the autumn tuna

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

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

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

with a sloppy garnish of parsley and dried cranberries.

feeding from the fall market

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

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

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

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

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

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.