A Serious Salad

I like salad one of two ways. Completely unadorned, eaten without utensils and out of the bag, or loaded up into a meal in and of itself. Give me anything in between, like a wilting mesclun mix with a few mealy slices of apples, and I'll punch you in the face.

The above photo does not do justice to the spectacular meal-of-a-salad that I assembled last night. That's because I took the picture halfway through the process, and by the time it was done, it looked so good that I couldn't wait another 1/60th of a second.

In its finished state, the salad contained the following:

-mixed greens from our Shared Harvest winter CSA
(spinach, chicory, red leaf lettuce, radicchio)
-cubes of baked sweet potatoes leftover from a previous meal, warmed and well salted
-crisp bits of Vermont Smoke and Cure bacon
-roasted sunflower seeds
-balsamic vinegar, whisked into the bacon grease (I'm currently roasting blue potatoes in the rest of it)

I cannot tolerate that fact that this divine creation -- at once sweet, salty, crunchy, and mushy -- shares the same name as bowls of iceberg lettuce and shredded carrots.

This is how tenth generation vintners must feel about "Two Buck Chuck," or how other, more successful gods feel when they look on our god's creations. Because, when it can be so good, it's embarrassing by what humans deign to call "salad."

Then again, if we were made in god's image, bad salads are His or Her fault.

The Armenian Cucumber: Cucumber or Alien?

Every now and then I like to touch base with my good friend, storyteller Jordan Hill, about how much more exciting the local food scene is in his current residence of Tucson, AZ. Of course I'm extremely proud of my own foodshed, but I guess the mesquite flour is always greener on the other side.

One day the subject turned to Armenian cucumbers. I've been delighted to find these crisp, thin skinned snacks at Boston far-mar's and was glad to hear from Jordan that they were thriving in the Southwest as well. Only it seemed there was something different about the Armenian cucumbers he was getting. While mine were the size of a small cigar, his were as big as my dog. Or, as Jordan here illustrates, his (hairy) leg:



They seem less like a vegetable and more like an oasis. Apparently the adjective "Armenian" not only means a resident of the republic of Armenia but also "either small or of Seussical proportions."

His cucumbers looked like they could eat him. However, it seems Jordan and his wife Autumn found a way to beat the cukes to it.



They butchered the monsters into delightful salads and cold soups: perfect food for living in the Sonoran dessert.

Many vegetables will grow to these proportions if left unpicked, like okra or zucchini, but at that stage their increased size usually correlates to a decrease in texture or flavor. Apparently not so with the Armenian snozzcumbers. Jordan and Autumn report that they are quite delicious.

My curiosity is certainly peaked by these watery beasts, and I'd appreciate it if someone out there could clear up the mystery as to why my Armenian cukes are small and Jordan's are so big. (Besides the obvious explanation that he's more of a man than I am.)

One thing I do know about Armenian cucumbers is that, though large, they're nowhere near as creepy as that giant rabbit. That thing gives me the willies.

Cinnamon-Chile Wood Fired Chicken

As much as I appreciate the exotic, if lemongrass and rosemary were tied to train tracks and I could only save one, I know I'd go continental. In other words, I'm no Jean-Georges.

However, when rubbing down the above chicken before it's fight with the flames, I suddenly felt inspired to add some tropical notes to the mix. I took two Eberly's (sorry Lionette's) chicken legs and smeared them with peanut oil, salt, cayenne, chile powder, cinnamon and ginger. That and the smoke from the wood fire -- nature's pimenton -- created an eye-crossingly good grilled chicken.

As far as wood fire cooking goes, I've said it before and I'll say it again: even though you associate sitting around the fire with the nighttime (and perhaps harmonicas and plastic saguaros), it's a really good idea to start your fire earlier if you plan to cook on it and plan to see what you're cooking.

That said, I've never thought to start a cooking fire before dusk, but even so I'm starting to get a feel for it. This time I didn't scorch the chicken black and leave it sashimi grade on the inside, as I have in other dimly lit grilling experiences. And when the coals pooped out I did have to finish it in the oven for about ten minutes, but otherwise this was everything you want from chicken grilled over a real fire: crackly skin, juicy meat and just a touch of ash.

But it was really the spice mix that drove me to blog about it. I can't imagine anyone trying this recipe and being disappointed, unless they're either vegetarian or a chicken.

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Recipe: Cinnamon and Chile Grilled Chicken

serves 2, or 1/2 of a glutton

Note: You could use a charcoal or gas grill instead of a wood fire, but you could also go to KFC.

2 chicken legs, as sustainably raised as you can afford
a glug of peanut oil
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp ground ginger
1 tbsp chile powder (something like ancho)
1 tbsp cinnamon
1 tsp cayenne

1. Start your fire.

2. Rub your legs with the peanut oil and spices. Do the same for the chicken legs.

3. Once the flames have given way to coals and once your grill is hot, add the legs.

4. Watch carefully. If they're giving any suggestion of catching fire, raise the grill or spread the coals to diffuse the heat. If they're not browning, lower the grill closer to the heat.

5. After about 10 minutes or when mahogany (golden is for people who peel cucumbers), flip and repeat on the B-side.

6. When both sides are brown and crackly, cut one thigh to check the interior. If they're at all pink, continue grilling with less direct heat or finish in an oven set at 350.

7. Barely hear the rosemary scream over the train's whistle.

Kimchee Donuts!?

Thanks to Serious Eats for making us all aware of the fact that there are kimchee donuts at Korean Dunkies.

I like Serious Eats' rubbernecking attitude towards food: half of the stuff they post about grabs me because it looks delicious, the rest intrigues me just as much for precisely how it does not.

Coffee: A Seven Hour Thrill Ride

I drank a cup of the always excellent Karma coffee yesterday at 11:30am. I felt like a king, or a god, or the king of the gods. But at 7pm that night I was still twittering, and I'm not talking about social networking.

For those of you who are numb to its effects, allow me to be the canary in the coal mine: coffee does absolutely crazy things to your body. You may not be able to tell because you've gotten used to it, but hear my words. Coffee is black magic. Not being used to it, drinking just one cup changed the entire course of my day.

I respect it, but I wouldn't let coffee into my daily routine any more than I'd invite someone dangerous over to tea, no matter what that series of "How to Be An Artist" posters from the 90's said.

Even in my years as a touring performer, I never wanted to turn to the dark side, for I knew the temptation would be too great. In all those years of 1,000 mile driving days, late night performances and 6am flights, I could count the cups of coffee I had on one hand. And I don't have extra fingers.

If I don't like what coffee does to me, why, then, do I ever drink it? Because, a few times a year, I think "why not?" I also recognize that few ingestibles have the powerful sensory properties of coffee -- that aroma, that viscosity! -- but a few hours after I've had a cup, I inevitably think "why did I think 'why not'!?"

Links Galore, Links Galore

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce (and why there are 36 kinds of Ragu)

What the world eats (answer: things in boxes and fake looking fruit, except in Ecuador)

McDonalds withdraws from Iceland (if it were Wendy's there would be an excellent Frosty pun in there somewhere)

A vegan in a Hummer may not be better than a carnivore in a Prius (though there are no vegans in Hummers, so really it's irrelevant).

Cocoa Rose Tea

I recently received a comment asking "when will you talk about tea?" The answer is "now."

With cooler weather more or less here to stay (we've been bouncing between snow and 70 degrees), tea season has officially begun. I've been drinking a lot of mate and tung ting, with the occasional herbal like elderberry, hibiscus or lemon thyme from what remains in the garden. But the most interesting non-true tea I've had in recent memory has been the cocoa rose served at Sofra.

Like soy and flax before it, cocoa is now making appearances where it often doesn't belong due to the fact that people think that it will save their lives due to the fact that it does have some healthful attributes but more because the industry is paying massive amounts of money to make you think so. And so I approached cocoa rose tea about as skeptically as I approach rooibos chai, which is to say very skeptically.

And yet it was wonderful. The bitter richness of the unsweetened cocoa, the full perfume of the rose petals. At once earthy and celestial, it worked.

When I was in middle school, one of my teachers blew my mind by saying that it didn't matter if you ate healthily because you could still get hit by a bus. From then on, I would use this rationale as my excuse to eat ho ho's and drink liters of Jolt, which was a bar mitzvah's version of being a devil may care bon vivant.

To some extent, I still believe in my teacher's words. But if, at the moment that reckless MBTA bus splattered your brains across Mt. Auburn Street, you had a cup of cocoa rose in your hand, you'd go out smiling.

Happy International Day of Climate Action

If you don't know what I'm talking about, see the icon at right or see here.

And don't forget, the way we eat has a tremendous impact on the world around us. And perhaps more importantly, on the world around other people, around the world. So eat your broccoli stems.

I Make Steak

As you may have noticed, I'm more of a foraged mushrooms and noodles kind of guy than I am a steak eater. But as you can tell from the photo above, I do also eat steak. And when I do, I lick the cutting board afterward. Hmm, maybe I should make steak more often.

There are several reasons I don't usually make steak. One is that I never buy it. Two is that it's kind of boring. Three is that eating copious amounts of beef doesn't set the best example for all of the aspiring third world peoples who are now destroying their resources to copy our lifestyles. Sorry, planet.

But I do eat beef on occasion, and in my world order there is certainly a place for small amounts of locally raised, lightly seared, grass fed cow flesh. Especially if it's cooked in butter and topped with a rioja reduction, as was the steak I made last night.

I picked up a Hardwick Beef flat iron (the steak formerly known as top blade) from City Feed and Supply in JP, one of the few markets in the Boston area that makes you feel like maybe, if you squint real hard, you could be in one of the lamest neighborhoods of San Francisco.

I did what I almost always do with steak. I heated a skillet, tossed in a lump of butter, waited until the foam subsided and then slapped in the salt-rubbed meat. I didn't touch it until the juice started to bubble up, at which point I flipped it, at which point it was basically done.

I then transfered the steak to a cutting board to rest (forever) while I deglazed the pan with a splash of wine and a little more butter and chopped shallots, rosemary, or whatever I happened to have on hand that made sense. I served the meat over arugula alongside basmati rice and a butternut squash and chicken stock puree, assuming you can still say "served" when it's just for yourself.



I don't describe this process because I feel that it's the best, or even because I want others to follow my technique, which isn't even "my" technique but something I once read somewhere. I share this information in the democratic and confessional spirit of food blogging: this is what I do, know that, and now go do what you do.

But if you do do what I did, you'll be as happy as a cow. Or as happy as I was when eating a cow that, from what I understand, had been relatively happy.

Also, for those of you who think you can't eat responsibly and well for an affordable sum, know that this steak was only a little over four bucks and that I was completely satiated after eating only half of it. In other words, I had one of the best steaks of my life for about two bucks and could still feel plenty smug about supporting a righteous cattle farmer.

And I'm going to do this again any time I'm by City Feed & Supply, so watch out.

The Real Deal

Over the weekend Elise and I stumbled upon what must be our best local cider hook-up: One Stack Farm in Stow, MA, which presses its own apples in the antique device pictured above.

And that's the only place you'll find it. Because One Stack doesn't pasteurize or add preservatives, they're only legally allowed to sell on-location. On top of that, the stuff they do sell has to be slapped with a warning label detailing the potential health hazards for the young and old.

Now think about the other potential health hazards in the food we eat, and think about what bullsh*t it is that that crap doesn't have to be labeled while this does. Meat cut by workers who don't get paid for the time it takes to clean their knives gets a pass, yet the kind, old pipe-smoking apple farmer down the road has to put a skull and cross bones on his juice.

Regardless, One Stack cider is so delicious, so fresh, round and balanced, that I'd drink it even if it could kill me.

Tea and Food... and Music!

Last night I had a perfectly good Jack Daniels and club soda at the Avett Brothers show at the Boston House of Blues. If you only read food blogs, stop reading now. For the rest of you, I now present my first ever post on music.

In a nutshell, the concert was absolutely rockin'. I can't think of any other band with two leads who, when not singing and simultaneously manning the drum set, are singing, playing guitar or banjo and banging out percussion with a kick drum or high hat, the latter being alternately played by pedal and by direct kicks from the taller Avett brother's boot tip. The crowd was up on their feet for the entirety of the concert, and not just because there weren't any seats.

Nor have I seen a cellist play with such emotion that it seemed like the bow was a saw he was drawing across his own stomach. Nor have I ever heard a band make a point of saying "Thanks for inviting us back to the stage" when doing that thing that bands do and coming back on after pretending to finish.

Perhaps that gratitude was not as sincere as it seemed and was instead an example of a highly polished folksy affect. If that's the case, then I'm just as impressed with the Brothers' theater skills. They're either the nicest, most earnest band I've ever seen ("Y'alls' enthusiasm is the only reason we can stand straight right now"), or they're superb actors.

I especially recommend checking out the AB's at this catalystic point in their career. As I type, they tip, and it remains to be seen whether they'll become a full blown stadium act with indie roots, like Wilco, or an indie band that plays like they're playing for a stadium regardless of the venue. By the end of their set last night, the Avett brothers, along with the non-Avett brother Avett Brothers, were drenched with sweat, hoarse, exhausted, and, it seemed, delighted.

For the first half of the set I marveled at the manic enthusiasm they brought to the stage, but for the second half I worried about them. Can the kind of guys you'd like to bring home to meet your mother survive an increasingly stacked tour schedule and continue to belt out their anthems with the same blend of ease and energy night after night? It remains to be seen, and the shorter of the Brothers sounded like he was really straining by the end, though not remotely holding back.

Listening to their music or watching their videos alone, the Brothers' shamelessly sincere lyrics and dreamy, lingering gazes sometimes verge on awkward. Watching them do the same live, you don't care, you just stomp your foot.

Peace and Hominy

There may be nothing more comforting than having a bubbling crockpot full of hominy stew. Except perhaps two bubbling crockpots full of hominy stew.

