and to really understand what goes into an operation like this—why it's important for the cattle to be fed on grass and raised in fully sustainable and organic pastures—i implore you to watch this video. this is the kind of food education we all should've gotten when in school, as kids. the kind of education our own kids are still not getting. and it's right here at your fingertips! and there's no processing or butchering at all, it's clean!

you learn a thing or two, from time to time

2010-08-30T06:53:00.000-07:00

an elephant in the room via law h8r's photostream.

there's an elephant in the room. it's in the corner when i sleep and sitting next to me on the train when i head to the city. i see it drinking a beer at the bar and it joins us at dinner in our dining room when we eat at home. i even see it now from my desk. it's across the street, trying to climb the tree where the squirrels are. but it can't. it's too fat.

and no one else can see this elephant but me. or so i've come to realize.

losing my grandmother this summer, and watching my family suffer with that loss, has had a tremendous impact on me. which is to be expected, right? but the thing of it is, i'm ashamed of what's become of this. i've stopped eating well. i haven't been to the gym in months. we rarely cook dinner at home. our fridge is bare—and when we do go to the market, the stuff sits and rots before we ever think to eat it. to be totally candid, our produce drawers are full of mustard greens, arugula, and escolar that i bought the week we moved in to our new place. that was a month ago. and yet, when i do open the fridge, and the smell of something stale so blatantly hits my nose, i ignore it. i leave the spoiled foods where they've been untouched for weeks now in those drawers. and i'm not sure why.

fair haven, ny. where my grandmother left us and we
discovered the magic and simplicity of family and summer.

there was a point this summer when i wanted to just walk away from the business i'd started, feeling the pressure of running a one-man operation, that it was just too stupid of an idea to ever start to begin with. i'd imagine most people would come to that point when facing the loss of a family member, the excitement of an engagement, and the weight and pressure of the wedding planning that follows. which is why i didn't walk away from my business and instead am restructuring the way my business operates. if working alone is too tough, then hire somebody, right? if wedding planning is overwhelming, then take a step back and think about why you're even getting married to begin with—i keep on thinking over and over about the moment i bent on my knee. her face was beet red and she was laughing and crying and while i lost the ability to speak, i was so damn nervous, she kept asking what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing. over and over. and it just might be the happiest moment of my life. so planning a wedding? it's about remembering that moment, isn't it?

but the problem i'm having is that through all of this, the elephant is still there. i weigh more than fifteen pounds than i did before alicia and i left for california in june, when we got engaged. i'm at my highest weight of my life. i look awful. i've looked awful for a while now. and yet, i haven't found the courage to do anything about it. it's not that i'm sitting in a room with the lights off every night drowning in my sorrows—i've been there before. i know that feeling. this is different. most days, i'm numb to my emotions. after my grandmother's second service, which was in california, my grandfather's health started to deteriorate, too. he hasn't been able to eat much, and like her, he's been fighting cancer, too. but when she was alive, they had each other. how does one keep fighting after a loss like that? cancer doesn't let up. if you let your guard down just for a moment, it sneaks right in and doesn't relent. unfortunately, that's what he is now facing. so when i'm hungry or tired or overworked? when i'm vulnerable to my emotions and lose that numbness i carry with me every day? that's when i stop caring about what i'm eating or where it's from or how it was cooked. that's when i just eat. that's when things feel good.

and that's the total opposite of everything i've ever written about in this blog.

so there's this elephant, and i'm just not sure what to do about it. the answer is obvious. i know how to shake it. but that produce drawer is still stinking up our fridge, and i'm still sitting here ignoring it. maybe now that i've called the elephant out i'll step into the ring and take the thing on. but if it's that easy, then why'd it take me so long? why didn't i kick the elephant's butt before this?

though really, when it comes down to it, i'm getting married next summer. whether i like it or not, that elephant will grow wings before my bride to be allows any ol' elephant to sleep in our room at night. and that's maybe the sign of courage i need. like my grandparents were for each other, i've met that someone who won't let me back down.

hello, again

2010-08-19T11:15:00.000-07:00

this was our backyard for one night. deetjen's, big sur.

it's been a while. a long while. since i last wrote, i proposed to my girlfriend; bunked for a night under a redwood along a creek in a cabin on a big sur canyon; lost my grandmother to cancer; failed to add any new clients to the business; stephanie opened her restaurant; started reading the town that food saved—a remarkable story of agriculture and community set in a vermont town called hardwick; finished reading anthony bourdain's newish book; moved; my parents moved, too; and so did my brother mikey; got deathly ill off oysters in san francisco—in the middle of the night, when i was going to propose the next day; the hearty boys received a flawless review in the tribune—and are now packed nightly; my brother tommy graduated from the 8th grade; found what might very well be the venue for the wedding; went to a wedding in north carolina; and michigan; but failed to eat my first chick-fil-a; but not my first epic burger; and, oysters and sickness and all, somehow the girlfriend said yes.

and yesterday morning i found myself sitting next to a husband and wife farmer, discussing a future project that's very much raw and in the early stages of development—but just might have the right combination of timing, public and political interest, influence, and just a desperate, desperate need by a small minority (family farmers) that'll evolve into something really, really big. something i've been waiting and waiting to not only see, but have a hand in.

but it was sitting next to the farmers, hearing first hand what it's like to be small farmers in a country whose government is making money hand-over-fist with its interests in big food commodities, when i noticed the dirt and filth caked to the nails of the farmer sitting next to me, that i realized how far i'd come in my journey from little woodland hills, california.

this farmer wore the dirt on his hands as though he'd been born that way. that my small, unblemished, dainty little fingers separated my hands from his like his bald head was different from my flowing head of hair. like blue eyes are different from green. the farmer wore his filthy and weathered hands like he had no choice. something like genetics.

i was sitting next to, and having a responsible and mature conversation with, real life farmers. to me—i could've been sitting next to magic johnson or vin scully—big deal, man.

and when i woke up this morning, i couldn't stop thinking about finding a way to re-immerse myself yet again within the issues i'd been writing and researching about late last year. family farmers are struggling. corporate farms are thriving. and in all this time that i've started my business, thousands of people across the country have continued to write and work and better the state of our food systems. well, i'm looking forward to rejoining the cause.

that, and run a business. and plan a wedding.

leaving on a jet plane

2010-06-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

alicia and i are flying to los angeles tonight to spend a couple days with my family, and then we're driving up the coast to spend some time in san francisco, carneros, and big sur. some great farm to table restaurants are in the plans and same too for some vineyard visits, but i think i'm most excited about driving along the coast and through the windy and rolling hills of wine country. this will be a first time there for both of us—and is there a better way to close it out than staying in a cabin on a creek near the ocean in a redwood forest in big sur?

in the meantime, i'm pretty excited about something that launched yesterday. the splash page to my website! jamco new media has got some legs - albeit it wobbly toddler ones.

hope everyone has a great weekend. and we'll see you in a couple weeks!

pesticides: what to avoid, and what's okay

2010-06-01T05:02:00.000-07:00

eating organic wasn't something we ever really learned about, right? i mean, if you really think about it, the way americans shop at the market is pretty standard: follow the big yellow price signs in the produce department and pick what not only what looks most fresh, but costs the least, too. which, of course, organic is not.

but even for those who are buying organic, nobody is quite sure why it's better and if some foods are okay to buy if they're not organic. growing up in california, i knew strawberries year-round. big, plump, juicy ones - but it's funny, because it wasn't until last summer when we moved to chicago that i tasted my first real, true strawberry.

(at the market via sarahpoelstra's photostream)

thumb nail sized berries with chive-like stems that just radiated with that bright ruby color like in the picture above - but yeah, they definitely aren't cheap. but they also aren't covered and caked in pesticides like the giant strawberries i know so well from home - the same strawberries i see in grocery stores all over chicago - which leads me to my point... unless you make nice with the produce workers, the supermarkets aren't going to take the reigns and teach shoppers what's best to buy, and it for sure won't be the government, which means we're kind of at a loss, aren't we?

that's why i try and pounce on these things as soon as i can. starting june 2, cnn will be running a two-part report on pesticides in our food - and they've thrown together a list, as well as the short video above, as a precursor of what's good to buy non-organic, and what should be avoided.

the government states that consuming pesticides in small amounts is not harmful. how do you feel about that? you mind eating these foods, caked in the stuff even after washing? the government's pockets are lined with gold by big food, so of course low doses aren't harmful... i bet your doctor would tell you the same thing, wouldn't he or she?

(not sure what about this is anywhere near appetizing...

the obvious via through joanne's eye's photostream)

and the thing of it is, fruit is tested for pesticides after it's been washed by the farmers. so that old trick you thought was helping, running the sink and giving your food a quick rinse? not really helping...

the bottom line is this. the edible parts of foods with a skin or husk aren't exposed to the chemicals like a strawberry or an apple. so think about it: if you have to peel it, like a banana, then it's okay to save your money and by what's cost-effective for you. but those berries you love? even though organic berries are sometimes twice the cost of non-organic, you're only helping yourself and anyone else in your home in the long-run.

here's a list to follow. if nothing else, i hope it at least will give you second thoughts...

what to avoid

celery
peaches
strawberries
apples
domestic blueberries
nectarines
sweet bell peppers
spinach, kale and collard greens
cherries
potatoes
imported grapes

lettuce

and what's okay

onions
avocados
sweet corn
pineapples
mango
sweet peas
asparagus
kiwi fruit
cabbage
eggplant
cantaloupe
watermelon
grapefruit
sweet potatoes

sweet onions

happy eating.

the lunch line

2010-05-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

(i eat nearly every meal at home now, like this fish stew, on its

third day, made with potatoes, kale, carrots, leeks, and more)

i've been clawing and itching and dying to find just a half hour to sit down and write one of the dozen or so posts that've been stewing in my mind for the past couple of weeks, but somehow a half hour has become very difficult to find. funny thing.

but i couldn't help myself when i saw the chance to take the five minutes or so that it's gonna cost me to get this one up. this project hits close to home, and i hope to begin writing about the issues more and more in the coming days. we've heard the first lady is making it her mission to reform the school lunch program, but we all need to understand why it needs changing to begin with. we need to push past the surface and dig a bit deeper to learn what it is that we've been eating for so many years, and how truly harmful it's been for our health.

here's a starter, and a damn good little effort at that.

Lunch Line Trailer from uji films on Vimeo.

i gave twenty bucks. the way i see it, that's twenty bucks i'm not spending on take-out, restaurant, or some other over-priced and not-so-healthy food from somewhere else because instead, i'm gonna eat what's in my fridge!

my baby's name is jamco, new media

2010-04-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

(the fun i have w/ my work... chef john caputo of

bin 36 cutting swordfish steaks before service)

to grab the bull by the horns, i've lost any momentum i had going with this blog with my writing silence over the past few months - and that's a major bummer to me.

i moved to chicago with no job and a recent master's degree specified to a field that - because i couldn't have plotted my career course better - doesn't exist in the job marketplace. it's not like there are tall buildings in new york full of firms eager and awaiting a creative writer to come and start crunching ledger sheets and quarterly earnings and mutual funds. writers crunch words, and as the internet grows, the written word holds less and less value.

so this blog, for all its worth, was my way to try and crack any kind of something that might lead to a job in chicago. and funny enough, it did.

writing that piece way back in july on stephanie izard's backyard party scored me a gig working her social media and website (a gig i'm still working). in turn, working for steph scored me a job waiting tables at hot chocolate, which is helmed by mindy segal who this year is nominated, for the fourth year in a row, for a james beard award for outstanding pastry chef in the country - and she's gonna win it this year. while i swore off waiting tables ever again after leaving boston, i made some good cash working this job and became friends with even better people, one of which set up an introduction to a woman i'd heard so much about, even before moving to chicago, and i badly wanted to meet. it was through this woman - i don't know why i'm keeping her anonymous, her name is ellen malloy - that i found work with the hearty boys doing the same type of work that i do for steph. that was november.

and i think it's pretty safe to say that november was the last month that i really kept this blog running at a pace that engaged the few readers i had.

(when the hearty boys' catering vans

were tagged, there was work for me!)

a couple weeks after i met ellen another friend of mine, who i also met at stephanie's dinner, referred me to bin 36 for social media work and again, i'm doing the same type of stuff for them that i do for steph. obviously, a pattern was developing. restaurants and chefs, so consumed with the thousand moving parts that compose restaurant operation, had no time to keep up with this new thing called social media, but like those who i'm working with, were smart enough to understand they needed to find some way to manage social media somehow in order to keep their business relevant. which, is too bad when you think of it, because shouldn't food speak for itself?

(and work with steph is never dull...)

the pattern was obvious. there was work to be had in this field, and there were few in chicago who could do it. and so, almost five months later, i'm finally putting the last pieces in place to move forward and enter this wide open field.

my company is called jamco, new media and when the logo is finished, it'll be a playfully spilled jar of jam that i hope will reflect my laid back and fun edge, while still instilling the confidence and appearance of someone who gets it. because if it doesn't, then obviously... i don't get it. and there's a good chance i just don't.

i'm working with lawyers for the first time in my life and saving up cash for the big checks i'll have to write to get this thing going. but it's fun - a lot of fun - and hopefully, i'll be back in my old cities, crossing familiar bridges, and pulling along old and new friends on this venture (that's right dante, i'm coming for you!)

so here i am, clearing the stale air from the past few months that covered the navel - and i hope taking the first step to resurrecting this little platform of mine to share these little stories about this stuff i love so much, this stuff called food.

know what seafood you should be eating, and what you shouldn't be

2010-04-16T05:55:00.000-07:00

(the copper river in alaska, source of some of the finest

salmon in the world, via walt k's photostream.)

it's not often i find comments on the blog—and worse, not often i'm posting—but this morning i came across a comment that was left on the blog yesterday afternoon, and after spending the better part of the last thirty minutes responding, i realized i'd actually written my first post in weeks.

so, to break the silence, more on salmon, starting with the comment:

how does one know if the "wild salmon" served in a restaurant, really is viable wild salmon?

and, my attempt to answer...

first off, our consciousness needs to improve on all aspects of seafood, not just salmon. with that, the monterey bay aquarium has established a program that constantly studies and analyzes the status of catch around the world, and rates their finds in a guide that's available for anyone to use (broken down depending on where you live in the u.s.).

go here to get it. but seriously, go there. and don't just read it, but print this out and bring it with you. or better yet, do the environment one better and download the app on your phone!

(the seafood card i use here in chicago. where is yours?)

right now, wild alaskan salmon (and that's what the menu needs to read, be it king, sockeye, or coho) is the only salmon you should feel good about eating. even then, eat in moderation. the demand is far too great if we consistently eat this fish and will eventually deplete the supply if it remains the only sustainable salmon option.

the western u.s. wild salmon fishing is on the rise, and hopefully even california will enter the picture as a local option, which is what we need. currently, wild salmon from washington is recommended as an alternative to wild alaskan.

which leaves us with farmed and atlantic salmon - which, like i point out in the post, is farmed salmon from european countries on the atlantic seaboard like norway, scotland, ireland, and iceland.

that said, some european salmon farms are on the upswing in practices and soon enough we may see a shift.

(the seafood card i'll use when traveling to

california this summer... unless it changes.)

so when you're at a sushi bar and all the menu reads is "salmon." ask where it's from. most sushi bars will print "wild alaskan" or "king salmon" because it costs them far more to purchase, and hence will charge you more to eat it. whether you're at a chain restaurant like maggiano's or a steakhouse like ruth's chris or you're even at some swanky restaurant in a downtown hotel, even then, avoid the salmon—if you truly want to make a difference both for yourself, our fisheries, and the environment—unless it reads... "wild alaskan!" simple enough, right?