I've been making such meals ever since having the posole at Ole in Inman Square, and I have to say that I'm quite pleased with my results. I've used both beef bones and chicken legs and each has yielded a rich, buttery broth. After a long simmer, the hominy surrenders its starch to the surrounding liquid, and the whole thing tastes like the best corn tortilla.

I've also been using Amanda's slow cooked soup plus fresh garnish theory, which I think I can now call the slow cooked soup plush fresh garnish law. One day, Amanda thought "It seems like such a waste to make stock out of ingredients like vegetables that you could eat instead." And then she thought "What if you could make stock out of something that you wouldn't otherwise eat, like bones and spices?"

So she started making soups with just a spiced bone broth and finishing it with herbs and veggies at the very end, thereby creating the perfect yin and yang of slow cooked richness and last minute freshness.

Here's how my posole works, and I'm open to other suggestions. I brown a few chicken thighs and do the same with onion, garlic and cumin seeds. That all goes into a crockpot with the hominy (previously soaked overnight), a large can of tomatoes, a dried chile, salt and a splash of some leftover wine or vinegar. I forget about it pretty much all day, then take the meat off the bone, reintroduce it, and serve with chopped cilantro, diced raw onion, and lime wedges. It is divine.

Here's the one problem: when the chicken is falling off the bone and everything else is just perfect, the hominy still needs to keep going. What I've been doing is finishing it on the stove on higher heat once I take the chicken out, but it would be nice to get everything to finish at the same time (single entendre). I suppose I could just start the whole thing earlier - any thoughts?

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Recipe: Posole (At Least I Think It's Posole - Call It Hominy Stew to Be Safe)
serves 4

The stew:

12 oz of hominy, soaked overnight
4 chicken thighs
1 28 oz can of tomatoes
2 cups water
2 onions
1 whole garlic clove
2 tbsp cumin seed
1 whole, dried, chile pepper
salt to taste
a splash of wine or a slightly smaller splash of balsamic or wine vinegar
2 tbsp pimenton

The garnish:

1/2 bunch chopped cilantro
1/4 diced, raw onion
1 lime, cut into wedges

1. Brown your chicken thighs, onions, garlic, and cumin seed.

2. Add the above to a crockpot with everything else in the stew list.

3. Simmer on "high," about forever.

4. Remove the chicken and shred like pulled pork. Put it back as such.

5. Serve with the garnish.

Destiny Fulfilled

I found this old photo of myself when I was back home in Florida. Guess I've been a foodie since the time that I might have referred to food itself as "foodie."

The Amateur Gourmet on Kimball on Gourmet, Plus Zombies

See here for Adam Roberts of the Amateur Gourmet's brilliant response to Christopher Kimball's op-ed in the Times regarding the fall of Gourmet. (And can we all just note the irony that an old media publication called Gourmet has fallen while a food blog called the Amateur Gourmet continues to thrive? )

Apparently, Christopher Kimball thinks that it's me, a blogger, who killed Gourmet, and Adam couldn't be more lucid in my (and his own) defense. He writes:

"These food blogs represent a welcome break from institutional food writing; they are fresher, brighter and more truthful than the kind of writing Kimball mourns—writing that must pass through board rooms, across copy desks, and into editorial meetings before it’s ok-ed and printed. By the time it hits the stands, it has all the relevancy of a tomato in January."

Well roared, Lion. Adam has voiced my own thoughts better than I could have, though I do have a few additional points and observations. The first is that, while I disagree with his position on new media, I do admire Kimball's dogged, "cold dead hands" defense of his crumbling ivory tower.

If you've seen Zombieland, it brings to mind Tallahassee's climactic stand-off at the film's close. Locked in a cage (closed minded thinking that fails to see the good in new media), Tallahassee (Christopher Kimball) fires his pistols (NYT op-eds) at a seemingly infinite wave of attacking, rabid zombies (Adam Roberts). The only difference is that Tallahassee wins.

Also, Kimball writes that if you "Google 'broccoli casserole' and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing." But isn't every broccoli casserole disappointing?

Understanding the Chicken

After multiple dining experiences (and blog posts) involving the chicken of the woods mushrooms growing near my home, I have only just begun to know how to fully appreciate them.

Though this fungi can run tough and/or dry, when you pick the right parts of the right mushroom at the right time and prepare them correctly, the c.o.t.w. is absolutely divine. Sound like more trouble than it's worth? It isn't. The same guidelines apply to a zucchini, we're just more used to dealing with those.

Here are my rules for having a healthy relationship with this vegan chicken:

1. Only pick specimens that you want to eat. This is difficult to do, because in your ecstasy at having discovered an enormous, traffic cone-orange wild mushroom, you're going to want to take it all. But you really only want the tender, flexible tips of an older mushroom and not quite all of a younger one. They're most tender at the edges and become woodier as you move back towards the base. I suppose the tougher parts are good for stock, but so are onion peels.

2. A mushroom brush is not enough. Unless your 'shroom is growing high up on a tree, or in a hospital, it will have dirt not only on it but in its "skin." The mushroom seems to embed little pieces of the forest that can't just be wiped away, so before you cook it, taking a paring knife and gently scrape or poke out any dark bits. Remember, you'd do the same with an unsightly zucchini.

3. Keep it simple. It's only when I try to dream up fitting preparations for this glorious ingredient that I end up not using it and letting it turn pale and sad. Pick it, clean it, and just cook it up in a pan with a little olive oil and salt. Eat it straight up as an amuse, on toast, on noodles (pictured at top), or whatever. It is so richly flavorful - sometimes like poultry, sometimes like eggs, sometimes with a hint of lemon - that it needs little else.

4. Slice it thinly. Doing so will shorten the cooking time and enhance the texture, which, if you follow the other rules, can be as soft as an omelette.

4. Don't eat it if it's growing on a pine or another type of conifer. Apparently that can make you ill, though your odds are probably still better than if you were eating ground beef.

My Favorite of Michael Pollan's Favorite Reader Submitted Rules for Eating

"Eat foods in inverse proportions to how much its lobby spends to push it."

From this entertaining and thought provoking NYT feature.

Great Ingredients, Horrible Food

Dinner prospects couldn't have looked better.

I had chicken jus, chicken fat, and a fresh chicken of the woods mushroom harvested from the woods behind T&F HQ. I also had a can of coconut milk and an heirloom eggplant from Allandale Farm -- a Louisiana Green -- plus plenty of spices, fresh cilantro, scallion, and my go-to dried noodles. By all accounts, it should have made for a bangin' curry.

It was not, and I blame the Louisiana Green. The eggplant was gaggingly bitter and made my tongue prickle and itch in that special eggplant way. I would have just eaten around it, but like a skunk that's been hit by a car, its influence had spread.

The whole beautiful thing tasted as bitter and as mushy as the eggplant. I ate the noodles with as little of the sauce as possible and, out of respect for the slugs whose food I'd stolen, picked out the pieces of the mushroom with a pair of chopsticks. I was so disgraced that I couldn't even bear to empty the pot for another day, and so it remained on the stove, full of horrible curry, haunting me. It's final resting place was not my stomach, but the trash can. Hence the above photo.

Ironically, I had picked up the eggplant while researching an article on the resurgence of heirloom vegetables. My slant had so far been positive, but now I might reconsider.

It was definitely the worst tasting, highest quality food that I've ever eaten. In that one sense it takes the cake, though I wish I had taken a piece of cake for dinner instead, and I hate cake.

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Recipe: Ruined Curry

Directions: Combine the freshest, most flavorful, heirloom, organic, local, seasonal vegetables possible with spices of your choice and equal parts coconut milk and chicken stock. Add a nasty eggplant. Serve over noodles. Throw away.

My Latest

See the link for my latest article in Stuff magazine (the Boston one, not the now defunct lad mag). The topic: fall wines.

http://stuffboston.com/liquid/archive/2009/10/05/fall-up-your-glass.aspx

Fall Raspberries: The Best I've Ever Had

I'm going to be honest with you. Berries aren't as sweet as you think.

Yet when you think berries, you think sweet, largely because you think of what we do to them: crisps, cobblers, cream and sugar. Fresh from the bramble it's a different story, as the flavor profile of a berry is often dominated not by sugar but by pucker.

I generally prefer the taste of unadulterated ingredients, so I appreciate the tang of a real berry, but the fall raspberries I've been eating lately have me singing a sweeter tune. I don't really know what I'm talking about here, but it seems as though there are very different raspberries in summer and in fall. Also, there are raspberries in fall at all.

I usually think of raspberries as a strictly summer thing (barring tasteless - in more ways than one - imports) and am glad to see that they're getting a second wind. My hunch is that the fall raspberry is a different variety that's on the up and up as eating locally and seasonally gains ground.

From what I've observed (and not from any actual research), fall raspberries differ from their summer counterparts in two ways. The color, like the weather, is darker. The flavor is sweeter, more mellow, somewhat honey-like and almost absent of any acidity.

I'm reminded of a passage in the Omnivore's Dilemma about different recipes for eggs from different seasons, and I wouldn't be surprised if, in our recent past, there were similarly varied treatments for summer and fall raspb's.

I'm sure that in the annals of cookery there are absolutely delicious fall raspberry-specific tarts and sauces and such, but they're just so good that I can't stop myself from gobbling them up unaltered.

Mr. Vongerichten Goes to Boston

See today's Globe for my article on the Boston opening of Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's 25th restaurant.

His farm-to-table concept, called Market, already exists in three other cities around the world. Which is why I thought it was so funny to write the following line:

"The Boston Market, not to confused with Boston Market..."

My editor disagreed. See the whole thing here:

http://www.boston.com/ae/food/restaurants/articles/2009/09/30/vongerichtens_latest_venture_has_international_flair_regional_flavor/?page=1

Cereal + Diabetes = Comedy

I try to do my part in helping the association between sugar and diabetes, but Boston area comic Tom Dunlap has taken it to the next level. I saw a recent set of his at The Comedy Studio and got him to send me the relevant bit. Here's the transcript, so you'll have to do your own comic timing:

These next few jokes are called, "Advertisers don't care about children."

Cookie Crisp Cereal: It's cookies for breakfast! And diabetes.

Kellogg's Corn Pops: Gotta have my type II diabetes.

Frosted Flakes: THEEEYY'RRRRRRRE diabetes.

I think you get the point. It upsets me that advertisers shove sugary cereal down kids throats, and they don't care! They don't care that Raisin Bran is just two scoops of diabetes, you know, they don't care there's some children in hospitals, snap-crackle-lost-a-foot to diabetes. What it comes to is Kix Cereal: It's kid tested...positive for diabetes.

A Shortcut to Food

As some loyal readers might know, T&F is in part a musing on how to eat well while working from home. And I think I've finally cracked the code.

The answer: highly seasoned ground meat and noodles. Don't be thrown off the seeming simplicity of the dish. This can be very, very good food.

For instance, dan dan noodles, perhaps the greatest culinary gift the Sichuan province has made to the rest of the world. If you can just look past your school room cafeteria associations -- to stop beating around the bush, that's "beefaroni" -- you'll see the vast potential in this elemental combo.

The version pictured at top includes ground pork from happy, heirloom pigs at nearby Drumlin Farm and mung bean noodles, which looked very cool and just a little scary while resting in a glass bowl.



My inspiration started with dan dan noodles, which is basically soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, Sichuan peppercorn, chili flakes, and something else that restaurants do that I can never replicate at home (and no, it's not MSG, unless they're lying to me). But now I just throw together real meat and complimentary spices and it always works out. The one in the photo, which was the best yet, had a sauteed onion and bell pepper and focused primarily on the interplay of pimenton and cumin. It was so rad.

And you really could make the whole thing in ten minutes. Add more veggies to the meat and you've got a balanced meal, assuming that phrase still means anything. Use non-wheat noodles such as mung bean, rice, or buckwheat and it's that much more interesting.

This really is the fastest, most filling and flavorful lunch (or dinner) I can think of.

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Recipe: Not Beefaroni

1 package mung bean noodles (or rice noodles, buckwheat, udon, spaghetti, etc.)
1 lb organic, sustainably raised meat (pork, beef, turkey, beefalo...)
1 onion
sesame oil
soy sauce
spices!

1. Boil the noodles until katame ni yuderu. Rinse and toss with oil.

1. Sautee the onion until translucent.

2. Add the meat to the same pan and cook until brown and slightly crispy.

3. Add the soy sauce and spices (such as pimenton and cumin).

4. Add the sesame oil.

5. Top the noodles with the meat.

The Reign of Gorditas Continues

Now just because the article isn't still up on the Globe's main food page, it doesn't mean that I'm not still cooking and eating tons of gorditas ala Chole Adams.

In fact, they're the most satisfying vegetarian - vegan, even - meal I can remember eating in a long time if not ever. Must be the starch combo of the beans and cornmeal. Or maybe it's all the fat? Either way, they're one of those perfect, transitional early Fall foods. A hearty base of corn and beans, and an end-of-summer topping of raw tomato, onion, and cilantro.

For the recipe, follow the link from the article, with two additional notes. Your choice of refried beans can really make or break the dish. I recommend taking cooked (canned works) beans and blending with a little water, some sauteed onion, garlic and ***pimenton***. Also, it's a lot easier to just dress the top of the gordita rather than slicing and stuffing it.

If you really want to be like me, you can also garnish with lemon (cucumbers) and lime, as pictured above.

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Recipe: Gorditas de Chole

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2009/09/09/gorditas_recipe/

Not Too Chicken to Eat Chicken of the Woods

I was recently poking around in the woods behind my house (by which I mean my rented apartment) with my dog, and as always, I had one eye out for wild edibles. But unlike most of our forays, this time I returned home with a few pounds of serious food tucked under my arm. As you can see from the photo above, it was a mushroom.

A chicken of the woods, aka sulfur shelf mushroom, as I've previously covered here.

Though I am interested in foraging, I am not at all interested in eating a mushroom that might kill me. Luckily the c.o.t.w. is no such mushroom. Known as a "beginner fungi," it has no poisonous counterparts and is ridiculously easy to spot. It's like it wants us to eat it.



And the feeling is mutual.



We made a risotto with little else but the wild fungi for flavor, and also sautéed a few hunks of it in butter and pan drippings from a chicken not of the woods. These were absolutely outstanding.



The sulfur shelf ain't no slimy, watery tasteless white button. It's a wild mushroom, and it tastes like it. The 'shroom is meaty in both texture and flavor, hence the name (I think). In fact I can't recall any other vegetarian foodstuff with a chew so downright steak-like.

Of course the actual chicken pan drippings accentuated the fungi's umami, but it worked with what was already there. As the drippings reduced, the mushroom took on a glaze and the edges began to candy. Little bits of hand-torn fresh rosemary didn't hurt either.

I don't eat every wild edible I find in the woods behind my house, largely because of concerns for the health of the soil. Though the woods are beautiful, they're low and surrounded by suburbia, and I imagine that much of the pesticide from my neighbor's lawns and the oil from our cars all finds its way down there. There's a beautiful elder growing out of the middle of a stream at the nadir, and at present it's full of berries, and I love elderberries, but I don't love lead.

But when I saw the chicken of the woods, I couldn't resist. After all, it wanted me to eat it.

Late Night

The only thing worse than being woken up at 3am by raccoons scattering your trash is then knocking a glass bowl of compost-ready noodles down the stairs, and then cutting your finger picking up the pieces.

News Flash: Filet-o-Fish Not Sustainable

I can't say that I'm shocked that the tasteless fish served in anonymous, fried patties by McDonald's, Denny's, and Long John Silvers is not being harvested sustainably:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/science/10fish.html?_r=1&no_interstitial

Article In Today's Globe

See here for my article and photos in today's Globe.

The subject: great Mexican food very close to Canada. Click on the recipe link to see the second photo. And the recipe.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2009/09/09/chole_adams_nearly_always_sells_out_her_mexican_food_at_vermont_farmers_markets/

Ceci N'est Pas Une Orange Juice

To round out a brunch I made for visiting family over the weekend, I decided to buy orange juice. When I took a sip, I was surprised how much like orange juice it tasted, given the fact that orange juice isn't really orange juice any more.

I first had this realization thanks to my acupuncturist's blog, which referenced the book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice. This excerpt from an interview with the author is what made me realize just how different the orange juice on the shelf is from what we think of as orange juice:

"The leading producers of “not from concentrate” (a.k.a. pasteurized) orange juice keep their juice in million-gallon aseptic storage tanks to ensure a year-round supply. Juice stored this way has to be stripped of oxygen, a process known as de-aeration, so it doesn’t oxidize in the tanks. When the juice is stripped of oxygen, it is also stripped of flavour-providing chemicals … If you were to try the juice coming out of the tanks, it would taste like sugar water. Juice companies therefore hire flavour and fragrance companies, the same ones that make popular perfumes and colognes, to fabricate flavour packs to add back to their product to make it taste like orange juice."

And that goes for the stuff they're still allowed to call not from concentrate, or worse, grove-style or whatever the latest, homiest qualifier is (smooshed by grammy and grampy?).

So it was surprising that the orange juice I bought at the grocery store still tasted more or less like what I think orange juice tastes like. Kudos, flavour and fragrance companies.

Nice Try

An anonymous commenter responded to my post on acai, saying only "acai is great food." The comment was then signed with a link to something called "weight loss diet pills."

I don't which the internet is better for: food blogging or hucksterism.

Lobster Bolognese, Revealed

I'm sure you all think about The Best Thing I've Had All Year as much as I do, but you may not have realized that we received the recipe for it in a comment.

I'm also sure that you all comb through the comments as obsessively as I do, but just in case this one slipped past you, I thought I'd showcase it here. Thanks to Rick Rodgers for sending it along. He wrote:

This recipe was popularized by Alfred Portale at Gotham Bar and Grill in NYC, and is in his first cookbook. You are right--cream, stock, and veggies are the ingredients. I have the recipe in my computer because I worked on the book as the recipe tester and writer.

Recipe: Fettuccine with Lobster Bolognese
makes 4 to 6 main course servings

Lobster Bolognese Sauce:

l/4 cup distilled white vinegar
3 (l to l l/4 pounds) live lobsters
2 tablespoons olive oil
l medium onion, chopped
l/2 cup chopped carrot (about l/2 medium carrot)
l/3 cup chopped celery (about l/2 small celery rib)
4 garlic cloves, sliced
5 sprigs flat-leaf parsley
5 sprigs tarragon
5 sprigs basil
l dried bay leaf
3 tablespoons tomato paste
l/4 cup Cognac or brandy
l/2 cup dry white wine
6 cups white chicken stock, or as needed
1 cup heavy cream
Coarse salt and cayenne pepper

Bring a large stockpot of 10 quarts salted water and the vinegar to a boil over high heat. In batches, if necessary, add the lobsters and cover. Cook for 5 minutes. (The lobsters will only be partially cooked.)

Drain the lobsters, place in a bowl, and set aside until cool enough to handle.

Working over a bowl to catch the juices, twist the lobster bodies away from the tails; reserve the bodies. Saving as much of the juices as possible while working, crack the lobster tails and claws. Remove the meat and cut into 3/4-inch dice. Transfer to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Coarsely chop the lobster shells.

In a large stockpot, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot, celery, garlic, and parsley sprigs and cover. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables soften, about l0 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste. Add the lobster shells and bodies and cook, stirring often, for 2 minutes. Add the cognac and reduce by half, about 2 minutes. Add the wine and reduce by half, about 3 minutes. Add the reserved juices and enough stock to barely cover the ingredients. Bring to a boil over high heat, skimming off any foam that rises to the surface. Reduce the heat to low and simmer until well-flavored, about 45 minutes.

Strain into a large bowl, pressing hard on the solids to extract as much flavor as possible, then discard the solids. (If making in advance, cool, cover, and refrigerate.)

In a large saucepan, bring the stock to a boil over high heat and reduce to l cup, about 30 minutes. Add the cream, return to a boil, and cook until the sauce thickens slightly, about 5 minutes. Taste and season carefully with salt and cayenne pepper.

Assembly:

l pound fresh fettuccine
l tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
2 teaspoons finely chopped tarragon
l0 basil leaves, cut into chiffonade
Sprigs of chervil for garnish

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the fettuccine and cook until al dente, 2 to 3 minutes. Drain and return the pasta to the pot.

If necessary, reheat the lobster sauce over low heat. Add the lobster meat and cook just to heat the lobster meat through, about 2 minutes. Stir in the parsley, tarragon, and basil. Add the warm lobster sauce to the pasta and toss well.

Serve in warmed pasta bowls, garnishing each serving with the chervil leaves.

To Eat Wheat?

You can imagine a well sculpted, deeply researched New York Times piece about the increasing numbers of those who cannot (or just think they cannot) tolerate wheat, but this isn't it. This is a baseless morning blog post.

As I've said before, when it comes to the burgeoning realm of food sensitivities, I'm torn. There's my inner Michael Ruhlman, who thinks people who don't eat everything are sissies. Then's there's the inhaler that I stopped using once I stopped using dairy.

Wheat, or gluten, is by far the fastest growing intolerant food. I'm shocked by the sheer volume of people who are giving it up. Often these tales of abstinence are accompanied by miraculous recoveries. Suddenly that chronic back pain you've had for years just disappears, all because you switched to quinoa pasta like that pictured above (with bacon, escarole, garlic and chili flakes).

Sounds fishy, doesn't it? And yet I have my own health success story with cutting out dairy, so I'm left wondering if perhaps it isn't the wheat itself that's to blame. Why would one of the oldest crops known to humanity suddenly turn on us?

Probably because we turned on it. I'm no farmer, but I know we don't grow wheat like we used to. Perhaps we've done to wheat what cell phones did to good old to human interaction.

I don't know if it's the pesticide, genetic modification, over-processing or... well, it's probably some combination of those.

Do I eat wheat? All the time. We all do, and the number of those who cannot is vastly outnumbered by those who can. And I wouldn't be surprised if those who think they can't eat wheat could eat some kinds of wheat, perhaps an heirloom variety not processed into white bread. But to be perfectly honest, I now eat less of it and feel better.


--------------------------------------------------
Recipe: Quinoa-Corn Pasta With Escarole

Ingredients: just look at the directions. The ingredients are in there.

1. Boil pasta.

2. Sautee diced bacon and chili flakes. When the bacon is crisp, add escarole and garlic.

3. Toss the pasta with the escarole, bacon, spices, and one dipper of the pasta water.

"Food"

I just made a curious discovery that I feel obliged to share. If you google image search the word "food," this is what you get:



The irony is that many of us do not consider to above to be food, but rather what Michael Pollan famously called food-like substances. In other words, corn manipulated beyond recognition.

Pollan also suggests that we not eat anything our great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. That excludes pretty much everything in the image above. Then again, great-grandma didn't know what google was either.

Which begs the question: was great-grandma better off? Hard to say, though she was certainly better at not getting obese and diabetic.

What I Ate On Or The Night Before My Birthday

-chips and guacamole
-ribs with chile de arbol
-pozole
-the best flan I've ever had
-coffee with orange rind and cinnamon
-Tres Generaciones Plata
-oats and eggs
-leftover yellow dumpling soup broth
-trail mix: almonds, raisins, coconut
-water
-coconut water
-ham, mustard and cilantro sandwiches (it's what we had)
-trail mix: peanuts and cranberries
-wild mountain cranberries
-wild blueberries
-one partridge berry
-an accidental mouthful of Sculptured Rocks creek water
-beef tongue and tendon in vinegar peanut sauce
-pork belly in garlic sauce
-Sichuan dumplings
-towel gourd with bamboo fungus
-cumin beef
-crispy salt and pepper ribs
-white rice
-lots of sake
-tea smoked duck
-dan dan noodles

Neither Tea nor Food

This morning I was jogging with Oli, the official dog of T&F. As he often does when off-leash and drunk on freedom, he was running circles around me. Literally.

At one point he darted in to nip at my heels and his rabies tag became ensnared by my shoe lace. He pulled away to free himself but instead got twisted up and landed on his back. He stared up at me as if to ask "Master, what is this cruel new magic?"

Moments later, while dashing through the woods, he flushed a deer. The only other time he'd seen one, my typically calm and quiet dog essentially flipped out. He let loose a horrible, primal sound from deep within, sort of a cross between a howl and a garbage truck going off a cliff.

That time, he was on-leash and could not pursue the creature that had bemusedly pranced away. But since then I've always been worried about him seeing another hind while unhindered.

Or to be more precise, I was worried about how many miles he would chase it and how many dangerous, Froggeresque intersections he might cross in doing so.

When he discovered the deer this morning, of course it ran off and of course he pursued. But here's the surprising part: when I called him, he came right back. My only explanation is that he did a quick calculation of how much meat he would get from that one deer compared to how much I would feed him for the rest of his life.

Clearly, my cruel, new magic worked. He trotted happily back to my side and we kept jogging without incident. Except for when he picked up a pointed, six foot long fallen sapling and galloped at me full speed, ramming it into the back of my knee.

But who who needs a patella when you've got loyalty?

Photo courtesy of Cailin, my vet tech.

The Lemon Cucumber

Like many of you out there, I grew up after the Industrial Revolution but before the Delicious Revolution. In that awkward phase of human history, which I hope is drawing to a close, there was only one kind of cucumber: The Cucumber.

I grew up in a healthy household, for the time. That meant no soda, but it also meant industrially produced produce. Even though I lived in Florida, where one could potentially eat from the garden every day of the year, we only had access to the same stuff that everyone else in the country was eating. And everyone was eating The Cucumber, which, like the County Paris, is as bland as it is handsome.

Flash forward to a world in the midst of a food revolution, sometimes delicious, sometimes not. The revolution takes many forms, from riots over rising food costs in Haiti to those locally made logs of goat cheese at your neighborhood farmers market. Though the stakes vary, these are opposite sides of the same coin. Both say, in very different ways, that the system we've been relying on is broken, and that it's time to look elsewhere.

We now live in an era in which there are many, many kinds of cucumbers. Or rather we live there/then again. Before The Cucumber was singled out for its ability to survive long truck rides and still arrive looking like a cartoon, there were many cucumbers bred for many different climates and culinary purposes.

For instance, the lemon cucumber, which is not named for its flavor but for its appearance. And though it doesn't taste like a lemon, it does taste about a bajillion times better than The Cucumber. I'm thrilled to see that heirlooms such as these are regaining popularity, and I plan to eat them all.

But wait, you say. Isn't the lemon cucumber just for limp wristed East Coast liberal elitist foodies, bloggers and food bloggers? Isn't the whole Delicious Revolution a bit "unrealistic" as Anthony Bourdain says?

No. While I now have lemon cucumbers like the one pictured at top growing in my garden, I had my first at an immigrant-run farmers market booth in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Springfield, Missouri. Now that's crop diversity.

Return From Vermmmont Raw Corn Salad

Returning from my annual two weeks teaching in VT is usually a drag. When I would come back to Somerville, I found the urban setting abrasive if not hostile. Luckily my new place of residence is much greener, but in comparison to VT, our nature somehow seems less natural.

So I was cheered to see that in my absence things had been growing back home. Oli had a short, sleek, summer coat, and despite the lack of soil, light, attention and planning, there was actually some food in the garden.

The apples had blushed.



The blackberry blossoms had transmogrified into blackberries.



And there was a cucumber...



... that went into a raw corn salad, along with some of the local sunflower oil I picked up at Pete's Greens.