(and, finally, the seafood card i use when eating sushi!)

the other thing to do? try other fish! go to the link above and find out what other options there are for you. just because you don't recognize the name of this fish doesn't mean it's not worth eating. you'd be surprised how good these fish are, and might even like them better than the beloved salmon...

the slow money alliance: change

2010-03-12T07:03:00.000-08:00

i've written about slow money in the past, and today i'm asking for your help. please take your time and vote, they're so close to their goal...

the trouble with atlantic salmon: an identity crisis

2010-02-22T09:32:00.000-08:00

(photo via the pure salmon campaign)

i once worked at a restaurant that served two types of salmon. one type was five dollars less than the other, and obviously sold far more in quantity than that which cost more. this restaurant is one of many belonging to what is possibly the greatest seafood empire in the country, so diners certainly sit at its tables with a sense of trust, that regardless of what they order, by dining there they're treating themselves to something special. but let's really think about this. truly. if one piece of salmon is listed on the menu for $19.95, and the other for $24.95, shouldn't we be looking up from our menus, scratching our heads, and asking our table-mates, why?

so the question is now before you. seriously, why do you think this is?

well, let's start by building the differences between these two types of fish. the $25 salmon is from the wild, and the $20 salmon is not. reason enough for a difference of five bucks, right? if that's the case, and if the $20 salmon isn't from the wild, could you confidently answer if i asked you, where the heck is it from then? if it's not wild, what the heck is it?

and that's the problem that people grapple with. on the whole, the problems with fishing ethics are so tertiary in politics and media, so muted, that people just don't know what's going on. don't know where their food is coming from (which, funny enough, parallels the factory farming problem far too much). and that's because when it comes down to it, we're taught to understand that cows graze and do so on land, birds fly and do so through the air, and fish, well they swim, and swimming is only done through water. and water is something our planet has lots of, so there should be lots of fish. one plus one then equals: shouldn't all fish be from the wild? the answer is yes, but yet, somehow the laws of nature have been tinkered with, and now we have fish coming from that thing that cows, the land grazing animal, call home. farms.

so how about this: one salmon is from alaska, and the other is from the atlantic. now, do you know which is wild caught and which is farm raised? do you know why?

my guess is, most people know that alaskan salmon is the cream of the crop. i'd even go so far as to say this is one the first fish most of us had ever known. remember those nature videos from our childhood? disney was infamous for them, airing often on the wonderful world of disney, remember? the stunning wildlife images of a day in the life of a grizzly bear? of the bear lurking over a shallow stream, her paw swiping at the water and pulling from it a flopping fish? and that fish, the one she'd strip clean of flesh and feed to her cubs, well, that's wild alaskan salmon. and yes, we pay top dollar for it.

but why does it cost so much more than atlantic salmon? hell, if it's atlantic salmon, it's got to be wild too, right?

on friday, mark bittman wrote this in his blog about "discovering alaskan king salmon:"

What an odd history salmon has had, not only in my lifetime but in the history of the world. (There was once so much salmon in the rivers of the Northeast that according to some historians, servants complained about being fed the fish too often. Supposedly.)

Like so many baby-boomer East Coasters, I experienced salmon first as a canned fish. (Tuna too, of course. Who knew?) It was also an absolute luxury item at white tablecloth restaurants; I might have eaten it fresh two or three times – max – in the 60s and 70s. That’s because Atlantic salmon (of which there is only one species) had become not only overfished but endangered. (You can’t sell wild Atlantic salmon commercially.)

"you can't sell wild atlantic salmon commercially." did you catch that? do you realize the weight of those words? they're telling us that to all but a small minority of this world, true atlantic salmon, the stuff that makes its home the way nature intended, in the wild, does not exist. so what then is this stuff called "atlantic salmon?"

(norwegian atlantic salmon farm, via trondj's photostream)

two years before i started working at that seafood restaurant in boston that listed the two different salmons on the menu, the company launched a campaign around wild alaskan salmon. that was six years ago. here's how the menu reads today:

(menu via legal sea foods, park square)

ironically enough, just six years after launching a campaign to attract diners to eat the more expensive wild alaskan salmon, the fish has disappeared from the restaurant's menu, and the price of our mystery fish has increased.

so what is this mystery fish? and why does it dominate restaurant menus all over the country? again, we'll find a parallel to the corporate giants who have decimated our country's beef, pork, and poultry farming. the shades might be drawn when it comes to the dirty work, but make no mistake these corporate entities are slipping in and out of bed with the world's governments night after night.

spend the three minutes it takes to watch the video below. it's three minutes spent better than almost anything else you could be doing right now, including reading this blog post. again, so much of america's problem when it comes to food is the lack of knowledge we have about what it is, and where it comes from.

i realize how difficult it is to sit down and spend twenty minutes, let alone the three it took to watch that clip, but that's how long this documentary is. just twenty minutes. and in twenty minutes, you're learning more about this food than you've ever known about it. if that's not enough to convince you to watch the entire film, what is?

and that seafood restaurant i worked at in boston? it's called legal sea foods. yeah, you might've heard of it. when the company brought wild alaskan salmon to all of its restaurants six years ago, here's what roger berkowitz, the ceo and president of the giant chain, had to say about wild alaskan and atlantic salmon:

There's nothing wrong with farmed salmon. It's perfectly fine to serve. But wild salmon has different flavor characteristics. It's more interesting. And we're in the fish business--it's incumbent upon us to offer products that others would have trouble getting.

apparently, they're having trouble getting the wild stuff just like everyone else now. incumbent, or not.

(legal sea foods' wood-grilled salmon,

via asir-selvasingh's photostream)

and, yet, what trouble does the company go to in order to bring in the farm-raised atlantic salmon? if you watch the four clips of that documentary, you'll see that atlantic salmon is literally being harvested, boxed, and shipped overnight by fedex from europe every day, which really, i guess means the trouble for roger berkowitz in obtaining the fish is the occasional need to get up and out of his desk chair to sign for the delivery when nobody else is around?

no. the trouble roger berkowitz, and the rest of the consumers who purchase and sell atlantic salmon (and we're talking a massive amount of people here) have is an environmental trouble. it's a trouble that for those of us living today, especially those of us completely detached from our planet's well being, is irrelevant. it's as pesky as a house fly buzzing though the kitchen on a summer day. we can just ignore the thing and get by just fine, and leave the problem for someone else to deal with later on.

(sea lice, a tremendous infector of atlantic salmon,

via neil blake's photostream)

as the video details, atlantic salmon farms are stationed off the coasts of european countries. a popular salmon in restaurants today is scottish salmon, though farms exist and were made popular in norway, and are even found in iceland and other countries. these farms are over-crowded, ridden with disease, and eliminate the crucial variable to life of all species, which is natural selection. think about it, when a child of any species is born in the wild with an illness, it eventually dies. for humans, modern medicine has curbed these statistics, but that's not so in the wild. animals are often prey, and those not fit to survive in turn fuel the life of a creature better suited to live on than the prey. this can't happen in salmon farms. it's impossible. which means we're massively introducing a fish to our markets whose mortality rate in the wild ranges at best around 50%. and consider this, what if these defected fish, pumped with antibiotics and carrying scientifically modified dna, broke free from their farm habitat and spawned with pure fish in the wild? yeah, that's really happening, and some fear it won't be long before a true wild salmon, the fish that swam long before man came along, is completely extinct.

changes are being made to farming methods, but is it too late? and is change coming fast enough?

but americans want to eat good food, and do so with as little damage inflicted upon their checking accounts as possible. and, i have to imagine, roger berkowitz (a semi-finalist of the recently announced james beard award for outstanding restaurateur) is only too pleased to oblige.

fun with blogs

2010-02-19T12:27:00.000-08:00

the bin 36 blog launched yesterday, and for those who love reading about food, i thought i'd share it with you. this baby has been about a month or so in the making, from when i started design work and began implementing an editorial schedule for the boys to follow, and we're thinking it might really take off... would love it if you commented on the posts and shared your thoughts!

the calamari taco lunch

2010-02-03T11:11:00.000-08:00

as i get more and more involved with the uncharted territory before me, i have a feeling i'll be spending a lot of time working from home. like today. and like today, i'm hoping i'll be spending more time in the kitchen making my own lunch—which for more than two weeks now, along with every other meal, have been absent of the one thing i've always treasured above so much else: meat. meat, pork, poultry... all of the things that vegetarians don't eat, i haven't been eating either. but despite how easy it's been to cut the stuff out of my diet, i'm having trouble calling myself a vegetarian. but this is a different story, one i keep on pushing out of my psyche—i think because i just never thought this would happen to me. maybe it's shock—that no doubt i'll sit down and tackle soon enough. but for now, for today, i was inspired by lunch.

calamari tacos. i cut and then sautéed the calamari, chopped some white onion and tossed it with cilantro and lime, shaved some radish, and cut the avocado.

and they couldn't have lasted more than two minutes on my plate.

the brooklyn kitchen

2010-01-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

the brooklyn kitchen spawned from amateur cooks who were frustrated with the lack of cooking supplies available in their brooklyn neighborhood. that's when taylor erkkinen and harry rosenblum took what seemed like a good idea and opened their store, which was five years ago. crain's new york business wrote about them just a couple of months ago.

(courtesy of their site, the shop before construction)

i love this. first off, i'm envious at the very idea behind what they've done. they had a passion, saw a need that was in turn impeding that passion, and took the risk to assume that others felt the same and... made a business out of it.

(and how it looks today)

there's something to learn for all of us in this story, which crain's was wise enough to recognize as well. for me, this brings to light the subtext of every thing i've written on this blog. it's like saying, wake up, everybody. at what point was ingenuity and creativity replaced by mass-produced goods and foods. where did the home cooked meal disappear to? why, one hundred years ago, did over 40% of this country's workers classify themselves within the agricultural sector, and we now face a number that is less than 2%? how did agriculture become a multi-billion dollar venture for global corporations to control, pulling the carpet from beneath the country's small farmers?

the brooklyn kitchen is a prime example of how people, whether they're conscious of it or not, are in fact willing to engage this ongoing dialogue and exorcise the far more sufficient and sustainable ways and means of agriculture and distribution that began to disppear just fifty years ago.

(my papa, carving our christmas dinner pork shank)

harry rosenblum is the son of a friend of my grandfather, and yesterday it was my grandfather's birthday. this artcile was sent to me by him. i'd give anything to have sat at the dinner table with my grandfather when he was a boy. what did my g.g. cook for him back then? where did she shop? and how far did the foods she brought home travel before they wound up in her hands? have you ever even thought of how different food might have looked then? that's something i never even thought to ask my grandfather, but so easily could. all of these questions are.

as i often say, maybe i'm just a nostalgic idealist. maybe there's little to the cause and in truth, people are more obsessed with a place like the brooklyn kitchen because we as a people are eating more food than we've ever eaten before. but then why did the brooklyn kitchen just recently opened the brooklyn kitchen labs, as crain's highlights, where cooking classes are offered and filled constantly? people are finding their way back to the kitchen, and the bar has been raised when it comes to what they want to learn and who they want to learn it from. but is this a small movement, or the start of something far larger?

(the newly opened brooklyn kitchen labs and meat hook)

and how much do i wish they'd opened shop in chicago and not brooklyn?

happy birthday, papa. thanks for this.

what should i eat?

2010-01-13T08:43:00.000-08:00

the man behind two of the loudest books of the past few years, and whose name appears in this blog maybe more than any other, managed to release a book this past holiday season without creating much of a stir. yes, that man. michael pollan.

food rules: an eater's manual is very simple in its premise. it's an attempt, in sixty-four rules, to help you answer the question that's constantly asked every day by all of us, "what should i eat?" only this time, the answer doesn't come down to a sandwich from subway or a buritto from chipotle, but rather an actual answer to the question: what should you eat.

and so, some rules:

18.

don't ingest foods made

in places where everyone

is required to wear a

surgical cap.

19.

if it came from a plant,

eat it; if it was made in

a plant, don't.

20.

it's not food if it arrived

through the window

of your car.

21.

it's not food if it's called

by the same name in

every language.

(think big mac,

cheetos, or pringles.)

restaurants, and the social media frontier

2010-01-12T07:11:00.000-08:00

perhaps this falls on deaf ears, but my conscience has been tugging at the lack of new content on the blog, when the reason for that lack of posting really amounts to content itself. so here goes:

i've been pretty quiet about this, and there's nothing too crazy about it really, but i'm in the position to start my own business here in chicago. it started with stephanie giving me the opportunity to work for her, in a position she calls her media coordinator, which two months ago afforded me the chance to meet the right people at the right time. i've since started working in a similar capacity for the hearty boys, who, for those in the food network know, won the first season of "the next food network star" and went on to run "party line with the hearty boys" for three seasons. they're operation is impresive, pushing out some of the best catering services in the midwest, as well as a brand new restaurant that opened this past fall from their boystown hub, hearty. not long after i started work for the boys, a friend referred me to another chicago mainstay, bin 36. the bin brand is unique in that they operate three restaurants in chicago—from which they've been nominated for outstanding wine service by the james beard awards—but also push their own wine in the national market that's produced in partnership with hahn estates. the driving force behind the operation is a three-man partnership who divide their expertise and presence between food, wine, and management. point being, i'm planning some unique work with some pretty cool people.

it's an interesting place where i find myself, filling the needs of restaurants by offering a service traditional public relation firms are somehow not able, or wanting, to fill. tonight i'm heading to an event with the head of an up-and-coming distillery who's thinking i might fill his needs, too, which has really got me thinking. i don't see why once i get this up and running, i shouldn't make something out of it. there's a need, no doubt, and right now there are few in the position to make it happen.

and yet, there's no certainty in what i'm doing. maybe these guys will learn how to handle social media on their own and manage to integrate its nuances within the day-to-day necessities of hospitality procedures. maybe technology will change further and sites like twitter will peeter out just like livejournal and myspace have before it. maybe you have no idea what i'm even talking about, no clue what social media even is, and my reach just won't reach far enough. or maybe not. maybe i've found a service that's at just the right cost so that the hassle and annoyance of constant updating and upkeep is something people are more than happy to have me carry as my burden, and not their own.

it's an exciting risk i'm taking, and as with everything else, time will tell how it works out.

they want to plump (clap, clap), you up!

2010-01-04T08:35:00.000-08:00

the holidays have come and gone, and in the wake of a better christmas holiday than this cold chicagoan could have ever asked for, the navel took a backseat. well, the holidays are over.

so here's a little prelude to today's post:

the opinion section of today's l.a. times ran with a column titled "what goes into chicken," not posed as a question, but rather, an answer. and shouldn't the answer be, other than the food it eats, nothing? shouldn't chicken be chicken?

in the past few years, it has become common for chicken producers to inject fresh chicken with saltwater as a way to keep it juicy and flavorful in the hands of indifferent cooks, a process called "enhancing" or "plumping." in some cases, the plumping solution contains a long list of ingredients, and it can make up a fifth or even more of the chicken's weight.

foster farms, the california chicken giant, defines plumping as:

the practice of injecting saltwater, chicken stock, seaweed extract, or some combination thereof into chicken to increase its weight and price, simultaneously increasing sodium content by up to 700%.

that's a nice thought, isn't it? i dated a vegetarian in college and at that time, my own logic said, as a chivalrous gesture i guess, i should stop eating red meat and pork. but poultry? sure, not a problem. in fact, i viewed poultry as a substitute. i ate more chicken during those few years than i've probably eaten over the span of my entire life.