In the summer I crave unadulteration more than I crave any specific ingredients. I eat less and I eat dishes made with less preparation, if you could call taking a cucumber out of the refrigerator and eating it whole a "dish" that underwent "preparation." But when I can overcome my estivation, I make a raw corn salad.

-----------------------------------------------

Recipe: Raw Corn and Cucumber Salad
(serves 2)

Note: variations are limitless.

1 cucumber
2 ears of corn (suitable for eating raw, i.e. sweet and picked that day)
Pete's Greens sunflower seed oil for dressing (or olive oil)
salt to taste

1. Dice the cucumber, keeping the peel on, unless you're a total weiner.

2. Slice the kernels from the shucked corn cobs.

3. Combine both with salt to taste and an ample drizzle of the sunflower (or olive) oil. If you got 'em, add fresh herbs or nearly anything else.

White Mountains, Blue Berries

One way to beat the summer heat in New England is to rise above it. Yesterday I left the steamy, swampy lowlands of Boston for a chilly, misty mountaintop in New Hampshire. Cardigan, to be exact.

As if the dramatic weather wasn't enough of a reward, the summit was also rife with wild blueberries.



And mountain cranberries.



Now maybe you're not supposed to pick the berries in a National Park, but it's better for everyone if you eat the fruit growing at your feet rather than stuff trucked in from Mexico.

Just leave some for the bears, and for me.

Vermmmont: My First Eggs

In case I haven't made it clear already, Vermont is a really interesting place to eat.

For instance, when visiting the homes of various campers, I was treated to the following meals: elk chili (shot in New Mexico), halibut kebobs (caught in Alaska), and homemade wontons (fried in the kitchen).

Equally impressive is the sheer bounty available in many VT backyards. Nearly every house I visited had an ample vegetable garden, plus many had sizable crops of blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and black raspberries with apples en route. Several had both meat and laying chickens, one had ducks and guinea fowl, another pigs.



One home even had its own fully stocked trout pond. Talk about a sustainable source of seafood (pondfood?): instead of overfishing and mercury poisoning, all you have worry to about is otters.

It was in one such backyard that I gathered my first eggs. Then, in an expression of gratitude, I tenderly held my first chicken.



Before then, I had only ever held a chicken tender.

Links Galore, Links Galore

I've received a few link exchange requests recently, and it's often difficult to tell which are from actual people and which are from capitalists. I'll let you figure it out:

Kalahari Tea: an eco-friendly, organic tea company that sources raw materials and products from South Africa to support the local economy. Their tea bags are made of unbleached hemp and wood chips, they contribute to the African Wildlife Foundation and are members of 1% for the Planet (which is about the environment, not milk).

The Teacup Tango: I received this tea-themed music video from a wife and husband duo who created it to win a scholarship competition. From their experience they have concluded that "Tea is awesome and there is so much more to it – whichever type you prefer – than we ever realized."

I highly recommend watching it. FYI, my favorite moment occurs at 50 seconds in.

Local Food, Thanks to the Enemy

How f'ed up is it that this Serious Eats video about a local farmer starts with a plug from Kraft?

On the one hand, the local food movement needs whatever support it can get, and if that video only exists because of cash from Kraft, it's still a net positive. On the other hand, I hope no one puts the "Kraft Lite Raspberry Vinagerette Dressing" advertised at the beginning on the veggies they buy at the greenmarket.

I do, however, like that Ed Levine uses the phrase "to grow a crop in their shoes." Isn't that what farms are for?

Vermmmont: Barely Sweet Red Currant Tart

One of the things I look forward to during my annual two week gig in VT is the Dunbar's red currant bush. Lucky for me, the fruit ripens during my stay. Also lucky for me is that the Dunbars don't really like currants, so I'm always encouraged to take as big of a haul as I want.

In the past I've never had the wherewithal to do anything but eat them out of hand, but this year I got it together to whip up a crude tart.



As I prepared it, the berry topping somehow became a black hole for sugar; the more I added, the same it tasted.

I prefer barely-sweet desserts, but even for my palate I had to keep sprinkling on the cane dust. All the while a little devil sat on my shoulder, whispering "Just dump it in! People will like it better!"

Meanwhile, the little angel that, inevitably, sat on the other shoulder, meekly suggested: " Sugar is bad for you. Maybe your friends would enjoy a horribly sour tart and better health?"

In the end, neither won, as I compromised. But the tart was perfect for me, with a challenging level of tartness yet just enough sugar to walk you through it. I made one for the Dunbars as a thank you for years of free currants, but I'm told it met with mixed results. Some of them ate it straight up, some added more sugar, and some passed on it altogether.

Angel: "Even if they didn't like it that much, at least everyone had a healthy dessert."

Devil: "That means more for us! Rrrrrrrrrah! (<-- a devil roar)."

---------------------------------------------

Etymology for Karen:

"currant" origin: Middle English "raisons of Corauntz," translating Anglo-Norman French raisins de Corauntz, meaning ‘grapes of Corinth ’ (the original source).

Hot, Hot, Hot

See here for more of my stuff (writing) in Stuff (magazine). I wrote 8 of the entries for this year's Hot 100 list, and not surprisingly, most of mine are about food. If you're a truly loyal reader, see if you can pick out my prose.

The next post will have more pretty pictures of sustainable food, I promise.

Muscadine Wine

See here for my first piece in Stuff magazine, on the conspicuous lack of Muscadine wine in Boston:

http://stuffboston.com/liquid/archive/2009/07/28/an-appalachian-appellation.aspx

Vermmmont: Wood Fired Pizza

Last night's dinner centered around flatbreads baked in the handmade, homemade clay oven pictured above.

The first course, though prepared in a less exciting cooking vessel, was even better: Turkish cucumber soup, resplendent with curry, yogurt and tomatoes and topped with fresh cilantro.



Dinner companions included hummingbirds, a nearly full moon, and my personified jealousy for the clay oven.

Quote of the Day

From a student at the camp in VT where I'm currently teaching:

"My mom once castrated a lamb with her teeth."

Vermmmont: Maple Roasted Chicken

Last night we were invited to dinner at the home of one of our campers. I was thrilled to learn that we would be having maple roasted chicken. I was even more thrilled to find out what that meant: instead of being covered in a syrupy glaze, the birds had slowly roasted in a haze of maple wood smoke.

The family serving the meal keeps a log near the barbecue for just that very purpose. When they feel like adding a touch of sweet smoke to whatever they're grilling, they simply hack off a few chips to scatter on top of charcoal.



As you can see above, the chicken skin was a deep bronze, and the meat beneath it was tender and juicy. The faintly sweet taste of smoke permeated every nook and cranny.

For dessert we were served a carrot cake garnished with local strawberries and raspberries from "around back." Why don't I live here again?

Non-Dairy Moose Tracks

One ran by outside of the camp I'm teaching at here in Craftsbury, VT. Later in the day I went down to look for tracks, which I found clearly stamped into the mud. A faint channel was visible where it had trotted through the tall grass en route to the woods.

I'd only seen one up here once before: last summer, on my plate.

Back in Vermont

I'm currently up in Craftsbury, Vermont for my annual two weeks of teaching at a Shakespeare camp. (See here for last year's posts.)

Internet access is scant, but I'll do my best to keep posting from this fascinating foodshed. Just today one of my campers told me she's been woken up each of the past few nights by the grunting of a moose.

If you think that's Vermonty, consider this. The following sentence was spoken by a mother to her children at a local natural foods coop:

"Brocoli, Arugula, stop that!"

Homemade Jam: As Easy as Pie

Homemade jam. Go ahead, think about it. The mess, the effort, the special equipment, the self righteousness. Now think again.

If you have fruit and sugar, and you do, homemade jam is at your (sticky) fingertips. You don't have to pick the berries. You don't have to hermetically seal the end product. You don't have worry about odorless, tasteless, killer bacteria.

You don't even have to be a hipster. You just have to cook a little fruit with a little sugar.

I had some strawberries that were on their way out. They weren't even local berries, just some Big Organic (not that good for the planet, but also not that bad, right?) fruit that I had lying around, getting a little fuzzy around the edges. I halved them and simmered with less sugar than you think goes into jam for less time than you think jam cooks for.

I didn't add pectin. I didn't add rosemary or anything else that doesn't belong in jam but increasingly finds its way there.

As soon as the heat and sugar permeated the fruit, my limp, squishy strawberries transformed into vivid, cartoon like fruit. They went from looking like something that you wouldn't want to eat to looking like something that you wouldn't want to eat because you'd think they'd been dyed and thickened with cornstarch.

But no. The thick, ruby red concoction was more natural than most of the girls who went to my South Florida private high school. The berries were plump and toothsome, full of seeds that popped and crunched between my teeth. The flavor was tart and fruity, just a shade sweeter than what you might pick from the vine, and nowhere near as cloying as, say, Smuckers.

It was easy. It tasted amazing. It resurrected my fruit.

-------------------------------------------

Recipe: Homemade Strawberry Jam

-strawberries that no longer look good enough to eat fresh
(about 2 cups)
-enough water to cover the bottom of the pan - no more!
-a fat pinch of unrefined sugar

1. Wash and halve the strawberries.
2. Combine all ingredients in a small pot or pan.
3. Cook until the berries are vivid and surrounded by thick syrup.
4. Cool and store in the fridge, if it lasts that long.

The Best Thing I've Had All Year

..was a lobster bolognese at the Green Street Grill last Sunday night. I simply couldn't understand how any combination of earthly ingredients could taste so good.

My guess is cream. Lots of cream. And lobster stock. Generous hunks of lobster meat, including claw, didn't hurt either.

Yet even those incredibly delicious components don't fully explain the dish's magical powers. I could combine cream, lobster and lobster stock at home, but they did something else, something I don't understand, and it left me awestruck. Probably, it was butter.

Go there just to eat it.

Buffalo Shepherd's Pie

Not only is this dish good in and of itself, but it's also a superior recreation of a childhood comfort food. Without lunch lady hairs.

Even though I secretly liked the version slopped onto my lunch tray as a school boy, this shepherd's pie is a vast improvement, with buffalo meat instead of beef (leaner, hipper), smoked paprika, fresh sage and a touch of cumin. Instead of the classic trinity of frozen peas, frozen carrots and canned corn, we use whatever fresh veggies we have around. Last time our friends brought over some of the surplus bounty of their CSA, including turnips and chard, which worked great.

I also appreciate the irony of a shepherd's pie made from buffalo, since buffalo can't actually be shepherded. The only downside is that while it's still hot, using the term "pie" is really being generous. Even though it doesn't taste like slop, it still kind of looks like slop.

But when you have the leftovers the next day, as you invariably do because you make an entire skillet's worth, because it looks gorgeous and rustic to do so, that slop sets into distinct strata that can easily be sliced into a clean, self-supported wedge.

While eating one such pie during last night's dinner, conversation turned to talk of sprouting grains. Our guests, an enterprising young family that bakes their own bread and makes their own cheese, are in the habit of sprouting everything from grains to nuts. That's a food wagon I haven't boarded yet, largely because of the extra effort required.

That said, when I looked in the dog's water dish this morning, I noticed that two buckwheat grains had accidentally fallen in and sprouted. Guess it's not that hard after all.



Now if only buffalo shepherd's pie appeared so spontaneously.

-------------------------------------

Recipe: Buffalo Shepherd's Pie

1 lb ground buffalo (it goes a long way, 6-8 servings)
8 potatoes
chopped seasonal vegetables
pimenton (smoked paprika)
fresh sage (about a handful)
cumin
salt

1. Make mashed potatoes.

2. Brown the buffalo meat in an iron skillet with a healthy dash of pimenton and slightly less cumin.

3. Layer the chopped veggies and chopped sage on top of the meat, sweating anything that would produce a lot of water first (i.e. chard or spinach).

4. Top with the mashed potatoes. Top the mashed potatoes with a heavy sprinkling of pimenton and a drizzle of olive oil (and cheese, if that's your thing).

5. Bake at 400 until it begins to brown, then slide under the broiler to finish the job.

6. Serve as is or let set in the fridge over night for pretty slices.

Ghana Fishin'

This morning's The World made the obvious link between the G8's proposal to fund agriculture in nations like Ghana and the old "teach a (hu)man to fish" saying.

I just want to go on record saying that I too think it's better to build roads that will help distribute food rather than letting it rot in the fields and then feeding Africans stuff that we grew. I too think it makes more sense to enable farmers to produce their own food rather than continuing to send aid after the fact (which we'll still need to keep doing, at least for a while).

This is that powerful part of the local food movement that is all too often obscured by obnoxious foodies like myself going gaga over scapes or black raspberries. Here eating locally is associated with stuffing yourself with goat cheese, but in other parts of the world it means being able to feed yourself at all.

Big Agriculture stole the word organic, they're working on co-opting "local," and soon Super Walmarts will probably have a little sticker that denotes (alleged) sustainability. But real sustainability is, not to be too dramatic, the key to our survival as a species, and local food is a big part of it.

So the next time you hear a foodie holding court about what they made from their most recent CSA pick-up, try this mental exercise: replace phrases like "ramp tartlets" with "food security."

Personally, I'm looking forward to the first issue of Edible Accra.

Today's Lunch

Eating while working from home is often a double edged sword. On the one hand, you can make whatever you want. On the other, that never happens.

I usually wait too long to eat or don't have anything on hand that I actually want. In both cases, I consume whatever I first set eyes on, and it's never ideal (though I have developed a soft spot for pasta with canned sardines).

But today I had the presence of mind - and the ingredients - to whip up a perfectly acceptable, well timed meal. I browned and then simmered chicken thighs with artichoke hearts and had one with salad and a white bean dip laced with za'atar. The latter might sound fancy, but the only faster starch I can think of is a slice of bread. Also, I had a slice of bread.

The salad consisted of local greens and even more local, accidental wild edibles harvested/weeded from the kitchen garden. As far as I'm concerned, romaine, purslane, and lamb's quarters are just as good a combo as walnuts, pears and gorgonzola. You know, that salad.