(an egg factory, via aleutia's photostream)

yikes.

with the reading i've done on poultry farming practices, and the little of it i've shared on this blog, putting how much chicken i ate back then to words in the above sentence really sent my stomach churning. and the reading's had such an affect that i really have no desire to eat chicken ever again. drastic and silly maybe, and time will tell if that holds true, but how does a person eat a food that just the thinking of spawns fits of nausea? especially when, as long as the additives in these birds are "natural," the packaging on the birds in the market can say "all natural."

though i will say it was a relief to see the editorial highlight the above-quoted mega chicken farmer attempting to do the right thing, to an extent: the foster farms "say no to plumping" campaign. but i'd love to hear foster farms argue that their chickens aren't genetically modified and manipulated offspring of the factory farm equation like the rest of the corporate poultry farm birds in america.

(foster farms' chicks packed tight before slaughter, via

socially responsible agriculture project's photostream)

double yikes.

i've posed this question before and gotten little response, so i'll try again. does this matter to you? seriously, i want to hear what you have to say. i'm considering an organized effort to attempt a change in farming practices and food regulations in this country, but i really have no gage on whether or not there's enough interest in the general public to support this. does it bother you like it bothers me that we're being lied to when we buy our foods at the market and order off restaurant menus? in my opinion, it's criminal, and i'm curbing how i eat and how i shop, and seeking out more and more literature to gain more knowledge on what goes into our food and where it comes from as a response. but maybe you're still gonna keep on eating the same foods, with little regard to what i'm saying here. that won't hurt my feelings. not one bit. i'd just like to have a better understanding, is all.

happy new year everyone.

c/o santa claus, if i've been good

2009-12-15T08:41:00.000-08:00

because a kid can dream, my christmas list:

last christmas it was the french laundry cookbook, so it makes sense to dumb it down a bit and tackle thomas keller's newest book, since anytime i open the french laundry i feel like a parapelegic who doesn't know a potato from a loaf of bread. from his napa valley restaurant, where printed above the door are the words "for temporary relief from hunger," i've flipped through this book a few times now and can't wait to get my hands on it again. check out the wsj's write-up of it for more.

and then there's this:

printed two and a half years ago, i first read frank bruni's "fat, glorious fat, moves to the center of the plate" when i picked up last year's best food writing. that's also when i started paying attention to the name david chang. his restaurant's are now impossible to get into, which it goes without saying implies their infamy, due in part to this article, which frank bruni begins with carnivorous detail of the seven-pound pork butt he and his friends took to town one night at momofuku ssäm bar in the east village.

this is a type of cuisine that's new to me, yet the more chefs i meet, the more i find this is what they want to eat when they're not feeding us. when i asked one of my chef friends to run off three places i had to eat in chicago, the one he was most emphatic about was a spot in chinatown, and he insisted he'd have to come with me when i ate there. that's why i want this book. i feel like there's some secret withheld from me that people are slowly being let in on, and dammit, i want in on it, too.

when i booked our tickets to the east coast a couple months ago, i started looking into how in the world to grab a seat at momofuku ssäm, but saw how hopeless the task would be. there was no way. i guess hope is something you shouldn't give up though, because last night i was asked by a certain boss of mine if alicia and i wanted to join her and some of the crew for dinner there in a few days. talk about a twist of fate, huh?

and that, dear santa, is what's on my list this time 'round.

a win for the gipper

2009-12-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

(via garyprescott186, a teacher who has shared his
students' artwork for london's olympic games)

it's friday, so rather than dabble in the negative, i thought it'd be nice to change it up and share in something i felt great about finding on my morning news search: "olympics commits to sustainable seafood."

that's a big one, guys.

now if only i knew where alicia hid those chocolate peanut butter candies from the other night...

beef recall? here we go again

2009-12-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

i talked yesterday about mainstream media and it's inability to divulge the entire picture when it comes to our foods, and the incredible strain the industry's practices place not only on our health, but the global environment. well, here's an example of a deterrent. i have to thank an independent media source based out of madison, wisconsin for this video—she's provided the start to several stories i've covered—kathleen slattery-moschkau, host of the kathleen show.

but picking up on this, buried in the headlines just a few days ago was the story of a beef recall on the west coast. the company, beef packers inc., recalled 22,723 pounds of beef. this after two cases of salmonella poisoning in arizona and new mexico were traced back to the fresno processing plant. what's sad is that 23,000 pounds of beef may sound like a lot, but it's just a fraction of the output these guys pump through their systems everyday.

now what if i told you this same meat packer recalled 800,000 pounds of beef just four months ago, again amid fears of salmonella poisoning? well, that's exactly what happened.

the worst part about this is beef packers inc. is only the beginning. remember that story i wrote a couple months back? about a packing giant in the midwest called cargill? i was inspired by the nytimes article chronicling a healthy, twenty-something new york girl who's now paralyzed after eating cargill's beef at a family gathering, remember? cargill. cargill. cargill. can't forget a name like that, right? well, beef packers inc. is a subsidiary to cargill, the parent company to a sputtering empire of half-assed meat processors, catered to feeding the masses an embarrassing quality of beef product at jacked prices.

(photo via fedepo18 of cargill's rosario, argentina plant)

(via the progressive magazine of government closure

of their brazilian soy plant, amid criminal destruction

of rainforest, sold to european markets as chicken feed)

why is this not a major issue in washington? why does the media just glaze over what's slowly and gradually becoming more and more apparent about our foodstuff? that these two most recent cases of salmonella poisoning happened in arizona and new mexico, hundreds and hundreds of miles from fresno, a small city in northern california, a state larger than most of the world's countries, is wrong, is it not? how is that not self-evident? and who knows how far that beef traveled, and through how many other plants, before it made its way to fresno. remember, in that october story some of cargill's beef was coming from as far away as south america.

so slowly but surely, the truth is finding its way to the surface. but even in the cnn clip above, in no way does the interviewer press the representative from the national pork producer's council when she blatantly exposes, though unknowingly, how pathetic the inspection methods are when animals go to slaughter. a usda inspector is on the line, that's mandatory she says, her intent to strengthen the case of regulatory practices for the conglomerate pork industry, but then she says the inspector gives "basically a quick physical exam. is the pig healthy, is it not, in [the inspector's] professional judgment."

look. there it is right there. when you go to the doctor for a physical exam, would a quick up and down inspection make you feel at home with the doctor's diagnosis? so then why in the world would you eat something that goes through this very thing before it's slaughtered, processed, packaged, and shipped to your local supermarket and applebee's?

and what does this say about the usda's authority? its ability to be a force in the face of the lobbyists of these giant corporations?

i hate to draw the comparison, but how disturbing was the inspection scene in schindler's list when the men were forced to de-robe, then inspected in this very same manner by nazi physicians, which essentially decided whether or not they'd die immediately or be forced into labor until they were rendered physically unable to work any longer, and thus killed anyway. is there any difference at all?

i'm asking for someone to argue against me, because i really want to know how in the world we've allowed something like this to happen in our country. who said this was okay? and who the heck decided we were better off left in the dark?

cargill. cargill. cargill.

(and for more on healthy living, check out this awesome idea.)

when the sky fell on the dinner table

2009-12-09T12:17:00.000-08:00

(sketch from the economist, "let's agree to agree")

i'd be curious, if polled, how many high school students would be able to point to where copenhagen is in on a world map. would they even know what country it's in, or even what part of the globe to start with?

but i'm also curious about something else. how many of us know what began two days ago, half-way around the world, in copenhagen, denmark? and of those who at least have an idea of what's going on there, how many can dictate the event's importance? and let's take it even further—of those people who understand the importance of the event, how many are doing anything relevant that, to be blatantly honest, the event's importance requires of us?

i'm not trying to single anyone out here, because if these questions were posed to an auditorium full of people, i'd put money down that an overwhelming majority wouldn't have made it all the way to the last question. and you know what? that's okay. i'd be in that category, too. but what i'm attempting—and in turn investing hope that you'll mimic—is to change that.

on monday, a gathering of nearly 200 countries commenced in copenhagen for what's been dubbed the cop15, or the 15th united nations climate change conference. it's hard to believe that reports and outlooks grow more and more bleak for the world's climatic future, and yet an official u.n. gathering has begun for the fifteenth time, isn't it? there's no doubt though that people are listening, and the "green" movement is obviously catching on. just think about the commercials that air when you're watching tv. advertising and marketing has put a hefty leap of faith on this green movement, which is ironic considering, yes, it's selling their product, but it's also selling confidence in the movement. the more mainstream the green movement becomes, the more it settles into our consciousness as a necessity—and, hopefully soon, will no longer be a movement at all.

but what place does the cop15 have on a food blog? shits and giggles?

well, here's where your eyes open.

i've already written about how eating animals affected my thoughts on the thanksgiving turkey—i did indeed pass on the bird at the carving station—but that was just the beginning, especially when i came across this:

"animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change."

to be honest, i had no idea. when i thought of global warming—what the media portrayed, and still does, and the propoganda that flashed in my mind—i'd instintively blame industry for the the world's climatic erosion. factories and automobiles, that kind of thing. wouldn't you do the same?

now, i'm gonna have to ask you to bare with me here. i'm gonna throw some numbers out, and it might be a little much and the message might be lost somewhere in the numeric translation, but let's give it a shot.

"according to the u.n., the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector—cars, trucks, planes, and ships—combined. animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, which offers twenty-three times the global warming potential (gwp) of co₂, as well as 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, which provides a staggering 296 times the gwp of co₂."

first off, what's anthropogenic? to put it simply, it's a word the didn't exist fifty years ago, and was created by those studying the effects of human beings on the environment. it spawned a language to expolore the frontier of the direct correlation of human industry and global pollution. nothing complicated there, right? this is something we live and breath daily—like putting a face to a name for the first time.

but then, these numbers. they're staggering. but what the hell do they mean?

greenhouse gas is a familiar enough term, right? if you think back to middle or high school science class, you should be able to tap into what a greenhouse gas might be.

far, far above our tallest buildings there are gasses that absorb and emit radiation in relation to the sun (this is where i hear mr. overholt, my seventh grade science teacher, and his walrusy bravado). water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and so too is ozone—which yeah, is that thing we always say is getting a hole burnt through it. the ozone layer. but then there are three others: carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. looking back at those numbers, carbon dioxide is the least harmful gas in terms of its warming potential—and when i say warming potential, i'm relating this directly to global warming. the term literally means what it sounds like. again, easy enough, right?

it breaks down like this. we're being lied to. the media, and even our own politicians, are failing to divulge the entire story here. and worse yet, what is being divulged by the media, and lobbied for by washington, isn't even our greatest threat and concern when it comes to climate change. can you imagine turning in a paper to a college professor and only doing a third of the research? a student wouldn't even have the balls to show up to class ever again, let alone even hand the thing over. and yet this is exactly what's happening in our country, at an increasing rate, day after day. there is absolutely zero accountability.

look at the numbers. the warming potential of methane is up to twenty-three times more harmful than carbon dioxide, and animal agriculture is responsible for over a third of its production. are you absorbing those numbers? the warming potential of nitrous oxide is 296 times more harmful than carbon dioxide, and animal agriculture is responsible for two-thirds of its production. 296! and 65 percent contribution! not even a president of the united states has been elected to office with a majority of the popular vote as large as that two-thirds contribution of animal agriculture nitrous oxide production. and again, we're looking at a gas almost 300 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

the bbc published a story with similar data, backed by the man responsible for one of the most influential reports on climate change, lord stern. to help break down the numbers, here's a chart they used to truly display the disparaging gap between animal agriculture's production of methane gas and that of humans.

one western cattle, a staple of the american diet, is responsible for a thousand times more methane production annually than you or me. if that's not mind blowing to you, then what is?

maybe this from eating animals:

"the most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases than vegans do."

people take a lot of crap for choosing the vegan lifestyle, and i can tell you there's not much most restaurant staffers despise more than a vegan in the dining room, but while line cooks and waiters might think a vegan makes everything more complicated, maybe it's in fact we who aren't bothering to simplify things.

back to greenhouse gases.

i wasn't even planning on writing about this, but i couldn't ignore a story that aired earlier today on npr. it's title? "new mexico dairy pollution sparks 'manure war.'" take a listen:

david kirby writes for the huffington post, and on the site he published a two-part feature from his upcoming book animal factory. it's from his feature that i crossed paths with the socially responsible agriculture project. here are some photos linked from their site of these manure lagoons, similar to what's wreaking havoc in new mexico.

just look at the size of these things. try to imagine that whatever flushed from your toilet didn't pipe its way to a treatment plant miles and miles away, but instead just dumped a few feet through your backyard pavement and into your swimming pool? that's exactly the purpose these things serve. they hold millions and millions of gallons of piss and shit. in his report john burnett paints a ghastly picture when he says a factory farm of 2,000 cows produces as much as sewage as a small city. the thing is, small cities have treatment plants. and everyday, a cow produces three times as much manure as it does milk. with 300,000 cows in new mexico alone, there's 5.4 million gallons of waste getting dumped each day.

we have to ask ourselves, how is this socially responsible? john burnett's report exposes the fallout on neighboring residences, specifically on the local watershed, which i just don't understand. how are these factory farms getting away with this? i've said it before, how is this not anything other than blatantly criminal?

here's a clip from this year's buzz-stirring documentary food, inc., that sraproject has on the media portion of their site. if you've stuck with me for this long, i guarantee you can stick with me for the three and a half-minute lead-in to the movie—and do so to the end. there's a sweeping aeriel shot of a factory cattle farm that, in light of everything i've written in this post, is just gut-wrenching.

i've only just begun my research of factory farms and our food systems, but already i'm completely taken aback at how i'm continually shocked, and embarrassed, at what's been kept secret from me for so many years, so many meals, and so much money spent on my parents' behalf, and my own in my still young adulthood. everyday, often several times a day, i learn something new that's affected me ever since i started eating food. i love food, but when i began this blog i had no clue that i'd have learned what i have, nor ventured down this path, about this stuff it was i thought i loved. i do still love food, but the line of what food is and what it isn't is so unclear, that something else is happening here. the actions of the meat packing and dairy farmer lobbyists are blasphemous. food is something that defines community, is so much of what unites a family, especially through times of grief and mourning. do you want big corporate money capitalizing on your grief when you gather with family at the dinner table?

i realize there's no physical way to impact what's happening in copenhagen right now, but there are so many ways to at least get involved. first off, continue following these issues. find people in the media who are putting in that extra two-thirds research and divulging a better portrayal of what's really happening, and then figure out what you can do about how it makes you feel. talk about it. write your congressman. donate. or maybe take that risky step, take the gamble this country hasn't seen in quite sometime that resulted in a unification of so many of its people against a far more powerful entity and join a local group that's contributing to the movement. eventually, whether we've failed to be heard enough and it's too late or we've done something right and spawned change, the government will listen, and it will act.

it's easy to paint the picture, but we get nowhere without taking that first small step.

grilled cheese and a red onion jam thing

2009-12-08T14:12:00.000-08:00

i set out this afternoon to finish a post on the crucial gathering of the world's leaders and leading environmentalists taking place in copenhagen these next couple weeks, but figured it just might be of slight importance to eat first. with that, my first kitchen post in quite a while.

all we have in the house is salted focccia bread and cheese, so making a grilled cheese was obvious. but since the bread was already salted, and we only have an aged white cheddar and fresh mozz in the fridge, i wanted something sweet on the sandwich. enter the bag of red onions on our butcher block.

i used half an onion and sliced half-moons, then cooked them in butter and chili flake until they caramelized. that's when i added red wine vinegar, honey, and sugar, and after a minute, red wine. the end result wasn't technically a jam, but my goal was to make something like a jam, and as you can see in the picture, it's pretty close to what i wound up with.

with the cheddar and a little bit of the mozz, i let the thing go on low heat—this melted the cheese nice and slow and crusted the bread without burning it. while the top side cooked i tossed my go-to salad—which is a couple handfuls of fresh arugula, olive oil, and balsamic (the point is to use an acid, which i usually use fresh squeezed lemon for with a dash of vinegar, but in this case stuck solely with the balsamic)—which is such a fast, and healthy, salad to whip together.

i seasoned the onion, the raw cheese before i covered it with the jam, and the arugula with salt and pepper. that's three different times i seasoned, and all for such a simple lunch. but for me, seasoning is crucial. literally, i season any time i introduce something raw or new to my cooking, pretty much no matter what point i'm at, even if it's cheese. what about you? is seasoning something you avoid for health reasons? is it something you've just never cared about? or maybe do you taste the difference, and so you season frequently too?

if you're not sure about tasting the difference, next time you're cooking with tomatoes, try slicing a raw sliver and take a bite without any seasoning, then take a bite after you've dressed it with a pinch of crushed black pepper and kosher or sea salt. i promise, you're understanding of seasoning will completely change, and you'll be sure then.

before you give your thanks, read on

2009-11-24T11:24:00.000-08:00

i told you i'd be writing about eating animals soon enough, and here it starts—and not at a more opportune time.

first off, check out the book's site. for those with time to kill, especially those of you at work, the site's a good way to kill it. it's interactive, smart, and honestly, kind of fun. obviously though, i'm encouraging you to read more about this book.

but while you're there click on the graphic that says "talk turkey." and if you don't, well, you're gonna get it here, cuz this is what you'd find:

this year as you plan your holiday meal, consider the animal that is so often at the center of the table. what do we know about it? how was it raised? what was it fed? how was it killed? is it even possible to find these things out?

are the answers to these questions in line with your values, your family's values and the values we are celebrating during the holiday season?

if our holiday meals are supposed to serve as a reflection of our gratefulness, can a turkey that spends its life crammed by the tens of thousands into giant warehouses, on antibiotics, that has been bred to suffer—as is true for more than 99% of turkeys sold in america—be the choice we feel best about?

this holiday season, consider the turkey. take this conversation in any direction you'd like. the most important thing is that our choices be deliberate.

there's nothing more powerful than an informed conversation.

that's when a list of links will follow.

do me a favor—give me just one more thing to be thankful for this thursday. click on them.

      resources:
    * what is a turkey?
    * what is factory farming?
    * find a locally raised turkey
    * meat-free holiday meal recipes

i'd love to hear how many have ever given thought to how our farmers are able to make so many turkeys available for a day when so much of the country will be cooking and eating them. think about that. how do they do it? as the book exposes, they've got it down to a science, which really takes any semblance of the word farm out of the picture. the turkeys come from what are called factory farms, but it's hardly fair to leave the word farm in there—because as you'll learn, the turkeys we eat today are so far removed from the turkeys of a hundred years ago, that something else all together is going on with this foodstuff, so much so that i really think it is fair to question if these producers and suppliers continue to mislead the public into thinking their birds are coming from farms, how it's anything other than downright criminal?

or maybe you don't want to know or even think about where your food is coming from? that's fair, right? if the farmers are giving us product that is affordable and fresh, who cares how they do it. it's feeding our families, right? i completely empathize with that perspective—and when i'm with my family this thursday, it's probably why i won't be able to pass on the carved bird from the resort buffet we feast on annually in channel islands. but then again, maybe i will. in that moment, it's my choice, isn't it?

but if you have thought about it, and i'd shared this information with you sooner, would this have changed things? there's a link above to localharvest.org, which is a site that specializes in locating organic and nearby farmers for the everyday jane doe. from that link, you could find a turkey farmer that raises birds humanely, and i'd hope find one who isn't raising these genetically modified birds humanely, but rather offspring of the birds we'd farmed before factory farms ever existed. would you have put in the extra work, and most likely the extra cash, to feed your family one of these birds?

jonathan safran foer is a vegetarian. for him, writing the book was illuminating, but illuminating to a way of eating that he has given up. if nothing else, what he discovered further solidified his eating stance. for me, a downright meat-lover, reading those same discoveries has majorly shifted my views on the food i eat. people say the body is a temple, and though it's cliché, isn't there something to the saying? shouldn't i have to work hard to find foods that are worthy of feeding me, if my body is indeed a temple?

the sad thing is, in essence, i'm working hard to reverse and deter all of the opposite hard work that's produced a multi-billion dollar industry of genetically modified and scientifically controlled food production.

and i'll simply ask this, how in the world does a brief—and i promise dead-on accurate—description of our food systems like the one i just made make eating poultry appetizing?

i'm aware my writing comes across as preachy, almost rant-like. that's because it's spontaneous, which in turn captures whatever emotions i might be feeling in the moment. usually, with something like this, i'd imagine the writing reflects something like anger, which i realize isn't always affective. i apologize for this, but it's the nature of the format i'm writing within.

as a side note, the picture i pulled from thewe.cc at the top is a modest snapshot of factory farming, a visual that doesn't represent anything close to what the industry actually gets away with, largely because i didn't want to subject anyone involuntarily to something i'd imagine a lot of people never want to see.

but again, please, if you've read this far, read further on about this book. and for those that do, i'd love to hear further thoughts on this mess...

that's what a hamburger's, all about

2009-11-23T08:12:00.000-08:00

i leave for california tomorrow night, and the first thing i'm gonna wanna do is hit up in-n-out burger at some point before i turn in. i left california more than four years ago and the more that number goes up, the more i miss certain things about the place—or i guess another way of looking at it is, it's become pretty clear what i need to squeeze in while i'm home. in-n-out is the obvious destination, but then i have other spots like adagio, which is a small italian restaurant my parents have been going to for years, and yogurt delite, which outside of dole whip floats at disneyland, serves the best soft-serve i've ever had (banana cream pie). the point is, in so many ways, food really defines the places we've been, doesn't it?

home to me is a double-double animal style with a chocolate shake for a nightcap and the seafood tacos at howdy's in malibu for lunch the next day.

fair haven, ny, which is where i've spent summers for almost twenty years, is rudy's, a burger-flippin'-fish-fry on the shore of lake ontario.

boston is oysters from neptune or b&g or legal, the prosciutto and pesto sandwich on baguette from darwin's in harvard square, and the keith lockhart from mr. bartley's.

for my friend erika, summer after summer—and weekend getaways, too—is washing down new england seafood on the screen porch with pbr (nothing better for a byob) at moby dick's to the backdrop of a cape cod sunset and an ice cold goombay smash from the beachcomber in wellfleet after a day in the sand.

and the list goes on and on. i've been in chicago for five months and already birchwood kitchen is my go-to when i'm too lazy to make a sandwich, and though it opened a couple weeks ago, know that big star is gonna trump bluebird for the local watering hole (the pork belly tacos kinda give it the obvious leg up). and the longer i'm here, the more the food i eat will define the place i am.

but what do you think? am i just some food obsessed nut attaching everything important thing in life to what he eats? or, do you do the same? even though they've never left, i know everybody back home holds in-n-out in the same esteem i do—it's sacreligious not to. but what else? think of the places you've been. it's obvious that different foods define different regions of this country, and i can't forget the world kinda-sorta-maybe-definitely fits that mold too, but when it comes down to it, doesn't the food you eat, decided by the places you've chosen to go, define where it is your shoes have tred?

i hope so, because for me there's nothing more comforting than that first bite of something nearly forgotten after it's been left behind.

dishing it out for food and wine

2009-11-19T10:57:00.000-08:00

i've been busy working on a few things, and the posting has taken a hit because of it. so, for the sake of something, here's something:

monday night i worked with steph and the crew at the food and wine entertaining showcase. grant achatz from alinea was there, art smith and graham elliot bowles also were there (both on top chef masters this past summer), and more than fifteen other chefs joined in, inlcuding paul virant who came within a point of knocking off chef morimoto on iron chef a couple weeks ago. it's fair to say this thing was packed with star power. and the best part? we were the only table serving their dish up in the patron lounge, which was literally pouring free patron cocktails the entire night (even before the doors opened in our case...)

on the plate: pan seared nantucket bay scallops (so awesome to see a new england product make its way to the midwest), pancetta, braised pistachios, a sunchoke puree, preserved lemon, and pomegrante seeds. with all the p's, we had a few laughs over how hard the dish was to describe throughout the night when the rush hit. not so easy a thing to say ten times fast...

here's steph's write-up on the night, too.

aside from this, news broke early in the week on the state of the bluefin tuna, and i wanted to post on it first thing. npr and other news outlets have already broken stories on it, but here's hoping i can get something up tomorrow. things are very, very bad on that front.

(photos thanks to steph and tommy blue)

guy walks into a bookstore

2009-11-13T12:19:00.000-08:00

i haven't finished a moveable feast, and now i can't find it. this is a bad habit of mine, starting a book and setting it aside to finish later. i'm still just a couple hundred pages from finishing up tree of smoke, which i started two years ago. but over the last week or so i've been thinking about this blog and whether or not it's a bunch of babble and kicking around the usual prodding of self-doubt, as writers tend to often do. just like his work, the writer never seizes to be a work in progress. so i took a page from hemingway and made a trip to the bookstore.

hemingway wrote that rather than purge his writing and carry on and on, as soon as he stopped writing, he also stopped his thoughts on his work, which i think any writer will tell you is practically impossible. but he had a remedy to help achieve this, and that remedy was to read. to read and read and read.

a few days ago the la times published a q&a with johnathon safron foer, whose everything is illuminated achieved someting of a cult following amongst my peers when i was an undergrad at usc. i read his second novel (extremely loud and incredibly close) in my first weeks as a grad student in boston, so when i found out his new book was in fact non-fiction, taking aim at factory farming and so many of the issues i've tried to bring to light in this blog, bringing the book home was a no brainer. i started it today and have already found thoughts and facts within its first pages that i'll more than likely reflect on here. the book is called eating animals.

i also came home with this year's edition of one of my favorite books from the past year: the 2009 edition of best food writing. for fiction writers, this series is known as best american, or in long form, the best american short stories. i first read a best american collection as an undergrad, which for any writer is a goldmine of proof for what editors are buying in the small and grossly competetive short fiction market. the best food writing series is no different. represented this year are publications like gourmet and saveur and various city papers, but so too are small press pubs like gastronomica and even trend-driven sites like chow.com. point being, the book is a serious effort to find the best on food that writers had to offer from the past year. these aren't restaurant reviews and apple pie recipes, but rather the true grit of what's going on with our foodstuff. these are stories that would grab anybody's attention.

and then i saw this:

since the eighties, charlie trotter has been one of the world's best chefs. his restaurant is in nearby lincoln park and dinner there will set most people back a week's income. i haven't yet met the man and at this point in my life, he's one of two chefs who, having managed to stay safely away from the public eye, i view as something of an immortal—a status achieved solely through professionalism and reflected reputation (the other is thomas keller, who i was bummed to see will be on a certain bravo tv show next wednesday night). the book pictured above is his first cookbook, its influence stemming from his restaurant up to the early nineties, which is when the book was published. what i walked out with was one of three autographed first-edition copies of the book that were just hanging out on the bottom of a promotional cookbook endcap, the covers on the books with enough wear and tear that they easily could've been sitting unsold in that store for several years (as it was, they'd been published fifteen years ago).

alicia thought buying that book was a pretty stupid thing to do, and maybe it was, but i drove home with a big ol' grin slapped across my face.

i definitely think there's redemption to be found when reading a book. whether it's to deter the mind from a fight with a friend or to keep busy on a snowed-in saturday in the middle of winter or, in my case, to find that spark a writer needs to keep on going, it's there in so many ways. this is a different kind of redemption, though. one that doesn't blow holes in the ground nor draw blood from the wounds of war. at least for me, when i read, i'm finding a way to redeem those demons inside of me that keep me from getting where i want to go.

perk those ears: a conversation with wendell berry

2009-11-05T12:20:00.000-08:00

in the grassroots shakeup of our agricultural systems that's slowly creeping up on this country, michael pollan receives a mainstream sense of praise, or to say, is a household name, at this point of the movement. undoubtedly, he is its poster boy. but even pollan looks up to another man. wendell berry.

in yesterday's post i linked to an interview hosted by kqed public radio with mr. berry, but that wasn't enough for me. i wanted to bring this man directly to you as best i could.

i promise you, at one point or another, you've read this man's words.

he is a celebrated and decorated poet; he is, like pollan, an essayist of extreme wisdom and insight on the socioeconimic and cultural doings of our country; and, as goes in hand with his writings, from poetry to prose, a man who is in the business of agricultre, if not the business of improving of such.

for more than forty years mr. berry and his wife have tended to their kentucky farm, backing by practice what the words he writes implicitly preach.

i was first touched by this man's words in an undergraduate poetry workshop a few years back. several months ago, i was inspired again when i went at his groundbreaking book, now over thirty years since first printing, the unsettling of america.

play this while cooking dinner or folding laudry or sitting in traffic because now, it's your turn.

what's beneath the whispers

2009-11-04T07:51:00.000-08:00

the sole reason i have content to post on this blog is because our food systems are in bad, bad shape. over the past months i've hit on everything from the disappearance of aquatic species and the fall of the fisherman to the criminal practices of the major meat processors to the need for cooks to reemerge within the home kitchen. well, the thing of it is, there's more and more to go off on every day.

take a look at these stories in major, national publications over the past few days:

ny times, november 3: fighting child obesity and nutrition
- a white house chef who wears two hats

ny times, november 3: the push for local and organic, even in our schools
- someone's in the kitchen with michelle: the secret ingredient is politics

la times, november 4: challenging the home cook
- chefs thomas keller and mark peel take on home cooking

boston globe, november4: again, more on child nutrition
- kids' menus should grow up to be as interesting as their parents'

food on the food, october 29: sustainable seafood (from a blogger who gets it)
- something's fishy around here

the atlantic, november 4: more on seafood and the sputtering way of life of the fisherman
- saving seafood from extinction

slow food los angeles, november 3: the man who reopened our eyes to agriculture
- wendell berry on kqed

and i could go on and on. the thing of it is, that's sad, don't you think? the slant of the hill for this battle is so steep, the issues so many, that it seems impossible to actually win. we have to worry about eating beef that's been to pasture, eating seafood that's on the current sustainability card, figuring how to feed our children the right foods, eating local, cooking more in our kitchens, and on and on and on... how does one do it all? even one who cares and wants to do it all, is it possible?

it sure makes the task of reform, of convincing the rest of the country to follow suit, a complete joke, right? but then again, who would've thunk a thrown together band of farmers and masons and skilled craftsmen would've ever defeated the army of the farthest reaching empire the world has ever known... these are the united states after all, aren't they?

with enough conviction, and the smallest of possible steps, taken slow bit by slow bit, i think we might just get there.

but you have to put in the effort. it starts with that, with clicking on just one of those stories above. with absorbing what people are trying to say. and call me crazy, but my gut's saying you just might end up reading more and more.

the thing of it is, don't stop there. spread it. talk about it. challenge your friends. ask if they know where that cheeseburger they're eating came from; how that fish they're eating is helping kill off a species, and a way of life; and why shopping at the major grocery chains is only further fueling the danger we face in climate change.

the ball's in your court, now.

the autumn tuna

2009-10-28T12:47:00.000-07:00

i wanted to make tuna last week, and alicia thought i was crazy.