It was fast, it was easy, and it was good. The only downside is that I'm not eating it again right this second.

I Scream You Scream, We All Scream for Pee

If you're a reindeer, that is. See for yourself here. It's one of many impressive pics from Globe photographer Essdras Suarez, whose work accompanied my last article.

I'd been meaning to post some of his stuff, but for copyright reasons I think you have to go check it out yourself. You can see more, including his food photography, here:

http://www.essdrasmsuarez.com/phocont.html

The Best Tisane I've Ever Had

Expletives and herbal tea don't often go together, but I'm pretty sure I muttered one after taking a sip of this after last night's dinner. Made from freshly plucked anise hyssop and cilantro flowers, it was the best tisane I've ever had.

For those who poo-poo herbal tea in favor of true tea, know that equally complex flavors are possible from plants besides camellia sinensis. I didn't fully believe it myself, but this tea was the most powerfully flavorful thing I've put in my mouth this year.

Like garlic scapes, the flowers of herbs are a double boon. A culinary asset on their own, removing them also make the parts of the plant that you really want to eat (the bulb of the garlic and the leaves of the herb) more productive. The flowers of the anise hyssop were a shade of purple that would look at home in a Monet, but once hit by the hot water they became pale. I took comfort in knowing that the purple was now somewhere in the liquor, and that I drank a color.

The hyssop is incredibly sweet and of course very licorice like, and the cilantro flowers are, unsurprisingly, a very floral incarnation of the already cool and lovely cilantro. Together the two were sweet and deeply aromatic with just a hint of savory, no stronger than an association.

We spend so much time comparing the flavors of tea and wine to other things like flowers and herbs. So why not go straight to the source and just drink the flowers and herbs?

Or, as a friend of mine one said, if people want things to sell like hotcakes, why not just sell hotcakes?

Bacon, Broccoli, Bean Noodles

The weather is so wet, so damp and clammy, that if we want to be warm and dry we must bypass the sky and look to food. For lunch yesterday, I made my artificial sun of bacon.

I was hungry. I looked in the fridge. These stories usually don't end well, but this was a delicious exception.

I found three strips of bacon. I found a head of broccoli. In the pantry I unearthed a package of my favorite dry noodles: Amoy Bean Strips. I put them together and I had lunch. Great lunch.

Using the meat-as-a-seasoning approach, I snipped the bacon into the kind of tiny rectangles you'll find in non-vegetarian veggie dishes at some Chinese restaurants. I browned it in a skillet, adding diced onion about halfway through. Meanwhile, the noodles boiled and the broccoli steamed. Of course I could have cooked the broccoli with the bacon, but it can be a much cleaner operation to assemble the parts separately and then sauce together.

When everything was cooked to my liking (crispy bacon, translucent and slightly brown onions, bright green broccoli), I tossed it all with a splash of sesame oil and a drip of soy sauce. And of course the ample fat surrendered by the bacon as it gently sizzled.

It wasn't warm outside, but it was nice and warm inside (my stomach).

On Acai

See here for Adam Stark's latest dispatch, this time tackling the dubious qualities of the so-called "superfood" acai.

Personally, I think all foods are super, and my suspicion is always aroused when any one is singled out as a magic bullet. I never knew precisely why acai was bullsh*t, and am glad for Adam's thorough debunking.

As Michael Pollan so succinctly put it, "Avoid foods that make health claims." After all, broccoli doesn't advertise, except in this brilliant Onion article.

Again, you can read the acai piece here and an excerpt here:

Q: But I don’t care about science – it’s all sponsored by the fascist military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex, anyways! What matters to me is the shamanic healing wisdom of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin. Don’t they use açaí for, like, everything down there?

A: Actually, they mostly use it for breakfast. Sort of like we use grapefruit.

A Local, Vegan, Wacky Wedding

I spent this past weekend up in Maine at a wedding which revolved largely around food, as all festivities should. The bride is vegan, the groom vegetarian, and both are deeply committed to the local agricultural scene and to the DIY lifestyle in general. Which is why their cake was topped with shrinky dinks of themselves.



All of the bubbly, and there was a lot of it, was a ginger champagne brewed and bottled by the bridegroom and spray-paint stenciled by the groom's sister and brother-in-law.



Other menu items made by the couple included seitan (for 120), kimchee and sauerkraut made with local produce (I love the idea of Maine kimchee), a bowl of super garlicky hummus the size of a small child, and momos for all. For those who didn't want ginger champagne, they had also home brewed IPA, hefeweizen and ginger beer, which went into many a dark and stormy.



Also, all guests were required to wear fake mustaches like the one seen here on the groom's finger.

The wedding was a celebration of both love and local produce. Not only did they feed everyone with sustainably grown ingredients, but they did so creatively and colorfully. So I was struck by the contrast between that experience and this comment left on my last blog post:

"Good grief, your ideological crap about local produce has been debunked many times over and you are still on about it. Get a grip, retard."

Clearly, the anonymous author of the statement above has never been plied with locally made ginger champagne and kimchee. Also, they're stupid.

Butterwhat?

I bought this squash at my local "normal" grocery store, a Stop & Shop. I don't normally shop at chain groceries, but I also don't not shop at them.

Of course my favorite places to acquire food are farmers markets, CSA's, natural foods shops, my garden, and the woods. But I sometimes shop at supermarkets if for no other reason than to experience food like most Americans do. I like lemon cucumbers as much as the next foodie, but I'm never going to be too high on my food horse to avoid grocery stores. Sure they're doing horrible things to the world, but you have to recognize that just having the option of shopping at one makes you an incredibly, incredibly privileged global citizen.

Also, supermarkets yield quirky food items like the squash pictured above. I'd bought it to make butternut crepes, a truly divine dish that depends heavily on first browning the squash and then adding whole, fresh leaves of sage towards the end (quick eco-thical analyses: good that it's not meat, bad that it's not sustainable, local, seasonal, etc.). But I had to pause when I noticed the sticker.

The variety is Waltham, also the name of a town just a few miles from where I'm currently typing. But the place of origin is La Paz, Honduras, which is about 4,000 miles off. A brief internet search tells me that the squash is native to Mexico but by 5,000 years ago was being cultivated by the Incas in what is now South America.

At last, after a long, rich relationship with humanity that spans continents and thousands of years, the butternut has come to its final resting place: a nauseatingly lit supermarket shelf in the 'burbs.

So thank you, Stop & Shop. I never would have had that moment of malaise while picking a strawberry from my garden.

Quote of the Day

"The ever burning climate will not ignore the carbon emitted from fresh figs flown into Boston because you recycle."

From the latest Lionette's newsletter.

Quote of the Day

"You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese or Mongolian barbecue, but you can't eat indigenous foods native to the Americas."

From Loretta Barrett Oden, in an excellent NYT article from '05. And if you do want to eat those indigenous foods, you can always check the Native Tech guide in the Resources section at right.

Cape Cod Grub

I had two excellent eating experiences on a recent trip to Cape Cod. The first was the soup pictured above, made with tons of mushrooms, a few handfuls of wild greens and a splash of goat milk.

In case you can't tell, the soup was entirely the product of necessity. But by just using what we had on hand I managed to produce a vast quantity, and it was a real crowd-pleaser to boot. I started by browning onions and garlic and then sweating all of the stems. With salt and water, these cooked for quite a while longer, yielding a hasty stock. I then added more water, the sliced caps, and some greens and herbs that happened to be growing around the property where we were staying. These included sheep sorrel, garlic mustard, and feral oregano.

It was even vegan until I added a few cups of the goat milk at the end, which made the broth almost bisquey and gave it the slightest twang. We slurped mugful after mugful all day, even once it had gone cold.

The second excellent eating experience occurred when I was asked to pitch some spent lobster shells off the dock. I had arrived too late to actually eat the lobster, but I picked a meal's worth of meat off the carapaces. It was dark, so I couldn't very easily tell coral from tomalley, but it was divine. Someone even left me a claw!

Squatting on a dock in the dark and sucking second hand lobster gook out of shells that were supposed to be thrown away may not be for everyone, but I guess that's what makes me a gourmet.

So Good, There Must Be A Name For It In French

Sometimes when I hit upon a great new dish, I think "I've done it!" Other times I think "This is so good, the French must have already done it." The chicken leg pictured above fell into the latter category.

I usually buy chicken whole, but sometimes I want less than a whole chicken in less than the time it takes to cook a whole chicken. When this happens, I carve off a raw hunk of bird to cook immediately, and later, when I roast the rest of it, it appears as though there has been some sort of accident.

This time, I sawed off a drumstick, which I browned in olive oil. I then added about a cup of stock, several whole peppercorns, and sliced garlic. I covered and simmered, and once the meat was tender, I reduced the remaining liquid and poured it on top of the leg.

The meat had that supple moisture that only cooking in liquid can provide and the stock cooked down to a thick, chickeny sauce made all the more flavorful by the browning. And while cooking with stock might sound a little involved, the whole thing took about twenty minutes, also known as the time it took to chop and steam a few sweet potatoes (see background of photo). That and the leg was lunch.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to cook chicken like so, but I'm as excited about the dish as though I were.

-------------------------------------------------

Recipe: Hasty, Seemingly French Chicken

1 drumstick or thigh per person
1 cup chicken stock
1 tsp whole peppercorns
3 cloves garlic
salt to taste
olive oil

1. Brown the chicken in the olive oil.

2. Add the stock, garlic, and peppercorns.

3. Cover, simmer until tender (about 15 minutes).

4. Remove the chicken and reduce the remaining liquid to the consistency of maple syrup.

5. Pour the sauce over the meat and garnish with the peppercorns and garlic. Serve alongside steamed sweet potatoes.

6. Exclaim in delight using whatever French you know.

7. Explain to your girlfriend why the raw chicken in the fridge is missing a piece.

Quote of the Day

A sobering thought from Mark Bittman's latest article on fish:

"It takes three pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon."

The Return of Local Fruit

In New England we're now safely into strawberry season, and I know this because I've been eating a few out of the garden every day. Finally, we can all stop pretending that rhubarb is fruit.

In this part of the world, the strawberry heralds the return of fresh, local fruit and produce in general. Some of us do eat locally grown fruit throughout the winter, thanks to canning, drying, freezing and stockpiling apples, but there's nothing like the taste of some fructose picked at its peak.



The rest of my meager but satisfying kitchen garden is also coming along. The old fence we filled with our landlord's (horses') manure has held up well, and we've got two of the beds pictured above. To the strawberries, sorrel and garlic that survived the winter, we've added cilantro, spinach, lemon cucumbers, broccoli, broccoli rabe, zephyr squash, arugula and romaine. There are a few spaces left that I'd love to fill with ground cherries or tomatillos.



We've also added several herbs on the notion that perennial herbs in containers are the most non-committal form of kitchen gardening. These include anise hyssop, lemon thyme, lavender, sage, rosemary, and eucalyptus. I look forward to making a tisane from one leaf of each.

There are also a handful of wild edibles around the yard that I plan to start chowing down on in earnest as soon as I test to make sure that the soil isn't too leaden. The most exciting of these are the blackberries that each of these white blossoms will hopefully turn into.



I think of gardening as an extremely low stakes game of chance with an incredibly high payoff (if something that is low stakes can also have a high payoff). The worst case scenario is that you lose a few bucks while still having gotten exercise, time outside, and that ineffable sense of joy that comes from planting something you, or rabbits and squirrels, can eat.

If You Watch One Slideshow of People Tumbling Down a Hill For Cheese...

...then watch this one:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/05/coopers_hill_cheeserolling.html?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed1

Note the participant who had to be carried away in a stretcher.

Monochromatic Breakfast

In looking through my latest batch of photos I was surprised to see that I'd recently had two very different but very monochromatic breakfasts.

The first was a smoothie, pictured above. My standard blend is one banana, sometimes frozen, sometimes not, unsweetened soy milk, peanut butter, and a scoop of some weird, green powder that I got for free.

I've been drinking one every morning for about a month now, but had never realized just how similar the color was to some of my plates. The smoothie nearly disappeared when placed atop one.

The second monochromatic breakfast featured ground buffalo meat on teff, the Ethiopian grain often grown in Idaho.



Two breakfasts, both alike in dignity, and color.

Caveat Ramps

I'm glad that more and more people are eating fiddleheads and ramps, and thereby realizing that not all food comes from supermarkets. But fiddleheads and ramps may not be glad that people are eating more fiddleheads and ramps.

I'm an advocate of using (by which I mean eating) nature in order to appreciate it, hence my fascination with wild edibles. However, different plants require different harvesting techniques to ensure sustainability.

For instance, picking an apple doesn't have much of an impact on the plant, but uprooting the tree does, and essentially that's what happens when you, or whoever you pay to do the do the dirty work for you, harvests a ramp. As this article from the Globe and Mail says, "eating a nice sized bulb could be the equivalent of dining on an old-growth cedar, since a bulb could be 18 to 20 years old."

Which isn't to say that people shouldn't eat ramps - they should - they just shouldn't eat all the ramps. Let's not have another cod here.

Leftover Pizza Dough Rolls

This is going to be the kind of post that professional chefs hate.

On Saturday I woke up and read a few pages from MKR's "Cross Creek." I was in the middle of the chapter about what she ate while homesteading in rural Florida, which of course was the one I liked best. Here's the part that I read:

"My most successful Dutch oven rolls were prepared in the middle of the St. John's River... I brought out my bowl of dough, my extra flour, my butter and my Dutch oven from under a seat in the rowboat, and while spray from the wind-swept river dashed into my face, I mixed the dough in the bowl in my lap, shaped my rolls and placed them tenderly in the Dutch oven. I put the oven far forward where the late afternoon sun would rest on the lid, and by the time we reached Salt Springs Run and the camp fire was built, the rolls had risen and were ready for baking. They had never been so delicious. Supper was superb, and the fresh-caught bass white and sweet and firm, the coffee strong and good as it can only be in the open."

Of course, as you do now, I wanted rolls. Fortunately, Elise had realized just the night before how easy it is to make knotted rolls from scraps of pizza dough. (I'm guessing this is why such rolls are always on hand at pizzerias.) So lucky for me, moments after reading the Rawlings' passage, I was nose-deep in a hot roll.

The fact that you can make rolls from pizza dough is probably excruciatingly obvious to any real chef, which is why he or she might see this post as nothing more than the amateurish drivel of a naive foodie.

But I'm glad that I don't know everything there is to know about food. That way, even simple things like pizza dough rolls come as a total surprise. My kitchen might therefore be a fool's paradise, but it's still paradise. Or it would be if Elise also figured out how to turn leftover pizza dough into fresh-caught, white and sweet and firm bass.

Cheese Wheeze

A word on food as it relates to health. Specifically, my health.

These days there's plenty of skepticism about picky eaters disguising their preferences as allergies or the even less convincing "food sensitivities." But I've learned from personal experience that these distinctions are to be taken seriously.

Early this year, I dragged myself to an allergist for help with chronic congestion and wheezing that had become nothing short of scary. Elise's birth mother died from asthma, and so I take having trouble breathing very, very seriously. The allergist told me that there was nothing about my lifestyle or environment that was worth the money or effort to change, and that I needed only to use an inhaler or nasal spray when things got bad. Since they were bad every day, I started doing so regularly.

The drugs were shockingly effective, but I didn't want to be on them for the rest of my life and knew that there was more to the story. I made an appointment with a local acupuncturist/nutritionist to see if I could get to the root of the matter. That root turned out to be dairy.

The acupuncturist, who I now see regularly, suggested that I might have a food sensitivity to dairy. I was doubtful, especially because I didn't think that I ate that much dairy, but decided to see what would happen if I experimentally cut it out.

This is no exaggeration. Within days, I felt as though a weight had been lifted. I completely stopped wheezing, and the nasal congestion that I had come to accept simply as part of being Jewish completely disappeared for the first time in my adult life. Now, in my new, quasi-vegan life, I never use the inhaler and always breathe clearly. No cheese, no wheeze.

Was it because I have a unique sensitivity, or would every adult do better if they cut out the white stuff? Is it genetics, and if I were born a strapping, Swiss goatherd I could eat milk for three meals a day? Is the problem that I was raised on pasteurized milk and so I have an f'ed up immune system? I don't know and I don't care. All I know is that I'm breathing as clearly as a wind tunnel, and I'm not interesting in doing anything to mess it up.

And now, a shameless plug for my acupuncturist. The guy is really, really good (as is his wife, who practices in the same office). Go to him:

George Mandler
Assabet Valley Natural Health
32 Powder Mill Rd, Maynard, MA 01754
978-461-2001 (office)
617-913-5970 (cell)

Image courtesy of Just Clean Fun.

Write About Tea!

I received a request from the blog Tea Pages for original essays about tea, to be featured in an upcoming anthology. If you'd like to submit, see here:

http://teamemoriesbook.googlepages.com/

Stone Tea

Some people dream of owning a house on the beach, but I've always aspired to throwing a rock into a fire and then using it to boil water.

Last weekend, I achieved that lofty goal while camping on the Cape for Elise's birthday (we saw a seal!). Right on cue, heavy mist rolled in as soon as we crossed the Sagamore, and a roaring campfire did wonders to lift our spirits and dry our clothing.

I had a bit of a sore throat and, desperately wanting a cup of tea, I missed the creature comforts of a home kitchen. But then I realized that I had everything I needed right around me. I filled a steel travel mug with freshly snipped pine needles and water, then tossed a walnut sized stone into the blaze.

After about ten minutes, I removed it with a spoon, still glowing, and plopped it into the mug. The water immediately began to boil with fine bubbles reminiscent of a Guinness, which you can see if you look carefully at the above photo. For a strainer, I used my teeth.

The vitamin C-rich pine tea soothed my throat, and I was proud of having made my dreams of a cuppa come so thoroughly true. From now on, anytime I have a fire, there's going to be a stone in it and some tea in my future.

So it wasn't oranges with rosemary and sugar, but it still hit the spot.

Quote of the Day

From a wikipedia entry on biodynamic wine:

"Preparing a vineyard for biodynamic grape growing consists of several preparations... Preparation 505: Oak bark fermented in the skull of a domestic animal is applied to the compost."

I'm sure you can taste the difference.

The Worst Tea I've Ever Had, By Far

My apologies: I had no intention of leaving "Meat Thing" up for a week, but after a nasty head cold and some technical difficulties (hence there being no photo with this post), I'm back in the blogging saddle. And what better way to kick things off than with a tale of some truly terrible tea.

I was delighted when I recently received a gift of loose, black tea labeled Fahari Ya from a friend who had lived and taught in Kenya. But when I took a sip, I wished customs had mistaken the tea for drugs and that my friend had been incarcerated when trying to reenter to the country. That way I never would have drunk the stuff.

It was, by far, the worst tea I've ever had. Hands down. I'd take a stryofoam cup of Lipton brewed with hot water from a gas station that tastes like bad coffee over it any day. Bitter to the point of being acrid, astringent to the point of being caustic, I couldn't even swallow it.

Thinking that perhaps this was an acquired taste, I cleansed my palate, broadened my horizons, and took another sip. My gag reflex didn't go off as bad as the time that putty starting running down the back of my throat when my orthodontist took a mold of my teeth at age thirteen, but it was a close second.

I tried different brewing temperatures and various steeping lengths. No cigar. (Though tea made from a cigar would probably have been more palatable).

The last thing Kenya needs is for me to dis its tea, but I just can't help it. Maybe the lingering head cold is making me bitter, though I'm nowhere near as bitter as the tea. In fact, rather than even calling it tea, I'm going to lump the stuff with ipecac in the realm of emetics.

Don't drink it.

Meat Thing

Inspired by Melissa Clark's piece in the Times a few weeks back, I decided to make some free-form sausages. Or rather I continued to make highly flavored mounds of ground meat like always, but now thought of them as sausages.

I went with the Merguez or cigar shape, though it might be compared to something else by a middle schooler. Using ground beef from Codman, I mixed it with almost equal parts onion, plus salt, pepper, and loads of pimenton. We were going to grill them over wood, so the smoked paprika might have seemed redundant. But who doesn't want meat to taste smokier?

It worked. They were so good.

Healthy Soul Food

See here for my latest piece in the Globe, on the new wave of healthy eating in Boston's African-American communities.

One of the most interesting things about the movement is that, while there's a lot of new energy around these issues, it isn't coming from nowhere. Of course I couldn't tell the whole story in 800 words, so here's a peak at some of the historical context that didn't quite fit. Special thanks to cultural historian Fred Opie for his help.

Morris and other advocates of improving African American cuisine are part of a legacy largely born out of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's and 70's. One of the most well known participants of that era is comedian and activist Dick Gregory, who is still active today and whose feelings on un-healthy soul food are quite clear and quite negative.

In his book "Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' With Mother Nature," he wrote: "I personally would say that the quickest way to wipe out a people is to put them on a soul food diet."

Gregory was famous for promoting awareness about nutrition and hunger by running daily marathons while consuming nothing but water, juice and a personalized kelp based supplement blend he dubbed "Formula X."

Faith-based sources for nutritional reform include the food laws of Rastafarianism known as Ital (from "vital") and the dietary guidance of the Nation of Islam, whose former leader Elijah Muhammad wrote a two-volume series titled "How to Eat to Live." The effects of such rhetoric are still felt today. In the hip-hop community, rappers such as Busta Rhymes and Gift of Gab have often written on the topic of avoiding pork: "fly cuisine food poisoned cause you eatin' the swine" (Rhymes).

Inspired by figures such as Gregory, whom Opie dubs "food rebels," many African Americans have begun to regard what they thought was their traditional cuisine with skepticism. In "Hog and Hominy," Opie references a 1981 Black Collegian article saying African Americans believed they were eating "native food, but it is nothing more than slave food. Add to this slave food the chemicalized, refined, sugary, fast, convenience foods of our modern society and you have quite a deadly combination."

According to Opie, the African American diet hit its low point not during slavery but with the highly processed foods available today.

Again, the article: http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2009/05/13/rediscovering_and_reinventing_food_for_the_soul/

The Romertopf: Does It Actually Do Anything?

I love the concept of the Romertopf: a moisture-promoting clay baking vessel that you soak in water and then start in a cold oven. Despite these idiosyncrasies, I'm not sure that using one is that different from not using one.

I'm babysitting a Romertopf for some friends who don't want to move with it (imagine it bouncing on the middle seat of a U-Haul), so I recently gave it a whirl with a roasted chicken, pictured above. Ever since reading a Cook's Illustrated article about poulette en cocotte, I've been dying to sacrifice crispy skin for a new level of juiciness and flavor, and it seemed like a perfect time to do so.

But let's be honest. No chicken I ever make will surpass bird I got from Lionette's and then roasted, uncovered, in a good old fashioned iron skillet. When it comes to roasting chicken, I peaked at age 28, and I'm okay with that.

However, I only tried the Romertopf once, so perhaps I haven't given it a fair shake. And there are a few things that I really like about it, even if it didn't blow my mind on that single occasion. One is that, because it's made from clay rather than metal, it's in keeping with the Rastafarian food laws known as Ital. The other is this recommendation from the 'topf website:

"Workout with your favorite celebrity, play with the kids, or soak in the tub for the 45 minutes to an hour the Romertopf needs to cook your meal to perfection."

Maybe that's what I did wrong.

Wine and Food?

As you'll notice, the beverage in title of this blog is not the one most commonly associated with fine food.

Largely it's that I'm too poor for the pour. I recognize that wine expresses so much of what I love about things I can put in my mouth: slowness, tradition, regionality... But I can rarely bring myself to fork over the cost of a day's worth of food for a single bottle of wine. (One of the reasons I'm draw to homebrew t'ej, pictured at top.)

But Eric Asimov's article in this week's NYT food section made me think twice. Consider the following:

"...in my scattered tastings of 2007 Chablis here at home, mostly straightforward village-level Chablis at that, I’ve found the sort of beautifully etched wines that can send even the most unimpressionable Chablis lover floating up among aromas and images of oyster shells, crushed rocks, limestone and chalk."

He continues:

"With its pale yellow color, bordering on green, and its chalky aromas, the Servin brings to mind images of earth — white earth — the sort of limestone soils and fossilized oyster beds found in the best Chablis plots."

Chalk? Limestone? Oyster shells? It makes my teeth hurt. I want it.

Quote of the Day

From a recent NYT article on inventing new pieces of meat:

"In one tenderness test, researchers cooked muscles to medium, punched out half-inch plugs of meat and set them in a machine that measures the force it takes to shear them in half. Promising cuts were given names like the Sierra, the Western Griller and the Petite Tender."

Leftover Braising Liquid Flatbread

After braising two of the now dubiously cool Niman Ranch lamb shanks, I found myself staring into the pool of leftover liquid, thinking "now what?"

We served the shanks on the bone, in the center of the table, with in-apartment tortillas to cradle the hand-torn meat. The lamb was great, but so much of its umph was left behind in the juices it had cooked in, and there was only so much of it (lots) that we could spoon over our meat.

As I gazed into the bowl of orange juice, fennel seeds, onion stock, whole peppercorns, garlic cloves, and lamb fat, I suddenly had a vision of incredibly flavorful flatbread.



I made Bittman's socca, a staple in my kitchen, but instead of water I used the rich slurry described above. The lamby liquid worked perfectly with the slightly sweet chickpea flour, and the flatbread/pancakes were studded with mashed potato-soft chunks of garlic and onion. My test batch was so good that I made a whole stack of them for company the next night, simply mixing the braising liquid with the chickpea flour and pan frying on the range.

I'm thrilled to have found yet another way to close the kitchen loop. Often my braising liquid is made up of odds and ends anyway, so the thought of stretching it out into one more meal really tickles the stingy environmentalist in me. Luckily, it also appeals to my inner glutton.

And what else are you going to do, throw it out?

-----------------------------------------

Recipe: Leftover Braising Liquid Flatbread

Simply follow any of Mark Bittman's recipes for flatbread, substituting leftover braising liquid for water.

Ant Food

I don't know what's more exciting, foraging for wild chiles or getting to eating something that an ant made:

http://borderlore.com/2009/04/15/update-on-chiltepin-dispatch-from-chihuahua/

Another Feast at China Road

Last week I found myself in Syracuse and of course made time to feast at China Road. Or rather I went to Syracuse in part because I knew it would mean going to China Road.

The menu included cold spicy cucumbers, soup dumplings (the adult version of Gushers), turnip cakes (pictured above, though not quite as good as those at the International Buddhist Society in Cambridge - mmm!), a "sausage" hot pot, sautéed pea greens (perhaps my favorite veg), and the best ma po tofu I've ever had.

It was a sensible menu for two raging omnivores and a vegan, but it really got good when, still hungry, us omni's ordered the spare ribs with rice powder, for dessert, and ate it with our hands.

China Road was my first introduction to real Chinese food, and it is very good, but I'm amazed to now have something even better right in my own backyard: Sichuan Gourmet II in Framingham.

While Grace Garden is still the tops, the S.G.2 is so good that, weeks later, I can't stop thinking about my last meal there: two kinds of equally porky and garlicky dumplings, cold sesame noodles, dan dan noodles, yu xiang eggplant, twice cooked bacon, fresh bamboo with spicy wonder sauce (the "wonder" was Sichuan peppercorn oil), and cumin flavored dry beef with chili sauce.

Still, I love China Road and will eat there anytime I'm in the neighborhood. At the very least it's always better than the only other meal I've had in Syracuse: a horrible, fatty lasagna I once ate while waiting for a locksmith to let me back into my car.