"yeah right," she says.

"why not?"

"because it's not summer."

and that was it. she was right. tuna is that light dish that evokes warmer months and delicate flavoring. it's center is cool and seared exterior an earthy white. there's nothing there that screams out cold-comfort nor the essence of autumnal cooking.

so i cooked it anyway.

here's how:

pictured above is a raw salad of parsnip, honeycrisp apple, cucumber, anaheim chile, shallots, and lemon juice. it's fall ingredients, but taken with an approach that i hoped would match the tuna, which i marinated in apple cider and soy sauce.

but apples and tuna? don't seem to go hand in hand so much. gag me kind of, yeah?

or not. i reduced the cider and soy mixture and when it was done dressed it over the tuna, which sat side by side with the salad. somehow, the sauce, and the cold apple in the salad, worked really, really well together. this was something i think alicia was terrified to try, and for both of us, flavors we'd never had together before. and when it came down to it, we just had a simple piece of seared tuna with a raw, cold salad for dinner. light and healthy.

and a few days later, when i was hungry and alicia was out teaching, it made for good left overs with a kicked up grilled cheese to boot...

the journal of food and culture

2009-10-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

with gourmet's final issue hitting newsstands now, i thought this a good time to expose another publication that i can't get enough of.

gastronomica calls itself "the journal of food and culture." it's published four times a year, and not by a major conglomerate like conde nast, but by the university of california press; its editor is the francis christoper oakley third century professor of russian at williams college in massachussets; and its yearly subscription price is fifty bucks, which after four issues, breaks down to more than twelve dollars per. pretty steep for a magazine.

but this isn't a magazine. it is, like its cover says, a journal. and is, as a result, a compilation of everything gourmet couldn't be.

poems are published in each issue and so too will fiction sometimes grace its pages; there's the work of academics and so too that of painters and sculptors and photogrpahers; chefs might write a word or two and so too might roy blount, jr., a frequent panelist on npr's wait, wait don't tell me, as he did last spring.

this is a journal for food lovers and intellectuals and artists. it's a chance to celebrate this thing called food that we all love in so many different ways, and so too to ask the moral and difficult questions that aren't being asked elsewhere. and just look at the cover art from the past two years. might just trump those famed gourmet covers, don't you think...

summer 2009, hongtu zhang, kimchi-chanel

spring 2009, tamara kostianovsky, motherland

winter 2009, hans gissinger, tartas

fall 2008, no author given, popcorn #11
(copyrights belong to susan eder and craig dennis)

summer 2008, emmanuel sougez, still life with lemons and siphon

spring 2008, francine zaslow, radishes

winter 2008, chema madoz, sin tìtulo

check it out at the bookstore. or better yet, gift it for the holidays, yeah?

the murderer aaron burr and a cold glass of milk

2009-10-19T07:50:00.001-07:00

another food find in the la times. and this one, on the single beverage i've had more of than any other in my life.

yup. milk.

it's funny, because so many years later, when i think about the aggressive milk ad campaigns i grew up with, this is the one that i associate with best. and like the kid in the ad, i drank milk, and drank more and more of it, going through gallon after gallon every week, and by the time i was a sophomore in high school, was taller than my dad and all eight of my uncles. i think i drank the stuff because i thought it was cool, something that could make me bigger and stronger so easily, and like the ad says, "it does a body good." in retrospect, the ad had a long-term effect on me, though i doubt that was the primary goal of the ad campaign in the age of hi-c and kool-aid and yahoo and squeezits. you'd have to assume milk and dairy farmers just wanted to grab a foothold with young kids like me.

so here's to taking it to the next step with milk, thanks to the la times. my relationship with milk is always evolving. for a while i went on a skim binge, but then read michael pollan and was convinced there's just nothing natural about literally skimming the fat from a natural product. when that happens, it becomes something different than the milk it originally was. at the same time, i drink far too much milk in order to fall all the way back to whole milk, which if health didn't matter to me, is what i'd be drinking. but, it's fatty. no doubt. so we are buying 1%.

but then what about soy and almond milks? and so too goat's milk? there are so many different sources of milk available, and in the age of vegans and vegetarians, alternatives are easier and easier to find. so what's influenced your perspective on milk? is it even that big of a deal to you? or is it something you'd be willing to learn more about? the article really hits on things you'd never have known, and yet are undoubtedly worth knowing.

kind of frightening how much is being revealed about our foods that's been held from us, right?

milk cultivation is one of the oldest human practices that combines the domestication of animals, the cultivation of a product, and the human consumption of it, especially as a beverage, which then became so much more when it became the base for making cheese. the fact that we still drink it as much as we do, that's pretty cool, don't you think?

and here's raising a glass of the cold stuff, which we now buy exclusively organic, to my favorite milk ad of all time:

the one that started it all with two simple words: got milk?

the soup

2009-10-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

with a sloppy garnish of parsley and dried cranberries.

feeding from the fall market

2009-10-14T09:36:00.000-07:00

alicia was out of town this past weekend, so after waking to a cold and empty house, i worked my way over to the wicker park farmers' market for the first time in a long time. turned out to be a very, very good thing.

it was late summer when i was last at the market, and peaches and tomatoes and melons were still in peak season. this past weekend, it was all about the gourds and root vegetables.

i've been wanting to cook with celery root for a while now, and nichols farm was selling it at four bucks a pop. the vegetable is a variation of celery, with similar smell and taste, but is ugly and dirty and for someone who doesn't know the thing, easily intimidating.

i'd also nabbed some celery stocks from nichols, which like the root above, still had its greens attached—one major advantage of buying from the farmers. before starting on the soup, i tossed the greens from both vegetables in a pot of water with some fresh herbs and lemon and cooked it all down, creating a broth that i went on to use for the soup before i puréed it all together—something i'd never done before. i was skeptical, but in the end the soup was layered with the root itself and the dairy i'd used to smooth it out and there, beneath the punch of the lemon i'd added to brighten the flavors, was the earthy undertones of the broth, a complete book-end to the process of planting the seeds and pulling the root by hand, emanating with the smells and tastes of fresh turned soil.

and on monday night, i attempted another first. boeuf bourguignon.

as soon as i saw that the market's small beef purveyor, robinson beef, was selling chuck at five bucks a pound, i knew i was gonna do it. we bought our le creuset dutch oven months ago, and what better dish to break in the thing with than boeuf bourguignon, right? well, that never happened, and i've been itching to get at it still all this time. so in my bag went the beef, and so too some onions, mushrooms, and carrots, all from nichols.

the thing of it is, i'm a sucker for fruit. walking out of the market with my twenty pound bag of stuff, i was sucked in to the tasting table of seedling farm's fresh pressed ciders, especially when i saw the words "bosc pear cider" written on their board. i poured a taste and knew right there, my boeuf bourguignon was not gonna be so much of a bourguignon anymore.

so in the end i wound up braising the beef in a mix of both the bosc cider and red wine. since i was going cider, i cut up some apples and tossed them in with the veggies, and so too tossed in a few handfuls of pomegranate seeds. yeah. bad idea. with the pomegranate i was a) looking to keep with the season and b) wanting to extract the sweetness of the juice, while at the same time changing things up with the contrasting texture of the seed. here's the thing with seeds. they don't tenderize like, say, everything else in a boeuf bourguignon.

but those apples did tenderize. they really worked, bouncing the savory and sweet factor nicely in a dish so void of anything predominantly sweet. it was simple and rustic and yeah, damn good.

i don't consider myself a hippie. i'm not a tree hugger. but i do care a hell of a lot about where my food is coming from, and think you should, too. so much time having passed since buying from a farmers' market, and having since eaten for three days what i brought home, i'm feeling damn good now. the difference can really be felt when eating stuff so fresh and local.

and i haven't even touched the bag of peppers sitting on the kitchen table.

the burger debate hits centerstage

2009-10-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

so last week i brought attention to a soft spot of mine, which is my new fear of the hamburger. well, right at the top of this morning's headlines on cnn.com you'll find this: "should americans banish the burger?"

so. this is now a national issue. my question is, will it stop there? and how do you feel? sure, it's amusing if little ol' me in chicago writes about it, but when cnn and larry king bring it to the forefront of the national stage... becomes a bit more real, doesn't it?

but i can't say i'm a huge fan of how the cnn coverage is selling this story. should americans banish the burger? are you kidding me? why is it that we have to overdramatize everything in order for it to appeal to the general public?

no. there is absolutely no need to ban the burger. what we need, and insanely enough this wasn't discussed nearly to the point of necessity by cnn, is a complete overhaul of the ground beef industry. it's not the burger that's to fear, it's what's in the burgers we are eating and how it's getting there.

of all the energy that would go into a ban on the hamburger, how much more could be spent to finally straighten out the money-making meat packing giants that have corrputed not only the country's ground beef marketplace, but also shriveled the balls of those at the usda who have any power to rectify the matter.

because when you look at the solutions discussed by the guests, solutions that ranged from cutting ground beef entirely from the diet; cooking ground beef until it's completely cooked through; irradiating the beef; or for all of us to convert to a strictly vegetarian diet, each one overlooks the very problem that's at the heart of the matter: we're not holding our foodmakers responsible. and this coming from academics on the matter.

and despite tying these university professors and health professionals alike within the debate, it was anthony bourdain who actually got it right:

"'we have eyes in the front of our head. we have fingernails. we have... teeth and long legs. we were designed from the get-go... so that we could chase down smaller, stupider creatures, kill them and eat them. that said, we may be designed to eat meat. we are not designed to eat fecal choliform bacteria.' he went on to blast the practices of larger meat processor and grinders as 'unconscionable and border on the criminal.'"

exactly! listen to the man, for crying out loud!

the video is long, running at almost a half hour, but seriously, take the time to watch it. this is a much bigger issue than any of us might think. food reform is nothing to scoff at, because i promise you this, it's something that is not going to just disappear. things are undoubtedly going to change.

a chance to cook with steph

2009-10-08T09:25:00.000-07:00

so the boss is at it again. her next wandering goat dinner will be in early november, but she threw everyone a curve ball this morning when she announced a virtual cook-off for a chance to cook in the kitchen with us at the next dinner. i've been with her for a couple months now, and the one thing that's certain through all of the emails and solicitations that have come my way is that people are crazy about her. she might've won top chef over a year ago, but people haven't forgotten that calm, drama-free demeanor that won over the hearts of the show's viewers, hand in hand with the knockout food that won over the judges' palettes.

it's a weird position for me, since i wouldn't have this job if i hadn't been a fan of the show. but at the same time, i'm not gonna disclose the nuances of working for a celebrity chef. i could easily use this blog as a way to do so, and probably tap into a pretty large fan base as a result, but the way i see it, i fell into a tremendous amount of luck when we moved to chicago. and i'm no fool. that luck was invaluable, yes, but you don't earn a place in the world through luck. so when it comes to steph, that luck only fuels my motivation to work harder, and hopefully, in the end, be worthy of where i find myself. that's why i'd rather have to bust my balls a bit. i wanna get knocked down. to be candid, i'm struggling to find readers for the site, and you know what, i'm glad for that. there's no better means of motivation. and in the end, i won't appreciate anything that comes my way if i haven't had to really work hard to get it.

and it just goes to show though, steph is a free spirited, open-minded chef. she's so different from that stock stereotype of the maniacal, ego driven nazi chef that most people envision when it comes to the typical kitchen persona. she's smart enough to know her strengths, which rest largely in the success of her win on top chef and her loyal fan base, but also in her warm personality. opening the kitchen doors to a fan, and providing that fan a chance to work side by side with her for a night, it's something that i can relate to all too well.

and click here more info on how to get that chance to join us in the kitchen.

as you can see, we just don't have any fun together at all...

digging in the grass, and finding friends

2009-10-07T09:40:00.000-07:00

two weeks ago i wrote about the slow money alliance. what's interesting about the organization that i didn't hit on at the time is that though the cause is something i hope will truly take off, it's currently beating too small of a drum. it's demographic appeal is too restricted. did you read the piece? don't you agree? there's very little about their mission and overall vibe that will capture the younger generation, which as this past presidential election exposed repeatedly, is crucial to win over.

our generation doesn't have the resources to invest. to donate. to make that financial and political impact. so, there's a fairly significant flaw in this operation, isn't there?

and yet, something funny happened around the same time i was writing that piece...

a group of young people were so inspired by the slow money movement that they targeted their own initiative—a dead-on grassroots operation—squarely on their peers around the country. meet, friends of slow money.

the premise is simple: using time as both an ally and foe, start small, spread the word, and use affordability as a means to increase the sample pool and thus, donation amount.

starting yesterday, the clock began ticking, and for one week, the group's goal is to spread within the roots with just $5 donations, hoping to total a modest 5,000 donations by week's end. the thing is just one day in and already outside matching donors have jumped on board.

again, it's modest, but good for them. it's this kind of excitement and enthusiasm, the accessibility of it all, that will tip the scales of whatever success slow money alliance might attain.

but will that really happen? time will continue to tick—it's just nice to know somebody out there isn't willing to settle with just sitting around, waiting for it to run out.

mystery meat: meet the hamburger

2009-10-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

anybody who knows me, knows my love of the hamburger. it's something of a tradition now that anyone who meets my family for the first time is told the story of my first words, peeped from the backseat of the car while zooming past the golden arches of mcdonald's, "shakes and fries, shakes and fries!"

in my senior year of high school, when my day ended at 12:30 and i was let out to the world, where i'd find an empty home and a freezer full of the frozen burger patties my brother brought home from the meat market he worked at, i ritually fired up the barbecue and grilled myself a cheeseburger for lunch. day in. day out.

needless to say, i've come a long way, but my affliction for the ground beef patty has yet to vanquish. which is why alicia's heightened fear of my favorite food is so jarring.

the thing has spread fast, but still, like all corporation controlled markets of our food systems, the news of the october 3 ny times piece by michael moss hasn't rattled our country's infrastructure nearly as much as it should have.

in that story, michael draws attention to stephanie smith, a twenty-two year old woman who is paralyzed from the waist down, not from a car accident or birth defect or even physical injury, but from eating a hamburger.

the graphic above is linked to the ny times website, so if it's too small to read on my site, jump over to their's to check this whole thing out.

but don't you see, it's simple to think when you come home with ground beef from the market that the beef is simply what it says to be: beef. and yes, it is. but as the graphic details, the beef that composes the mass produced hamburger patties of wisconsin based cargill, just one example of the behemoth producers of our favorite grocery and fast-food grilling item, there's far more to this foodstuff than the simple grounding of a single cut of beef from a single cow.

because there is no single cow, nor single cut.

in fact, there's no way to know how many cows went into the e coli tainted, undercooked burger that stephanie smith ate at a family dinner two years ago at all. the process of cultivation for that burger is so complex, so deviated from the simple cultivation of small farms that sell directly to the consumer, not even the usda nor cargill's lawyers have traced a source of contamination of the beef strong enough to hold up in court.

for cargill's patties, the meat was sourced from as far away as uruguay and labeled from each source as things like, "fresh fat," "frozen lean," and "lean finely textured beef." cargill uses each different source to compose its patties, which shaves a hefty chunk of cost from its overhead in comparison to keeping everything in-house. and the danger, as moss notes, is that these sources are selling cargill scraps of beef that are mixed from various cows, which increases the risk of contamination, especially considering that some of the scraps are as cheap as they are because they come from parts of the cow that are more prone to come in contact with the cow's fecal matter.

so one would then think that these slaughterhouses and producers, like greater omaha packing in nebraska, which slaughters 2,600 cattle a day "in a plant the size of four football fields," would keep a tight watch for e coli with conastant testing and analysis, right? if i told you moss reports most of these guys test a sample only four times a year, would that make any sense to you? yeah, it sure as hell doesn't to me either. do you have any idea how much meat is produced from a plant that pumps out 2,600 cattle carcasses a day? think about that.

and consider this, pulled directly from the article:

"the food safety officer at american foodservice, which grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses. 'they would not sell to us,' said timothy p. biela, the officer. 'if i test and it’s positive, i put them in a regulatory situation. one, i have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. so we don’t do that.'"

so here's a producer like cargill, who outsources their trimmings, who at one point seemingly did the right thing. they went above and beyond the regulatory guidelines of the usda, a government branch whose sole existence is to better monitor and control the food systems and cultivations of our country, but stopped because doing the right thing was simply, bad business. verbatim, we have a food safety officer at one of country's largest producers telling us that they're not going to test because if they do, they'll get the positive-test inducing slaughterhouse in trouble with the government. am i missing something here? am i just so dense and stupid that this makes no sense at all to me?

better yet, here's a quote of the article where moss draws from the usda itself:

"dr. kenneth petersen, an assistant administrator with the department’s food safety and inspection service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. 'i have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,' dr. petersen said."

again, am i missing something? i understand the massive ramifications of government sanctions in a capitalistic economy, but this is a doctor declaring that public health is essentially not a strong enough factor to mandate necessary and life-saving reform. a doctor employed by the government. what in the world is going on here?

tomorrow is wednesday, and in los angeles there's a small group of people who will celebrate the day, as they do every week, as cheeseburger wednesday. a day, literally, more holy than even the highest of holy days of christianity and judaism. and if i were still there, i'd join them, as evidenced by this picture that was tagged of me on the internet, in which i blatantly appear.

there's a trust that currently exists between consumers and producers, including restaurants. when i go to in-n-out and order my double-double, i'm confident the two small patties on my burger are fresh and honest and made from high-quality, safely processed cows, right? think of all the burgers you've eaten in your lifetime. the same should be said for every single one of those greasy sandwiches, right? but a) i don't think that trust exists any longer (it hasn't for me for a while now) and b) that trust existed solely because we as consumers were never presented with the facts. in fact, those facts—industry practices and procedures that make the burgers we eat—aren't known because they're secrets—guarded secrets.

hence, exhibit a:

"the meat industry treats much of its practices and the ingredients in ground beef as trade secrets. while the department of agriculture has inspectors posted in plants and has access to production records, it also guards those secrets. federal records released by the department through the freedom of information act blacked out details of cargill’s grinding operation that could be learned only through copies of the documents obtained from other sources. those documents illustrate the restrained approach to enforcement by a department whose missions include ensuring meat safety and promoting agriculture markets."

to be honest, i intended this post to be light and quick and a highlight of moss' article, something that was interesting and disturbing that didn't require a lot of work, nor writing, on my part. obviously, that wasn't the end result.

what do you think? am i taking it too far, expanding too much energy on posts like this? is it verbal diarrhea? or is this worth the time. are you actually reading, and feeling at least a slight impact, by a post that runs on as long as this one has?

alicia wants me to stop eating burgers altogether. i assure you, that isn't happening. but knowing that very few restaurants—though more and more have begun to—are sourcing humanely raised, organic, local and small farm butchered beef, it's going to take a lot of convincing before i jump back on the burger bandwagon and order the things from greasy corner joints like i used to.

i work for a chef who has convinced me. several days a week i walk into the prep kitchen and see a cook pushing beef through a grinder, before it's hand packed into patties, which makes me feel damn good about where i work. and as for buying ground beef from the market, for a while now i've only bought organic ground beef, almost always from whole foods, which for now, is a market i hold that aforementioned trust with that i talked about above.

in the meantime, here's an upper for this downer of a raincloud on the beacon that is the burger:

my grilled peach and red onion bbq cheeseburgers.

rip: gourmet magazine

2009-10-05T08:53:00.000-07:00

so just a few days after i've been pumped and excited and feeling just a wee bit more important in this big bad world of ours thanks to my exclusive preview of gourmet magazine's new tv show with ruth reichl, i wake up to find that said magazine has folded.

as the article says, gourmet has been around longer than most of the people living on this earth. in the world of food, the thing was a pillar of resource and enlightenment. far worse could have hit the news this morning, but i am definitely unnerved by the story, given the prospects of my own career, which i've hoped to direct to the pages of publications like gourmet.

all things considered, magazine publishing is a form of media that runs only a handful of generations deep. to say the future of publishing is in danger may be a drastic overstatement, but for sure, things are going to change, and i doubt print publishing will make it through unscathed when all is said and done.

digging deeper, too: "gourmet's adventures with ruth"

2009-09-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

where some might say there are, at this point, too many food shows on television, i'll gladly stand up and argue the counterpoint that no, there really aren't. if you take the phenomenon of the food network, and stand it side by side with a show like "anthony bourdain: no reservations," nothing in the food network's lineup holds a candle to the grit and raw honesty that bourdain broadcasts with. there's a ton to learn from alton brown, and the amateur chef can truly absorb a wealth of knowledge on technique and gastronomic whatnot from emeril lagasse and mario batali, that for the most part had previously been limited to culinary school and restaurant kitchen exclusivity—julia aside—but the network is far too content to just settle with where they'd previously set their own bar.

the food network erupted on the scene not so long ago, and while the going was still to be had, continually raised the bar, capturing talent after talent to help shape the network—which is where they went wrong. it's not talent that programs need to focus on, it's content. based on the advertising during commercial breaks, and the campy, painfully bland humor every single host takes on each of the network's shows, it's painfully obvious that middle america is their target demographic. which makes a heck of a lot of sense profit wise, but worries me in one painful way.

the problem with middle america is that we've settled for complacency, and where, if pushed, we should raise to the challenge of intellectual adversity and change, we're instead sitting on our couches, time passing idly by, because there's just nobody tipping the couch and throwing us off.

that's where my excitement for this piece comes in. though i still can't stand the word and the thought of my having one, this blog, though so small and still such a work in progress, and minute in reach, has somehow turned some heads somewhere—enough so that i received in the mail an exclusive preview to ruth reichl's new wgbh program on pbs, "gourmet's adventures with ruth."

the title alone foreshadows this show is a) no doubt about food, but also b) not your middle america food network mediocrity. one word comes to mind when i look at the photo above: exotic. this is a show, hosted by a woman known for her triumphs through some of the finest food publications in the country—though a position of envy, one also of seeming safety and relative celebrity—that's going to pull at the roots of food, its cultivation and how it's eaten, and maybe even ask, finally, in what esteem this thing called food is held in parts of the world more than likely unknown to that middle america safety net of the food network.

we're talking bourdain, here. we're talking the salt of the earth. grit and gruff and god knows what else. or so i thought going into watching the season's premiere episode.

instead, what i watched was a program that was soft, nurturing even, nestled indeed within the salt of the earth, but minus the vulgarity and uncensored spontaneity, that admittedly i'd fear to subject my grandparents to, of an episode with bourdain.

the show's producers were smart with this first episode, casting its story in the tennessee foothills of the smoky mountains on the self-sustained grounds of blackberry farm. the episode was country. very country. with magnificent shots of bright green tree canopy and the call of roosters in the background, aided by the bluegrass duet of softly strummed strings, the tertiary elements of the farm played right into what i foresee the show is out to accomplish: an attempt to learn, and in return exploit, the truths that have somehow been forgotten about the way we eat and why, despite the increased ease and affordability to do differently, we need to invest far more trust and faith in the farmer and his cultivation of our foods.

in its element, the show is structured well. the actress frances mcdormand tags along side with ruth for the episode, and together they harvest the foods they then prepare with the farm's proprietor, sam beall. frances is a familiar face, and a safe one, too. she's funny and smart, and out of character, though donned in overalls, seemingly fits right in to the whole way of country living—which is further exploited when the two women give fly fishing a shot, and frances seems to naturally hone in, her face locked and concentrated on the natural methodicalness of the catch, while ruth repeatedly sticks her lure in the branches above the stream. it's not hilarious, but it's not campy neither. it's an honest example of just how far removed we've come from sustainable living, ruth a product of new york city—though when it comes to filleting the trout for dinner, the roles reverse and ruth comes off as the pro, and frances the rookie.

here's a teaser to give you an idea of the show:

will this show capture an audience like "no reservations" has? probably not. it just doesn't have the balls out machismo that embodies who anthony bourdain is. but, like i said earlier, i'd fear subjecting my grandparents to his show, yet i very much encourage not only friends and followers alike, but my family and all generations thus encompassed, to truly consider what's happened to our food and the way we eat it. and this is a show i'd hands-down-in-a-heartbeat pass along to my grandparents. it's safe and solitary, yet manages to pose a challenge of its viewer to rise to the occasion of its subject matter. and there's no reason this show can't capture its own audience, perhaps composed in part by those who meddle with bourdain, but so too one would hope of that middle america heartbeat that's the true target for progressive change in agriculture and food systems.

it wasn't so long ago that it was common to find things like possum and squirell and wild greens picked from the forest floor on dinner tables in the south, and so too oysters harvested from the shores of manhattan and the chewy cuts of conch in abundance on plates in florida. ruth picks up on that vein when in the episode she eats a cut of lamb she's never had before—its neck—which is baffling given the positions she's held, and so too admits, with such a trained palette, that she has no idea what a salad of sugar snap peas, cheese curds, mint, and black walnuts will taste like. that's encouraging given the vast separation that's grown between foodies and everyone else, and allows, i would think, a friendly invite for those maybe off put by the pretense and elitism of gourmet and "fancy" foods, especially things specific to a region or even eaten of necessity, as the offal of an animal once was, and in some places even still is.

ruth hits on the self-sufficiency of the farm and how it's a way of looking at both the past and future, "the way we really want to cook." i'm not suggesting we all pack up and leave the city, because the cities are only growing larger. but we all need to open our minds just a bit more. we need to take a look back to the generations before us and understand how they got by, and as i've said before, ask what might be gained from a sustained economy that thrives greatly on locally cultivated agriculture? indeed, it's happening in cities like chicago and boston and new york already, but how can we build on this, rather than celebrate a modest and minute accomplishment—in effect, how might we refuse to repeat where others have failed? how might we toss complacency off the bus? because, in actuality, that bar needs to be raised far, far higher.

and here's a look at the season beyond its initial episode:

a night at the chopping block

2009-09-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

i'm in the middle of working on a different kind of piece compared to what i've been doing—hopefully the good kind of different—that i'll have finished tomorrow, but in the meantime i wanted to get something up before the day closed out on me.

a couple weeks ago stephanie asked if i wouldn't mind taking pictures at an event she was doing downtown. if you read about our first event together, you know i rock out at these things, pretending i know what i'm doing when asked to help out in the kitchen. but pictures? no problem.

we were at the chopping block, which is on the first floor of the merchandise mart on wells. for those versed in chicago architecture, you know the merchandise mart has the most square footage of almost any building in the world—so much footage that the thing has its own zip code. and the chopping block itself is the closest thing to a cook's chuckie cheese you'll ever find. a retail store semi-resemblant of williams-sonoma dorns the front, and down below are glass walls that stretch from floor to ceiling, showcasing the enormous test kitchen where classes are held ritually. the appliances are new and sparkling and the tile work is immaculately laid, its sandstone hue emitting something like old world charm to a place so modern and fabricated. like something out of a dream. and across from this, secluded by thick rolling partitions, was the demo kitchen, where steph played host for the night.

fifty guests paid a pretty penny for the event, and in turn sat down to a printed menu showcasing five courses, each course broken down step by step for the guest to not only take home, but to follow along with as steph prepared each dish throughout the evening. and to boot, appliances called for with each dish were marked at a discounted price for everybody there. not such a bad marketing scheme, eh?

dave wound up needing my hands in the kitchen, and as the night progressed, the photo taking slipped farther and farther away. and no, this time no arugula was harmed by my hands in the making of the dinner. though maybe a tomato or two didn't find as much luck...

the menu:

mini bacon yorkshire pudding with smoked salmon and mascarpone
•
chilled yellow tomato and vanilla bean soup with lump crab and basil
•
seared diver scallops with heirloom tomato and truffle-poblano vinaigrette
•
roasted pork tenderloin with savory oatmeal, fig sauce and fig tapenade
•
frozen nougat with peach and tomato coulis

and shots that made the cut...

like i said, tomorrow i'll be rolling with something a little different. keep your eyes peeled. and in the meantime, i'll soon begin a routine guest commentary portion to the site, and you'd do me a huge thrill to show interest in pitching an idea on a piece for it. comment with interest, or shoot me a more detailed email: johnnyauer@gmail.com!

and check out steph's post about the night, as well (we both have an informality with capitalization).

an old farmer's advice

2009-09-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

received these words of wisdom this morning from a friend and mentor in response to the site. fit to be shared, for sure.

an old farmer's advice

-your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong.
-keep skunks and bankers at a distance.
-life is simpler when you plow around the stump.
-a bumble bee is considerably faster than a john deere tractor.
-words that soak into your ears are whispered...not yelled.
-meanness don't jes' happen overnight.
-forgive your enemies. it messes up their heads.
-do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.
-it don't take a very big person to carry a grudge.
-you cannot unsay a cruel word.
-every path has a few puddles.
-when you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.
-the best sermons are lived, not preached.
-most of the stuff people worry about ain't never gonna happen anyway.
-don't judge folks by their relatives.
-remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
-live a good, honorable life. then when you get older and think back, you'll enjoy it a second time.
-don't interfere with somethin' that ain't bothering you none.
-timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
-if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin '.
-sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got.
-the biggest troublemaker you'll probably ever have to deal with, watches you from the mirror every mornin'.
-always drink upstream from the herd.
-good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.
-lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin' it back in.
-if you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.
-live simply. love generously. care deeply.
-speak kindly. leave the rest to god.

and,

-don't pick a fight with an old man. if he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you.

doompadee doo

2009-09-22T07:35:00.000-07:00

the market is still on the rise, with 10,000 points square in its cross hairs, but the economy's downfall has posed a question worth at least considering: have we become too sloppy in how we invest? globalization is a nice word, and it seems to fit the natural human ambition, which is to dream big, doesn't it? as silly as it might seem, take charlie and the chocolate factory for example.

here's a story that exemplifies globalization, with wonka's golden ticket promotion gripping the people of the world from end to end. the obsession and greed that follow are what feed the story's satire, which as a whole serves to antagonize our beloved hero: sweet and innocent charlie bucket. in the end, greed is shown the boot by pint-sized orange men who sing, and it's the innocence and selflessness of the hero who savors the day. somehow, despite the truths in such a simple story, i have a hard time believing that many of the parallels in charlie bucket, despite the prophetic tendencies of the rest of roald dahl's story, will cross to our current predicament, and its outcome.