Weighty Issues

In my class at the Boston Center for Adult Ed, my students have been tackling a different genre of food writing each session. Last week they tried their hand at the fastest and newest: blogging.

The following is the first ever blog post by Jeanine Slater, one of the class. Let her know what you think!

I used to think that healthy food couldn’t taste good too. Brown rice? Sorry, no. Steamed vegetables? Again, no.

I’m a Yankee with southern roots and I love all kinds of food, so you might say I have equal parts clam chowder and fried chicken running through my veins. In high school I joined the track team and ran 10 miles a day, played tennis, ate whatever I pleased and until I was 18 never weighed more than 110 pounds. Then I went to college. You’ve heard of the freshman 10? Try the freshman 30. So began my on-going battle with my weight.

A few years ago, with the assistance of a Health Coach, I lost 55 pounds and have continued to maintain a healthy weight. The basic formula is very simple: calories in, calories out, but of course we all know it isn’t quite that easy. Finding time to exercise and prepare healthy meals can be very challenging. To help me stay on track, I began creating lighter versions of my favorite foods using both fresh and prepared ingredients.

You’ve heard of Sandra Lee? Oh, please. I was creating semi-homemade meals long before blondie appeared on the Food Network - she just got there before I did.

But you would be amazed by what you can eat while still maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Now that Spring has arrived I am experimenting with grilled chicken & fish (thank you George Foreman!) and preparing tasty and filling salads. I rarely use recipes but have created one for the shrimp salad below. It is simple, tasty and a crowd pleaser at large or small gatherings. Feel free to use the reduced calorie dressings or herbs of your choice

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Recipe: Peppery Shrimp Salad

1-2 lbs cooked or raw shrimp
1-2 fresh lemons
Herbs - Sweet basil, thyme, oregano (or whatever you have on hand)
1/4 Cup Ken’s Reduced Calorie Creamy Parmesan with Cracked Peppercorn Dressing (this is my favorite)
1/8 Cup Hellman’s Low Fat Mayonnaise (optional)
Lettuce or other greens

Step 1: If using cooked shrimp, remove tails, rinse & drain thoroughly. Proceed to step 3

Step 2: If using raw shrimp, peel and de-vein (if desired); add shrimp to a large pot of simmering water to which a few lemon slices and herbs have been added. Shrimp will immediately begin to turn pink ; stir & cook for 1-2 minutes depending on the size of the shrimp; remove 1 or 2 & taste for doneness; shrimp should be pink & firm but not mushy (undercooked) or tough (overcooked). When done, empty into a strainer and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking process.

Step 3: Drain shrimp thoroughly (pat dry with paper towels if necessary); place in a strainer and refrigerate overnight if you are not in a hurry.

Step 4: Place shrimp in a non-metal bowl & add salad dressing, mayonnaise, a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice, and herbs to taste. Refrigerate for 1-2 hours; adjust seasoning & serve on a bed of lettuce or other greens; garnish with lemon twists.

Serves 6-8.

N.E.R.D. Pretzel

This past weekend I briefly delved back into the world of the touring performer, a world I used to live in and write about here.

I accompanied one of my former touring partners, MC Mr. Napkins, to a show in which he opened for N.E.R.D., the hip-hop ensemble featuring hit machine Pharrell Williams.

On the way out of the show, I stole a bag of pretzels from Pharrell's dressing room. They tasted so much better than if I'd bought them from a gas station (something else I often did on tour).

Bok Choi and Brazil Nut Butter

Bok choi and Brazil nut butter, or "no ants, different log," is a weird snack, but a good one.

My inspiration to pair a brassica with a nut butter came from Michael Ruhlman, who confessed to eating something equally bizarre: cabbage and peanut butter sandwiches, for lunch, all the time.

Just seeing the photo of his sandwich, and I strongly recommend doing so here, caused me to rethink food more than any spherification or foam could.

I like bok choi. I like nut butters. Though they're rarely paired together (besides in a stir fry with peanut sauce - but do people even say "stir fry" anymore?), the flavors are not antagonist. If you're hesitant to try it yourself than you'll be all the more surprised at how pleasant the combo is.

The bok choi is light, wet, cool, and crispy. The nut butter thick, dry, and salty. The bok choi counteracts that infamous nut-butter-pasty-mouth-syndrome so well that you won't even find yourself wanting to wash it down.

Why bok choi and Brazil nut butter instead of cabbage and peanuter butter, as Mr. MR suggested? No other reason than the fact that I've been on a huge bok choi kick - raw, only - and will buy Whole Foods in-house bulk b.n.b anytime I find myself near or in the store. I always prefer an independent coop or farmers market over the creepily pleasant, dubiously ecological megachain, but they do have their strengths.

I eat it as a snack, but I suppose it could also make for a conversation-starting starter to a meal.

Try it, you'll like it.

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Recipe: Bok Choi and Brazil Nut Butter (or B.C. n' B.N.B.)

2 bok choi stalks
4 tbsp Brazil (or other) nut butter
1 pinch daring-do

1. Thoroughly rinse and rub two bok choi stalks free of debris, acknowledging the cruel trick of fate that the base of the stems always have dirt and sometimes have natural freckling that looks exactly like dirt.

2. Trim all but a suggestion of the greens from two stalks of bok choi. Eat them later, or if you're me, feed them to your strange dog who loves bok choi.

3. Schmear the hollows of the stalks with nut butter.


4. Congratulate yourself for having now become a molecular gastronomist.

Kill and Eat: Garlic Mustard

When I last wrote about the edible exotic invasive weed known as garlic mustard - and I know you've all been on pins and needles awaiting further commentary - I concluded that it was not as attractive to me as plain old domesticated garlic.

But why? Why didn't I want to eat something that's edible, free, and threatening the native vegetation?

Fear. That's why.

Fear of the unknown, as in "can I really eat something that you can't buy from a supermarket?" But we all know that I wasn't going to not eat the thing, and that it was just a matter of time. It was the following sentence on Wildman Steve Brill's site that finally twisted my arm:

"The flower bud resembles broccoli, a relative."

I then had the following thought sequence:

1. This stuff looks like broccoli rabe.
2. People eat broccoli rabe.
3. People eat broccoli rabe with garlic.
4. This stuff already tastes like garlic.
5. I'm going to eat this stuff.



Sautéed in olive oil, the buds were a dead ringer for rabe with a hint of garlic. It's no wonder the plant is also known as sauce-alone.

Like autumn olive and Japanese knotweed, this is one invasive plant that should be savored before being slaughtered.

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Wild Garlic Mustard With Buckwheat Soba

(serves 2)

About 10 garlic mustard flower buds
1 package buckwheat soba noodles
4 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp soy sauce

1. Pinch the buds off where the stem begins to darken. Rinse and spin.

2. Cook the noodles in boiling water under slightly tender, about 7 minutes. Drain and rinse.

3. Sauté buds in the olive oil until verdant. Add noodles and soy sauce.

4. After dinner, go back and pull up the entire plant, ensuring its destruction.

On Bitten

Monday's post on Bitten reminded me how much I enjoy reading Mark Bittman's blog posts. Sadly, his blog rarely features them anymore.

Bittman has posted several times on Bitten in the last week or so, which has been refreshing. Until recently, his role seemed similar to that of a deist creator: having set the clock in motion, he then appeared to have skipped town.

Bitten remains a captivating food blog, my favorite, but it's not always the peek inside the kitchen that produced How to Cook Everything that at first it promised to be. Which is understandable - the man is very, very busy.

Bittman often serves us as much Bittman as we can digest, leaving fans like myself satiated if not full to bursting. Every week you get a column, video, five recipes and a handful of other posts, not to mention the occasional Today Show appearance, new book, or TV show featuring Gweneth Paltrow.

The man waltzes between the bowels of professional kitchens and the sun dappled country lanes of Spain as if it were nothing. He is everywhere that pertains to food.

But if his range seems vast, it's nothing compared to depth of his accessibility. Everyone likes Mark Bittman, from serious chefs to home cooks to the little darlings of the food blogosphere. If you google the phrase "I love Mark Bittman," there are 570 results. If you google "I hate Mark Bittman," there are a scant 2.

Which is why I was so thrilled when he added blogging to his repertoire. Mark Bittman, benevolent emperor of food, was now hosting skillet-side chats. But bit by bit Bitten filled up with posts by his friends, colleagues, and readers that weren't me. At first it was novel, but then I realized how little of Bittman was left in Bitten. And how much Ed Levine there was.

A word on Ed. Ed seems like a great guy, and a stellar cook, but I find his tone to be somewhat antithetical to Bittman's you-can-do-it mantra. And they're both aware of it, with Ed referring to himself as a "maximalist," the yang to Bittman's yin.

But Bitten isn't the Minimalist column, and Ed does technically fit into the mission statement listed in the about section of the blog:

"On Bitten, he chews on food and all things connected to it."

Ed's posts fall under the "food and all things connected to it" part, though I had assumed that the "he" referred to Bittman. It all makes me wonder just who's hand is grabbing that carrot.

Bittman wants us to believe that any food, even if it's just vegetables, can be prepared at home without wreaking too much ecological or nutritional havoc. In contrast, Ed enjoys tauting readers with labor intensive, cream laden foreign delicacies, name dropping expensive restaurants he's eaten at in Europe and then mentioning how he's managed to prepare their signature dishes just as well in his own kitchen.

At first glance his posts appear to have that same can-do spirit as Bittman's, but on closer inspection one notices a sort of can't-do, nanny-nanny-boo-boo tone to his writing. Bittman is not only minimalist, but populist. Ed is not only maximalist, but elitist.

And that's part of Mark Bittman's thing. He has values (i.e. no animals during the day), but he refuses to pin himself down to any one label. He's vegetarian friendly, but not vegetarian. He likes locally grown food, but still shops at a supermarket. He remains open to all things edible in the interest of having fun with food and making everyone feel included. I just like it best when it's he that's doing so.

One gets the sense that he isn't able to regularly maintain the blog while trotting the globe in search of pancakes, and so his colleagues cover for him. And a world that includes a Bitten compromised largely of guest posts is still better than a world with no Bitten at all. But no one beats Bittman at writing for Bitten.

As I've noted before, this blog is in large part a response to Bittman. He's been a huge influence and there's no two ways about it: you'll notice in the labels section at right that the frequency of Bittman posts tie with those on fermentation, and I can think of no higher compliment. So in case there's any doubt, despite my criticism, let me make it perfectly clear: I love Mark Bittman.

That should bring it to 571.

Ambrosia

For breakfast I usually eat cereal. Unlike most Americans who might make the same claim, by cereal I mean actual cereal, not creatively shaped sugar.

The word "cereal" formerly referred to grain rather than the industrial product created by manipulating it into as inexpensive and addictive a substance as possible. As in Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain.

I want to eat the kind of food that a goddess can be goddess of, and it just wouldn't work with Frosted Flakes. But my diet also has a non-exclusivity clause, and no matter how strident my conditions might be, there's always room for an egg and biscuit sandwich. With butter.

Elise has a thing for baking, and while I generally prefer my grains whole (and garlicky), I simply cannot refuse her warm, fluffy creations. Like the one pictured above. She had made her best batch of biscuits ever, thanks in large part to some extra cream we had lying around. The next morning, toasted, with a little butter and a gently scrambled egg, they were the epitome of breakfast. Ceres may be the goddess of grain, but as far as I'm concerned, my girlfriend is the goddess of scrambled eggs in a biscuit.

Would I have thought to make a buttery little breakfast sandwich for myself? Probably not. Was it better than the spartan, boiled grain breakfasts I'm used to? Let's just say that there's a reason McDonalds makes McMuffins and not McMillet n' Miso.

(Long) Quote of the Day

From the most recent Lionette's newsletter:

The very people who have made our food dangerous come up with marketing campaigns like one fast food chain that claims that its uses 100 percent USDA-certified beef. (Note to nation: All beef legally sold is USDA certified.) Have we just become complacent? Have we given up, and will buy anything as long as it fits some image with which we want to associate ourselves?

Too often lately I hear from the farmers with whom we work that restaurants have cut way back or have completely stopped buying from them, switching instead to cheaper alternatives from around the globe. The economy is ugly right now, but our food supply is much, much uglier than the state of the economy.

Humanity can survive with a bad economy and safe food, but we will not last much longer with a good economy and dangerous food. The more people cut back on their food spending the more we are ensuring a very real devastation to our food supply.

The Best Roasted Chicken I've Ever Had

At long last, I've perfected my roasted chicken. The secret is sustainability.

After years of experimentation (meaning inconsistency), I no longer fuss about whether or not I should be stuffing the cavity with lemons, brining, or even which spices to use. I don't use spices. With real chicken, they're irrelevant.

I get the oven very hot and rub a sustainably raised bird with olive oil and salt, roasting breast side down until it almost starts to burn, flipping and doing the same on the b-side, then turning the heat down to let it finish.

But that's just the beginning. The most important step is to stand over the chicken once you've pulled it from the oven and to tear off pieces of the meat with your fingers, dredging them in the fat that collected at the bottom of the skillet and eating them, moaning, despite the fact that you've burnt your tongue.

In the OD, MP uses the phrase "a more chickeny chicken." The chicken I most recently cooked, purchased from the awesome Lionette's in the South End (now with carbon neutral bicycle delivery service), was the chickeniest chicken I've ever had. In tasting such chickeniffic chicken, I realized how misleading it is that the word chicken has come to mean neutral or plain.

See the phrase "tastes like chicken," which has become a mantra for mediocrity. People use it to indicate that something tastes plain, acceptable, and non-threatening. "Tastes like chicken" really means "tastes like nothing."

The flavor of real chicken is a presence, not an absence. We hear time and time again that organic, locally grown, sustainable ingredients taste better than their GMO counterparts, but the fact of the matter remains shockingly apparent every time you get your hands on real food. Industrially produced knock-offs taste no more like food than the Monkees sounded like the Beatles.