but why not? for all i feature on local foods and small farms and taking a step back to do things the old, and sometimes anicent, fashioned way, how many people are actually following suit? michael pollan is scheduled to speak at the university of wisconsin tomorrow evening, no doubt to capacity attendance, the sentiment of which is echoed in the linked article above. but despite the call for solidarity and support for pollan by the state's farmers, for how many people will his words be nothing more than a thought provoking tickle? a gentle humph at such brilliant and simple ideas that mount so great against the ease and cost-friendly ways of corporations and supermarkets and mass-produced commodities. it's nice that we have people like michael pollan who think so progressively, because the world does need its great thinkers after all, but isn't that the extent of their worth these days? a tickle?

well, not everyone is content to settle for just a stimulating tickle. and apparently, inspiration is not yet extinct. meet the slow money alliance:

relatively speaking, this is a toddler of an organization. it's only just barely hit the ground and though its press coverage has reached a national and widespread scale (time, wsj, la times), its legs have not yet been found, moving at a crawl—though rapid—on its hands and knees, its first step still yet to be taken—which is said not to be critical, but rather with a heart heavy of hope.

the slow money alliance, which piggy backs in many ways off the much entrenched slow food usa, is a non-profit organization of investors, for investors, who fear capitalism has gone too far. but membership and participation require a thing that rebukes all things capitalistic: the return on your investment comes to you not in dollars and cents, but in the restructuring of our food systems and economies. a charlie bucket of an idea, if you will. it's a charity of sorts, aimed not at a specific demographic or targeted area, but rather the prospective future we all face. and it's groundbreaking.

founding members and advisers stretch a wide and necessary spectrum of backgrounds and expertise. there's richard rominger (former deputy secretary at the department of agriculture); jack acree (co-founder terra potato chips); neil chrisman (former managing director at jp morgan); paul dolan (winemaker, fetzer vineyards and mendocino wine company); and wade green (former editor of newsweek, ny times magazine, the saturday review), to name a few.

but i fear grassroots operations like the slow money alliance, which is based out of my old hood in brookline, mass, won't receive the type of support needed to combat corporate dollars and current infrastructure. the as-of-now goal is to gain one million signatures in accordance with the group's principles, one of which draws from paul newman once saying, "i just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out." paul newman of course returned profits of his newman's own line to charity, a total that stands at over $270 million to date. but is that enough? seriously, will that even make a dent?

unfortunately, the power of persuasion lies in the hands of the media. people do as they are told. sure, free thought and interpretation exist, and there are those who definitely utilize that free enterprise, but for change to happen, there is no doubt that people will have to be persuaded. and not modestly, but overwhelmingly. convincingly. and hopefully before it reaches the point of too late, when there's no other choice, and persuasion becomes synonymous with necessity.

and it's going to take a lot more than michael pollan appearances at universities and farmers dressed in green and grass root organizations based out of boston.

it wasn't so long ago that a person didn't travel more than ten miles from his or her home over the span of their lifetime. absolutely, there's no going back to those times, but shouldn't we at least explore the advantages to the bubbles that spawn from locally sustained and supported agro-economies? maybe, just maybe, there's something to this slow money idea, and starting small will have a much larger impact.

taking a sick day

2009-09-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

i have the computer on a pillow that's covering my lap and am flat on my back, still in bed. i'm sick. so with that, a quickie with a picture of something i'd give so much to have right now:

i made this after the first big snow in boston last year. it's a shredded chicken soup that came out better than i could have imagined. it was spicy and hearty and the spoon always emerged from the bowl with strand after strand after strand of tender, juicy slow-cooked chicken that i cooked in beer. yum.

for the love of ham

2009-09-14T07:07:00.000-07:00

i'm finally reading the sun also rises, and thinking back on my one night stay in the big apple before jumping the east coast ship and packing the moving truck for chicago, this was a place my friend jessica and i stumbled upon that truly seemed to be ripped from the binding of a hemingway novel. bar jamón on seventeenth st. in union square.

a spanish wine list with more spanish wines than i'd ever seen and things like mussels en escabeche and bacalao with arbequinas and manteca with boquerones, all handwritten on a distressed mirror that spanned the entire length of the small place behind the bar. it's a place that requires little work of the imagination to think of robert cohn and lady ashley, and the rest of hemingway's lost generation characters, drinking bottle after bottle of albarino and rioja, nestled over the comnunal high tables, deep into the night. and then there was the ham. sliced thin on antique berkel slicers like the one we used at il casale, it took just one plate and my trip to new york was fulfilled.

i'm a throwback guy. i want my fingers dirty with the oil of the cured swine and the grain of the cheese after tearing each, bit by bit, and tossing it back with a sip of wine. i like the gruff of thick wood and the darkness of candlelight when the sun sets. hemingway had paris. for now, i don't mind having to settle for new york.

michael pollan's done it again

2009-09-10T06:25:00.000-07:00

there he is, yet again, creeping within the remains of the orb of the national spotlight that was meant to shine elsewhere. he's sneaky, but dammit, he's doing just what it is that we need.

an op-ed piece in today's new york times by michael pollan picks right up on where the pulse of this country is beating so rampant:

"to listen to president obama’s speech on wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in america is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed."

his thesis, it seems, will cover what one would think a michael pollan piece would never cover. something other than food. well, yet again, that just wasn't the case.

pollan narrows the health care problem in our country down to one major catalyst. we're too damn fat. and you know what, he's right. we've all seen the numbers, and he repeats them: one in three americans born after the year 2000 will be inflicted with type 2 diabetes, which draws a direct correlation to obesity. and he than draws a correlation of this to the neo robber barons of today's health care system:

"as things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. there’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

i'm sorry, but that is disgusting. does reading that not fill you with rage? our health is the key to our longevity, but our health is the one thing that we have little control over. we haven't been trained, nor taught enough, to prevent disease, which is what grants us more control over own bodies. our longevity. so, as we stand, bad things will happen. and when they do, as pollan is so blatantly broadcasting, people are making money. a lot of it. which for me was a revelation, like pollan had lifted the veil from the dream that is the american way of life, and revealed a corrupt and plotting network of profiteering puppet masters, dancing their hands with strings attached while the puppets weave through a maze of cackling flames.

how many steps removed are we from a controlled society like the one drawn up by aldous huxley in a brave new world? you see, there's a fallacy that i'm realizing is true. money trees? they do exist. they're us. we are the money trees.

"as for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it’s much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill."

but, dare i say it, if things were to change. if the president were to succeed. if this government were to properly function... look at these numbers:

"a patient with type 2 diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year; over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. insurers will quickly figure out that every case of type 2 diabetes they can prevent adds $400,000 to their bottom line. suddenly, every can of soda or happy meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to future profits."

all of a sudden, our health becomes a premium for these guys.

if insurance companies no longer view a ban on sodas and fatty foods as a threat to future profits, then we're suddenly finding ourselves in a system where preventative measures of health are promoted. can you imagine a chicken nugget or a can of soda as a threat to these big insurance companies? and the persecution of that junky foodstuff that would follow? it'd be enough to rise senator mccarthy from his grave.

and most importantly i think to pollan, and so too for myself, he finds a way to link all of this, which is a topic far too large for the several hundred words he'd written or i am writing now, to the focus of our food consumption to a far more regional and local scale than the one that currently thrives:

"recently a team of designers from m.i.t. and columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer unitedhealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in america. their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a 'foodshed'— a diversified, regional food economy — could be the key to improving the american diet."

can you believe that? childhood obesity, and the american diet, best combated by a regional food system? somehow, it's all coming full circle.

got milk?

2009-09-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

growing up, i loved things like kraft singles cheese sandwiches with mayo, mustard, and margarine—my mom was raised on margarine, and not butter, so too then were we. i loved cheeseburgers and chicken fingers and strawberry shakes from in-n-out. and most of all, i loved my mom's mashed potatoes. but when it came to things like peas and green beans, i found ways to avoid the vial foods from ever entering my mouth. there was the usual suspects like the napkin—precisely executed when one parent left the table and the other wasn't looking—or even, though it was one heck of a sacrifice, the subtle shovel of the food beneath a just-enough-eaten mound of mashed potatoes. and then, and i don't think i ever was caught pulling this one off, there was the innocent request for a glass of milk with dinner—milk one of the few non transparent beverages that kept those disgusting vegetables perfectly hidden.

i didn't eat salads until i was sixteen. no joke. and things like fish and pork, forget about it. my parents still deny it to this day, but one night my mom made veal cutlets, and when mikey and i asked what veal was, and its identity was eventually revealed, we both shut down in trauma, refusing to even look at the stuff. you can imagine the scene that stirred.

that's why, though for the longest time his diet consisted of seventy-five percent chicken fingers, i'm so proud of my little brother. in the picture above, which was taken at hungry mother in cambridge last summer, tommy is about to dig in on braised cow tongue. and the crispy stuff in the foreground? fried oysters. at eastern standard the night before, he ordered frog legs. who is this kid, right?

my point is, we shouldn't be afraid of our foods. people have been eating things, that on the whole, this country has classified as disgusting for centuries. what it was that removed the grotesque factor from my twelve year old brother's palette i don't know, but as his oldest—and it goes without saying, natuarally wise—sibling, i couldn't be more proud.

millions of peaches, peaches for me

2009-09-08T09:33:00.000-07:00

labor day. the end of summer. and for alicia and johnny, a first trip to the lake michigan shore.

it was a fog heavy morning, and after first trying out the beach my dad used to spend his high school summers at in winnetka, only to turn away with our tails between our legs because the fog was so thick, the air so cold, we wound up in evanston, walking something like a half mile, cooler and beach bag in tow, only to be turned away at the entrance because we didn't have a) a season pass or b) sixteen bucks cash. so, we picnicked on the grass, behind the iron curtain of a wooden fence that kept the likes of us ragamuffins from the patrons of the beach, for free.

(after finishing this post, alicia told me she'd used the same all-telling picture. well, on the risk of being slapped with an infringement lawsuit by my girlfriend, i'm keeping it. but here's her post, too...)

i popped open a bottle of a white spanish blend and we drank from red solo cups, which somehow was fittingly perfect; we noshed on a baguette and tore pieces of prosciutto from the deli packaging; sliced away at a hunk of smoked gouda and plucked crackers from a box that we slabbed the cheese on; popped open tupperware lids and dipped our forks into a chopped caprese salad with sweet 100 tomatoes from nichols farm, basil, and mozzerella and so too juicy red raspberries from another container, also from nichols farm; and licked our fingers clean of the melted peanut butter that covered the pretzels we bought from olivia's. and to top it all off, alicia and i slipped on our mits and tossed a ball around for the very first time. we even had a couple stop on their bikes and sit at a picnic table to watch us—and by that, i mean get a kick out of the twenty-something, backward hat wearing kid in glasses try to teach the twenty-something, pink skirt wearing girlfriend how to catch a baseball.

and then came dinner, which meant my first return to the grill since dad nearly s'mored my arm over the thing.

though i jumped away like a school girl everytime i dropped a match over the coals, i had a good fire going. and for dinner, just the two of us, i grilled the one foodstuff i've eaten more of than anything else: cheeseburgers. and i served them with peaches.

we came home sunday with gorgeous peaches from seedling farm and like always, while at the market, my demented mind thought of what was at home that i could throw on the burger. it's a pretty barren kitchen right now so naturally, when the only thing that really came to mind was the brown bag full of peaches that was on our butcher block, i said yeah, that's the stuff!

and so, along with thick cut red onion, i sliced up a peach and charred the summer fruit over the grill, drizzling oil over the coals, giddy and bouncing like a kid when the fire leapt up and engulfed the onion and peach in flames. since i wanted the char, i went with a smoked gruyere from the market to kick the smoky factor from the grill up another rung, and spooned bbq sauce over the buns.

and grilled peach? on a burger? in all seriousness, it might just've been the best thing i've ever tasted on a patty, sandwiched between two buns.

the farmers' market capital of the world

2009-09-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

newspapers have changed, and so too has journalism. the frontier of this once juggernaut news format is unknown and the days of past reporting are sliding farther and farther away. the la times, the paper i grew up reading at the breakfast table, is no exception to this. and the first time i opened the chicago tribune, which owns the la times, i couldn't believe how bad the paper was. ads larger than articles and poor typefaces and mismanaged formatting. it was hard to even read. and the la times, simply, is just not the paper that it used to be.

but, lately—and maybe it's a glimmer of hope—i've been damn impressed by the food section.

on the newspaper's food section of the website right now, there's not only the farmers' market map that i'd written about a few weeks back, and also a write-up on saving the season, which i also featured more recently, but there's a newly posted guide to seasonal foods and how to cook through the seasons. for bartlett pears, they encourage that it's okay to buy unripe fruit from the market, because they will, and need, to ripen at room temperature, and it is then that they can be refridgerated. there's tips for persimmons and peaches and grapes, and so too cranberry beans and apples and figs and zuchinni, and recipes to boot. and all with perfect timing as coming home with peaches and cranberry, or shelling, beans from the wicker park farmers' market yesterday suggests.

and then there's this story, in commeration of the first l.a. farmers' market thirty years ago. mayor antonio villaraigosa, who in conjunction with the huge party that will be thrown in honor of the first market, has announced a food policy task force, its primary function to "help turn l.a. into the farmers' market capital of the world." with 121 markets, the county already has by far the most farmers' markets in the country, and i can't help but scratch my head at the thought of it becoming the epicenter of the market in the world. think about all of the agricultural history in europe and asia and other parts of the world, where organized markets, where farmers and fishermen sell directly to their customers, have long been the practice. has l.a. really come that far? the things you take foregranted about the places you once called home...

a quirky sense of ostentation

2009-09-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

the fallout from a monday night dinner for two:

late that night, standing on the sidewalk drinking a glass of wine with a friend before we attempted to move a cooler full of pork belly and ice that might've weighed more than two hundred pounds to the second floor of a building, my friend told me, while he dipped a baguette in the bolognese i'd pulled off the stove an hour before, that the italian in me really shined through that bolognese.

there's not a single drop of italian blood in my veins.

this guy is a chef, which means he knows what can be said to really get to a person's soul when tasting their food. and for an italian, which he admittedly thought i was, is anything more important to the soul than a ragù, which my bolognese was a version of? so maybe it was premeditated flattery, but it worked, and given how italians feel about bolognese, it worked really well.

this post, for all its meaty worth, will be on the making of that dish, which was the first time i'd ever come close to cooking anything like it. it was a process that began months ago, and it was only the spontaneity of alicia asking if i'd make a bolognese for dinner, and my assuming that she wanted that bastardized impostor of ground beef and tomatoes that the olive garden calls a bolognese, that the thing finally came to fruition. i'd learned too much from dante. i'd read a book that even went into detail about bolognese. i had to do the thing right. so when, at five 0'clock, she asked when dinner would be ready, i guiltily lied to her when i said maybe sometime around seven. no way was i taking the easy way out.

and for the sake of trying something different, and having a bit of fun, i'm going to pair excerpts from bill buford's memoir heat throughout this post, because like me, working in an italian restaurant—with a chef who'd caked his fingernails thick with the foodstuff of true italian soil on italian soil—changed his entire perspective on food. and his naïveté, another thing we share, is abundantly apparent when he first talks about that hodge-podge of a native dish to bologna in italy, the bolognese.

"fundamentally," he says, "a ragù is an equation involving a solid (meat) and a liquid (broth or wine), plus a slow heat, until you reach a result that is neither solid nor liquid. the most famous ragù is a bolognese, although there is not one bolognese but many."

"an italian ragù and a french ragout are more or less the same thing. in any language, the process involves taking a piece of meat and, as it was described to me in the vernacular of the kitchen, cooking the shit out of the fucker."

hence, exhibit a):

to the right is the product of a visit to olivia's across the street. i came home with over a half pound of half-inch cut pancetta, a half pound of skirt steak, and a half pound of pork chop. i cut the steak a bit finer than the pork, since it's a fairly lean cut of beef and is best when cooked fast, or like in buford's learned kitchen vernacular, cooked the shit out of, which was obviously the direction i was heading. the small bits react better to the slow heat, and the larger bits of pork render better when browned with fast heat, which is the first step. and cutting the meat when raw makes the job that much easier.

but the surprise to the whole thing was in the bowl to the left.

a lot of my time in the recent days has been spent uploading content to the yet-to-be launched face lift of stephanieizard.com, not to mention knocking out the little nagging things that kept popping up for her second wandering goat dinner, which is why i've lagged on posting content on my own site. it's taken a lot of work. but, that work has its benefits, which were reaped monday night when steph found out i was gonna cook a bolognese for dinner. while talking to her she'd literally taken two hotel pans of pork belly from the oven, from which she'd pulled fiber-by-tender-and-barely-hanging-on-fiber of braised beef short ribs. it'd be perfect for it, she said of my ragù.

like i was gonna turn that offer down.

so in went the raw meat and boom, just like that, the thing was on. it sizzled and snapped and several minutes later, after scooping the rendered result from the pan, i was left with the brown and flavor seducing remnants of the drippings, or that word that's become so forbidden to say, fat. when it comes to fat, to each their own. my dad would probably spoon it all out and hit the pan with oil all over again, because that's just the way he likes to do it. for me, i want the fat. fat, always always always, equates to flavor. so i kept the drippings, though rather than roast my vegetables in a pool of the stuff, i spooned a good amount from the pan and poured it over my meat while it rested—this makes the meat happy. in then went a diced onion and a couple diced carrots, and lots of salt and pepper. my dilemma, at this point, was whether or not to throw in more.

this, in a nutshell, is the beauty of a bolognese. i bought a few seranno peppers from olivia's, toying with the idea of adding a punch of heat to the ragù, and if i'd used them, though my bolognese would have been far different than your mother's grandma's or your best friend's father's grandma's, it still would have worked. take a look at what buford says about it:

"a bolognese is made with a medieval kitchen's quirky sense of ostentation and flavorings. there are at least two meats (beef and pork, although local variations can insist on veal instead of beef, prosciutto instead of pork, and sometimes prosciutto, pancetta, sausage, and pork, not to mention capon, turkey, or chicken livers) and three liquids (milk, wine, and broth), and either tomatoes (if your family recipe is modern) or no tomatoes (if the family recipe is older than columbus), plus nutmeg, sometimes cinnamon, and whatever else your great-grandmother said was essential."

so, i toyed with serranos. but that's as far as it went. they never saw my knife, and are sitting still on the butcher block in the kitchen. i stayed away from nutmeg and cinnamon as well—though when next time rolls around, for sure the autumn spices will flavor my meats. so too did i avoid a classic mirepoix, opting to leave the celery out, and running instead with only garlic in addition to the onion and carrots. i wanted this sauce to be about the meat as much as possible, hankered down not by the texture and distraction of my sloppy and pathetic dice of the crunchy, sweetly-hydrated vegetable best known for something called ants on a log.

and consider this as to why i'd fear a thing like that:

"gianni speaks of the erotics of a new ragù as it cooks, filling the house with its perfume, a promise of an appetite that will mount until it's satisfied. actually, what he said was the cooking of a fresh ragù mi da libidine—gives him a hard-on—and until he can eat some he walks around in a condition of high arousal."

a ragù is something like a mexican mole, the sauce a thing of layers. each step along the way a new layer is added, and then so too another, and sometimes a previous layer is then manipulated by the addition of another layer, until the end result is this complex thing, something like "a crumbly stickiness, a condition of being neither liquid nor solid, more dry than wet, a dressing more than a sauce..."

so celery omitted, and the meat back once again in the pot, i hit the mixture with my favorite part. the tomatoes. for me, it's the san marzanos that heighten the sense of arousal for the ragù. when their fiery sugars begin to wrap around the melted fats and oils in the pot, and the first spat of heat explodes from the molten juice in a boiling pop, it's like the atomic release of the big bang and a whole new universe has been born from the seeds of the italian tomato.

which i realize is over the top and pathetically ridiculous, but still is altogether familiar to the italian's admitted state of arousal when a ragù is doing it's thing.

from this point on though, the thing took care of itself. other than dicing the short rib meat—which she cooked i think in pineapple juice and asian flavors, lending a hand to the italian/orient tradition of marco polo—to a super fine grain-like consistency and tossing that in and pouring in some red wine and later on adding some torn basil leaves, i just reduced the heat to a simmer and covered the pot with the lid. piece of cake. so much so that i did more work for the website and even hopped across the street with alicia to grab a drink with a couple friends, all while the slow heat did its business, and the ragù methodically took its form.

then, just after ten o'clock, it was done.

at il casale, dante served his bolognese over tagliatelle, and in it was everything from veal to pork to beef to pancetta, and even chicken livers and mortadella. this meek version, over paperdelle, was mine.

with a glass of red wine and a baguette we broke piece by piece over our plates, we had our dinner. and was it good? i thought so, but then again i'm german-irish and some trace of every other western european country, with absolutely no italian lines in my family tree. so when someone says, the italian in you really shines through in this, it can go both ways...

a super big boy combo, and fifty-six years

2009-08-29T13:15:00.000-07:00

alicia and i are utterly blessed to have been borne into the families that surround us. nearly two weeks ago she wrote a candid and emotional piece in memory of her grandfather, a man who i fast learned was the very thing i should strive to be in her life. he provided her with unmatched love. security. he was her rock. and the way she speaks of both he and her grandmother, the admiration of their marriage, is a thing so familiar, a thing i hold for my own grandparents as well.

only days ago my mom's parents celebrated the anniversary of their marriage. the story of how they met—a blind date at the original bob's big boy—epitomizes the core of their union. the commitment to follow through, beyond the nerves of a a set-up like a blind date, is at the heart of their remorse for not attending my recent graduation from emerson college. it was the first graduation of any kind, of all of their grandchildren, that they'd missed. and that alone, their remorse, meant more to me than having them present for the silly ceremony.

and today marks the anniversary of the wedding of my dad's parents.

six years ago this weekend all ten of their kids and spouses, and twenty-five grandchildren, were at lake george to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. today makes fifty-six. it's a large family, and it's remarkable how well the family gets along. you'd think anytime the families gather it was a reunion of college friends, and not brothers and sisters. as a child, i looked to my nana and papa as though they were saints. they held this mythical sort of air in my mind, and it was unheard of in my subconscious to ever even dream of crossing either of them. i was no angel as a kid, but in their presence, i at least attempted—though not always successfully—to be nothing less. it's a testament to their union, and again, the endless love they've showered upon their family.

i cringe at cliché and sentiment, and i know how deeply i've delved in both here, but when it comes to family, you'll always get the underbelly of my coarse core. it's because of family that this blog exists—and is the reason i decided upon the strange and obscure title that people mistake to have to do with bellybuttons—and to this point, it's my family that have proven to be my most loyal readers. thanks for that, and with a guilty and unsatisfied conscience, i apologize for not better expressing my gratitude and appreciation for all that you've provided for me.

funnin' with food and wonder woman

2009-08-26T07:05:00.000-07:00

i can't say i always heed to this, but you shouldn't be cooking food if you are taking it too seriously. there needs to be an appreciation for what you're doing. an understanding of how essential the act of eating is, and that cooking, as it has evolved, is a great reflection on the human mind. how man came to utilize heat as a means to prepare his food—and to then further manipulate the elements so as cooking became a science, and so too an art—is so tragically overlooked, despite it being so obvious a study to man's consciousness, or what fiction writers constantly seek to capture, the human condition.

so a couple weeks back, when i fired up the charcoals on the grill early in the afternoon to start charring vegetables, only to have the coals die by the time i needed to cook my fish and steaks, and so then cleaned the thing out only to build a new mound of coals, this time with my dad holding the lighter fluid, distracted and talking to alicia's stepfather, dousing the coals with ounce after ounce of the stuff in mid-conversation—which is when i bit my tongue so as not to cause a tiff between the two of us, despite knowing the label says to add only one and a half ounces per pound of coals, because he is my dad after all, and he knows best—and i slowly and carefully touched a match to the bottom of the pile like i always do, i was tested.

up until a couple years ago, i was still afraid to turn on a gas stove. the thought of the thing blowing up in my face, well, yeah. so when, before i knew what was happening, a fireball ballooned from the coals and snapped up my arm and toward my face, i thought i had it pretty bad. it's funny how trauma works, because in retrospect, i saw that fireball erupt in absolute slow motion. at first that kid in me came out and was simply awestruck, thinking something like a hushed, woah. but that didn't last long, and i snapped my arm away, shaking it over and over and over like it'd been swallowed by flames, though i wasn't on fire, and everyone else wasn't sure if they should be laughing or worried. because it was funny. and i deserved it, because up to then, i'd been bummed about having to restart my fire, and that's just not what it's about. so i singed a few dozen arm hairs? at least i snapped to.

and when alicia had an interview for a teaching position a couple days later, it was through food that i went about doing what i could to ease her nerves—though it's not like she ever needs it. sometimes i think i'm dating wonder woman. what the girl pulls off is inhuman. so as often as i can, i try and let her know this.

she was in a rush that morning, printing this and editing that on her resume, and needed breakfast. so i went to olivia's and picked up a couple wallaby yogurts, which she loves, and a pluot, which is a hybrid of an apricot and a plum, and some granola. in the bowl above, the granola sits at the bottom, sliced pluots fanned on top of that, which are hidden, and then the yogurt, which i had fun with and dotted with blueberries and a drizzle of honey and a small mound of more granola. you can see that plainly. it was easy, but a different way of making fruit and granola than the usual mix and match and pile it on that we eat every other day. my point is, i had fun with it. and it was the perfect way to send her off. the thing took thought, and she was touched that i'd taken that extra effort, which by nature calmed her nerves and i think helped set her up for an interview that was, despite her modesty, a cakewalk.

sure, take food seriously if that's your thing. but my whole point is when you have fun with the food, there's something different going on than what you get with the whole pretense of progressive, nouveau cuisine. and considering how far we've come since living in caves and hunting with spears, i'll take that any day.

because all the cool kids are doing it, a video!

2009-08-25T07:26:00.000-07:00

running off my august 14th post and the outstanding in the field dinner, here's steph's latest episode of her web series, the tasty life. my arduous arugula picking didn't make final cut, but pay close attention and you'll catch my cameo...

a sfizi and a pisco sour

2009-08-20T07:14:00.000-07:00

internet is still down, and this time i'm at a starbucks the size of a closet.

before i left boston, i worked at il casale, a brand new rustic italian restaurant in the boston suburb of belmont, which just a couple of years ago was still a dry town. we opened shop in the town's old firehouse, helmed by chef dante de magistris and his two brothers filippo and damian, and brought the town not only its first full bar, but with the success of his epynomous dante, the city chic approach to dining in a broken down, pretension-free and familial friendly package. so many of the dishes on dante's menu are replications and interpretations of what his nonna cooked for him and his brothers growing up. il casale itself means the farmhouse, or rural home. and to top the whole sentimental thing off, the boys grew up just around the corner. sort of too much just how perfect story is, right?

that's why when i saw this profile piece on the brothers and their father leon from the globe, i decided to share.

just after opening il casale, when buzz was building and every night we were on the lookout for the short, dark-haired type of a woman that could by any possible chance resemble the reaper of sorts who'd either seal the restaurant's fiscal fate like an angel or flatten it like a mythical giant—the globe's restaurant critic, devra first—leon's wife, and the woman the boys looked to like a saint, lost her battle with cancer and passed away. it was a crushing blow at such a pivotal time for the restaurant, and one couldn't help but wonder how in the world the boys would cope. there was an incredibly thick wave of sorrow that overcame the staff, a sense of what do we do now? so helpless, but wanting to help so badly—but it fast became apparent there was only one thing we could do. bear down and work our tails off. and suddenly the staff knew the menu inside and out, bottles of nebbiolo and wines from piemonte flew off the shelves, and the kitchen just worked it, plain and simple, like a perfected machine, in total unison.

i left for chicago soon after and one week into the move, had a message from the staff. my heart dropped, because i knew it only could have been one thing. dante was aiming for a three star review and i just had this sick, stomach-churning feeling they'd fallen well below the mark. but then i signed on to the globe's website and saw, below a picture of dante's fritto misto and the words "devra first," three and a half yellow pointed stars.

the review was titled "just like nonna used to make," and it sort of summed everything up perfectly. life works in the funniest ways. i'd never go as far to say that it was grace's passing that lifted the restaurant to a whole new level, high enough to earn devra first's highest ever rating with the exception of one other restaurant, but it's no stretch to say that somewhere, somehow, an angel was certainly watching over that old firehouse on leonard street.

aliments de confort

2009-08-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

internet is down at home and am at the library. in lieu of this, a picture:

via leunig's bistro in burlington, vt... boeuf bourguignon in the foreground and roasted duck in the back.

comfort food.

as summer begins its descent

2009-08-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

in yesterday's post i echoed michael pollan's fear that we're drifting too far from our rich food-labor past. it's a real challenge to cook in the kitchen once a day, let alone three times a day. and that's sad, isn't it? even today, i've been awake for several hours and rather than take the minimal energy to wash some fruit and mix it with yogurt, i continue to park it in front of the computer, still breakfastless and noon already passed. it's a lot of work to upkeep a kitchen.

but is it really?

after i published yesterday's post, i came across a blog featured by the la times that centered, wholly, on preserving foods. the blog, titled saving the season, epitomizes the very example i gave in the post on other ways to further close the void that's spread from farmer to consumer, and the little time we spend in the kitchen. again, cooking doesn't necessitate heat. preserving foods is just as productive, if not more so given the pliability preserved foods have over their lengthy shelf lives.

at dante in cambridge, they'll soon be having their annual canning party where literally all day long they'll be drinking and eating and partying it up, but also canning hundreds and hundreds of the season's last harvest of san marzano tomatoes. san marzanos are known for their fiery flavor, rich in minerality and sweetness, thanks to the volcanic soil they first were cultivated from in italy, at the base of mt. vesuvius. the restaurant literally comes to a halt, over nothing more than this delicate, little red fodstuff.

loads and loads of tomatoes will be preserved that day, and as summer turns to fall and fall to winter, the restaurant will continue to feature the summer tomato on its menu. it's an escape from the wasteland of the freeze and the farmers' exclusive root vegetable cultivation. and, it's fool-proof quality control.

there's also the green briar jam kitchen on cape cod. if the recipes and methods on saving the season are too hard without hands on teaching, the green briar offers classes and workshops. and if you don't live near the boston area, then run a google search. find a class. find a farm. take a drive out to the country and knock on a farmer's door, and just see what happens. i bet you'd be amazed. but like anything, it's not all that difficult given a little patience and practice, which of course equates to the one thing we should all be doing more of: spending more and more time in the kitchen.

the great thing with a blog about preserving is that as the season's change, so too will the recipes and approaches to the preserving process. and i find it funny that saving the season is a blog out of los angeles, and not a city like chicago or boston or new york, where there's really no other choice but to save the season, given that seasons actually exist in those cities. but the writing is solid, and the writer has the credentials to back his work, and is just one extension of the old ways in what will hopefully be a repeated pattern and common theme as the world of food continues to evolve.