A real bird will be more expensive than its supermarket cousin, because it lived a real life. So eat less of it at a time and appreciate it more.

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Recipe: Roasted Chicken

1 sustainably raised chicken
2 tbsp sea salt
1 glug of olive oil

1. Pre-heat the oven to 500.

2. Rub the chicken with the oil and salt.

3. Roast the chicken, breast side down, until the back has browned. Then flip and do the same for the other side.

4. Once the breast has browned, turn the oven down to 350 and continue to cook until the meat melts off of a drumstick with the slightest provocation and the juices run clear. (About 50 minutes all in all.)

Miso Plus None

I've written before about the joys of miso + 1, an equation which clearly proves that miso paste is the most simple and versatile path to soup. Add any one (compatible) ingredient and you've got an elegant and easy bowlful with practically zero effort.

But in thinking about miso + 1, I overlooked the even more minimalist miso + none. Or rather, miso plus water. Yes, that alone is food.

If you have good miso, which is neither hard to find nor costly, you've got soup. What else can you say that about? Miso, in and of itself, has an even more complex flavor profile than a bloody brownie.

The only challenging step is finding the right miso. After years of experimentation with red and brown, I've finally settled on white. I now use Westbrae Natural's "organic mellow white miso" and I'm never going back. I had a mug of it just yesterday, and nothing could have better suited the cool yet sunny Spring weather. The only possible improvement would be if Westbrae came up with a Beck tribute miso called Mellow Gold. (I can just see him staring into a bowl, tripping out on those ever shifting clouds of soy.)

A satisfying -- not to mention probiotic -- bowl of soup that's as easy to make as stirring. I challenge anyone to come up with an faster, healthier, more delicious snack that could still be considered cooking.

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Recipe: Really, Really Simple Miso

1 tbsp miso paste per person
1 soup bowl's worth of water

1. Heat the water in a tea kettle, microwave, or under a magnifying glass.

2. Dissolve the miso in a small amount of the water, then add the rest.

Barely Sweet Brownie

Being barely sweet, you might say that this was barely a brownie. But you'd be wrong. A brownie can sing a much more complex song than that single note of sweetness that usually defines it.

So much of cooking, or any art, is innovation. An attempt to make you see the world in a new and different way, thereby shattering the shell of mundanity that normally surrounds you. A good painting, or even a good bowl of soup, can burn through the haze of your day to day existence and, with one glance (or slurp), return you to a childlike sense of awe and wonder.

I'm sure you've had this experience: you sit down to a dish that you've had countless times before but suddenly taste it in a new way. Maybe someone spiked your mac n' cheese with truffle oil, or maybe the chef bought the garlic from a farmer's market instead of from China. And so you taste whatever it is that you're eating as though it was the first time.

Sure we generally prefer comfort food, but every now and then you need a slightly bitter brownie to broaden your horizons. In making this batch, Elise did something which I'm hearing more and more of my baker friends say: "I found a recipe on-line, then halved the sugar."

Even a single ingredient, say a slice of watermelon, has several flavors: the sweetness of the tip closest to the core, the sourness adjacent to the rind, that distinctive melon thing throughout. Yet all too often desserts only taste like one thing, and that's sugar.

Call me crazy, but I don't want diabetes. Sugar is bad for you. That's why every native population that's exposed to it quickly declines in health. You shouldn't eat too much of it, so if you're going to have it, halving it isn't a bad idea.

With less sugar, this brownie was forced to taste like something. The chocolate had nowhere to hide, and so it stood tall, enboldened by its larger role. A heavy pinch of cinnamon was duly noted, and the salt level almost took things from sweet to savory. Not as salty as the sea -- more like blood.

For the sauce we melted a 70% cocoa bar and stretched it out by whisking in some of the red wine we'd been drinking. If the brownie was barely sweet, the sauce was downright nasty, intimidatingly sugarless, and the combo of the two made for an almost somber dessert experience.

Strong, bitter, salty and astringent, this brownie wasn't as sweet as I'm used to, but it reminded me that I'm alive.

Quote of the Day (Night?)

Continuing on the theme of garlic mustard, this hails from Wildman Steve Brill's delightfully informative entry on the plant's edible uses:

"The leaves contain natural anti-freezes that lower the freezing point of water. Caution: Never put garlic mustard leaves into a car radiator. It's not that kind of anti-freeze."

Garlic v Garlic Mustard

I'm proud to report that my garlic continues to grow, despite the fact that I never mulched it, though everyone told me I had to.

While I practically cheered when the garlic came up, I have no such feelings for the patch of garlic mustard growing a few feet away.



This invasive plant dominates many yards and wild spaces and is difficult to control; however, it is edible. The pungent leaves can be cooked as a potherb or used raw in salads, and the root is a dead ringer for horseradish.

The garlic required timely planting and grows slowly, yet the garlic mustard appeared of its own volition, as though transported from an alien world. The second that the snow melted, it began a The Blob-like growth explosion that, if left unchecked, will surely take over the world. In other words, the garlic took effort, the garlic mustard did not. (Therefore someone who didn't fully understand English could take "mustard" to mean "effort.")

When it comes to selecting food, humans have historically gone for the highest calorie count per least expenditure of energy. Originally this meant picking the largest berry, though it has come to mean exchanging money for corn syrup.

My decision to favor the garlic instead of the garlic mustard marks a departure from this trend: I'm working harder for less food.

So why eat garlic when I could get garlic mustard, and tons of it, for free? Because I like garlic better and because you don't want to encourage an invasive. Just look at the Burmese python problem in Florida.

Clearly, nature is waging a showdown of garlic v. garlic mustard down in the kitchen garden. Why else would the garlic naturally grown in a "v"?

Quail To Go

When I first moved to Boston I seized every opportunity to dive into the labyrinthian playground of food that is Chinatown. In my Brandeis days I would often take a combination of buses and trains just to have dinner at Penang, which became a favorite spot for birthdays.

The food was great and the atmosphere thrilling compared to the sameness bubble of a college campus, though the dish of ice and sweetened beans that came with a sparkler in it - on the house - never quite took the place of a cake.

Paradoxically, once I moved closer to Chinatown I went there less often, rarely tempted to go beyond the inexpensive neighborhood eateries of Cambridge and Somerville. But now that I'm teaching food writing at the new Boston Center for Adult Ed., I find myself a stone's throw from Chinatown every Wednesday. Last night I finally had time to sneak over for a bite, or as it turned out, a quail.

With only ten minutes to find and eat something exciting, I ducked into a small establishment with the requisite smiling ducks and geese dangling in the window. I needed something that I could eat while walking (briskly) to class, and the small, plump roasted quails looked like just the thing. For $2.50 I soon had my own bird, nestled in a palm sized styrofoam dome, unaccompanied but for a drizzle of golden brown, sweet and salty soy glaze.

I ate the little wings, legs and breast while hoofing it, deciding mouthful by mouthful whether or not it was okay to crunch and swallow the bones.

A small, bony bird may not be as convenient as other, more mainstream on-the-go foods, like the Taco Bell "cheese roll-up," but unlike such alternatives, it won't kill me. (Well, maybe the bones will.)

Either way, the bird served as an amuse for the larger feast I intend to have the next time I fully reenter the labyrinth.

My Other Kitchen Garden is a Tropical Paradise

My apologies for not posting since last week, but I've been swamped. Literally: I'm visiting family in Florida. Yes, like Mark Bittman, my parents live in Delray.

There are many obvious differences between South Florida, where I grew up, and Maynard, MA where I now live. For instance, when I go swimming in Massachusetts, there's nothing in the water that can kill me. In Florida, there are many things.

The windows of my apartment look out over maple, walnut, and beech, none of which currently have leaves. But as I type this from my mom's porch I see palm trees, strangler figs, live oak, and Spanish moss, all cloaked in undying green.

Besides myself, there are some species that somehow manage to thrive both here and there. Blue jays and squirrels, for instance. I even saw elders in bloom at a nearby wildlife refuge, though they also grow on the pond behind my apartment that so recently was skateable. Our elders won't bloom for weeks, but I'm amazed that one variety of the plant can endure sub-zero temperatures while the other can withstand the constant gawking of sunburnt tourists.

But the greatest divide lies in the kitchen garden. As you know, mine has nothing but a tuft of sorrel and a few garlic sprouts. But my mom's has, in various stages of development...

Mango.



Avocado.



Meyer's lemons.



Lizards.



And the pineapple pictured at top, plus nine more, all grown from sticking the cut-off tops of other pineapples into the dirt. No aspect of life in New England, except being cold, is that easy.

Sadly, despite the drastic differences in locale, supermarkets in both MA and FL are full of the same exact stuff, most of it horrible: hard plums from Chile, flaccid asparagus from Mexico, and tomatoes grown by slave labor.

I dream of a world were regional food is more distinct than just saying hoagie or grinder, and not just for gastronomic reasons (there's also environmental, social, political and spiritual fruits to reap). Thankfully, we're getting closer to it.

Photography Note: You'll also notice a completely different quality of light in these photos than in any I've taken up North. As in the Low Country pics, the light down here is much whiter.

Soup Loaf

The only downside to freezing food is that it's then frozen. No matter how much you suddenly want to eat that frozen piece of cake or goat kidney, unless you plan ahead or have a microwave (and I'm not big on either), your appetite alone will not make it melt.

That's why I recently found myself sawing a soup in half, as pictured above. It was the last of the infamous buffalo yam chili, which I had the foresight to freeze but not to defrost by the time I wanted it. So out came the bread knife and the elbow grease (mine, not the buffalo's, though there may have been some of that, too).

But when life gives you frozen lemons, make room temperature lemonade. My blood sugar level crashed as the soup slowly passed through phases of matter on the stove top, but I tried to view the experience in a positive light. However, all I could come up with was that I'd never seen a cross section of a kidney bean before.

Speaking of patience, my garlic didn't grow as much in the past 24 hours as I'd expected.

Kitchen Garden Update

April showers bring may flowers, and we all know what Mayflowers bring, but this morning I discovered that March showers bring March garlic.

The bulb that I split up and planted back in November has finally raised several green flags down in the kitchen garden, heralding the return of the kind of weather that couldn't kill you.

Speaking of which, I cannot believe that this tuft of French sorrel survived the winter:



That's because from mid December until a couple of weeks ago, the yard looked like this:



But those few, fragile leaves somehow emerged triumphantly after being buried under feet and feet of snow, ice, and fox pee.

Now I survived the winter too, but the difference between me and the sorrel is that it didn't have a coat, hat, gloves, snow tires, hot toddies, oil heat plus an electric space heater, wool socks inside Tibetan slippers, gourds upon gourds of mate, a freezer full of meat, carpeting, an apartment, and a girlfriend.

Now doesn't it seem unfair that it's me who gets to eat it?

Adventures in Tealand

Seth, one of my former sketch comedy partners, and Maggie, his life partner, are traveling through tea country, apprenticing at estates in the Darjeeling district and beyond.

See here for their travel updates and to find out where the stuff that's everywhere actually comes from.

Quote of the Day

From Sally Falon's The Ploy of Soy:

"The longest living man in the West was Old Par, an English peasant who labored in the fields until his death at 152 years. His diet consisted almost entirely of raw goat milk products."

Killer Peas

Risen from the dead by rehydration, these dried peas came back with a vengeance.

I cooked them in an effort to work through the many mysterious bags of dried legumes we seem to have accumulated. We have enough to live on for several days, but have no idea where they came from, since dried beans can last longer than your memory of where and when you got them.

In an effort to purge the kitchen of unwanted but still edible items, I've been slowly using up our stash by making chili, soup, kitchari, and so on. But when I found these peas I wasn't quite sure what to do: I've had peas fresh, split, frozen, canned (yuck!), and wasabied, but never dried whole.

I started by soaking them overnight, which made them much more appealing. Formerly a dusty shade of gray, the soaked peas turned a plump, luscious green. I decided to first try them straight up, cooked in salted water and eaten like a grain. When I did, they promptly turned gray again and didn't taste much better than they looked.

So I did what made me need to make them in the first place: I forgot about them. A day later, the peas that were still submerged in water had sprouted tiny tadpole like tails. I put them in a a colander to slow the process, and forgot about them all over again. A day later, they were poking through the mesh, coming to get to me.

Since they were so ugly cooked and since sprouted things are supposedly better for you, I've just been snacking on them raw, which I hope has the same effect as chopping up a zombie so much that no part of it can attack you.

Let this be a lesson: you can forget about legumes, but legumes won't forget about you.

I Heart Lamb Heart

I have a friend whose meat CSA has a cooler full of $1 parts such as hearts and tongue. Clearly they haven't gotten the memo about offal.

Like lobster and countless other foods that were once thought of as edible when necessary, offal has gone from rags to riches. To get a sense of the popularity of these non-meat cuts of meat, just google "the offal truth." That gives you a glimpse of how much it's being talked about, plus it's fun to see how many people thought that they invented the (admittedly clever) phrase.

But back in my world, two lamb hearts still cost a dollar. I adapted a recipe from Nose to Tail and braised the hearts on the stovetop with a cornbread stuffing (and by "adapted" I mean "left out lots of bacon").

The stuffing and the braising liquid were both the results of some serious scrounging. Ingredients included over-fermented cider and chopped up bits of Tom-Tom Turkey Sticks. Before there were in-sink-erators, there was braising.

Besides timidly nibbling chicken parts in gravy, these were my first real hearts. I won't share the recipe since it wasn't an unmitigated triumph, and the next time I'd probably try roasting or oven braising. But they did turn out well and I'd eat them again. The texture was quite nice - between steak and liver - as was the appearance. Sliced into cross sections, the stuffed chambers made for an attractive semi-spiral.

Also, cramming the stuffing into the heart provided a good visual aid for what it might be like to eat too many fatty foods.