What you need for summer

I just invented a fabulous drink:

1. Put watermelon chunks and some Pimms in a blender
2. Blend
3. Drink

You heard it here first....

Vertical Farming

I've got a client who is thinking about vertical farming, so I've been looking into it. And what better way to introduce the topic than Colbert? (and despite what it says, this video is available and works just fine.)

Funny Eggs

One man's story of frying his first egg. Read the whole thing on Salon.com.

It was not until after graduating college that I found myself entering that strange, downmarket neighborhood of the house called the kitchen to do anything besides light a cigarette off the stove. The place was mainland China, where I was teaching English. Cholera had descended on the city, leading police to close the restaurants most popular with Westerners. Rather than brave the more modest noodle and dumpling houses, which in general tone resembled the sort of barrio body shop that deals strictly in cash, I lived on peanuts, which were grown locally and sold for about 10 U.S. cents per pound. For variety, there was watermelon, tea and a type of dry biscuit whose name in English -- Fancy Smell -- appeared helpfully on the package beside an image of Shou Xing, the Chinese god of longevity.

Crowd-sourcing

You know that I'm a foodie and this article would have appealed to me anyway, but the thing that really caught my attention is the word "crowd-sourcing". I guess that's the verb for how a wiki is created. I would say that evolutionary improvement can be made through the "crowd-sourcing" of a recipe, but that's not the way to make revolutionary steps or to produce real novelty or innovation. So, what do you think of the word? And what do you think of the process it describes?

AS the digital age seeps into the kitchen, it’s time to reconsider whether too many cooks spoil the broth.

Crowd-sourcing recipes — corralling a group of strangers on the Internet to create and edit a bank of recipes — is gaining popularity and investors.

The idea is that a thousand cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef.

Some cooks argue that the collective process strips recipes of their personality and their provenance. But backers believe they are creating a new authority for cooking: the Wikipedia of recipes. [NYTimes.com]

Food as Movie Star

It's not getting great reviews, but there's no way I'm going to miss seeing Julie & Julia when it opens next week. Here's an interesting article on how the food gets portrayed...

Although movies have long relied on half-cooked turkeys colored with motor oil, fruit made of plastic, and ice cream carved from Crisco, food in film is increasingly edible and even delicious.

“Everybody thinks it’s all shellacked,” said Colin Flynn, a New York-based chef and stylist who worked with Ms. Spungen on the film. “In the ’70s and ’80s it was more like that. Food looked more like Plasticine. Nowadays it’s almost always real food.”

For food stylists, most of whom began as cooks, it’s a welcome change. It’s also good for audiences, who have become more sophisticated about food and expect more realistic images. And directors believe that well-prepared food can improve the actors’ performances and the look of the final scene.

“The challenge always is making it seem delicious and hyper-real,” said John Lyons, president of production for Focus Features. “If it doesn’t look hyper-real, it doesn’t work in the movie.”

That means a dish needs to be fresh-looking and well-prepared to begin with, and then enhanced with a bit of oil here and a little fake steam there.

The White House Kitchen Garden

Michelle Obama's garden is producing lettuce, peas, eggplants and all sorts of other good things. As this article in Salon argues, she is just bringing more visibility to a movement that has been growing for some time. Americans are starting to be more interested in where their food comes from, how its grown and in cooking it themselves.

The Europeans have been doing this for a long time, as evidenced by the Slow Food movement and popular demonstrations around food policy.

I'm missing my garden plot while I'm on vacation. I hope my lettuce will not have bolted by the time I come home, but I'll be so excited to see the progress of my tomatoes and green beans.

Bam!

I visited the Fancy Food Trade Show today in NY. I was served a small cup of pasta and sauce by none other than Emeril Lagasse. I wish I'd thought to take a picture.

Bread as metaphor

Bread is used as much as metaphor as it is food. The most obvious examples that come to mind are from the Bible, in both the Christian and Hebrew texts. A simple search for the word "bread" in an online bible yields hundreds of results, and familiar stories abound. The book of Exodus reminds us that when the Jews were lost and starving in the desert God fed them with manna, or bread from heaven. And sometimes directions are pretty specific. In the book of Ezekiel, for example, the prophet is instructed to take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, and millet and make bread out of them for nourishment while he too was in the desert. In the New Testament Jesus uses bread as the ultimate metaphor when he refers to it as His body: blessed, broken, and shared. After more than two millennia this is still practiced in the form of Holy Communion each Sunday in Christian churches around the globe. And one of the most powerful Biblical metaphors is in the Lord's Prayer, where people pray to God for their life's necessities, while using the words Daily Bread. These, of course, are just a few examples of many.

Bread as religious metaphor is not limited to Judeo-Christian tradition or inspiration. Rumi, the 13th century Islamic mystic and poet, who is an important figure in Sufism and is usually accredited with the Whirling Dervishes, dedicated or inspired an entire series of poems to bread and how it mirrors life. To this day, in fact, bread is such an integral part of many Middle Eastern diets that in some Arabic dialects it is referred to as esh or aysh, meaning life.

The act of sharing bread or an entire meal together is sometimes referred to as "breaking bread." This is also the basis of the modern word companion, which is derived from the Latin phrase com pani, which loosely translates to with one whom bread is shared (com: with or together; pani: bread). Other modern, albeit slightly dated, examples are in the form of slang. Money is sometimes called "bread" or "dough." [cheftalk.com]

Foooooood!

Here's a list of what the Times OnLine says are the fifty best food blogs....

Healthy body, healthy mind

Before he agreed to cook for the Obama family in the White House, Chicago chef Sam Kass was already talking about changing the way American children eat.

During weekly Tuesday gatherings at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, Mr. Kass hosted “Rethinking Soup,” which he described as “a communal event where we will eat delicious, healthy soup and have fresh, organic conversation about many of the urgent social, cultural, economic and environmental food issues that we should be addressing.”

In May, over a meal of locally-produced beef and barley soup, Mr. Kass lamented the sorry state of the National School Lunch Program, which provides low-cost or free lunches to schoolchildren. He noted that what gets served up to kids is influenced by government agricultural subsidies. As a result, he says, meals served to students are low in vegetables and disproportionately high in fat, additives, preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup. (He also links the high consumption of sugary foods and food additives to learning difficulties and attention deficit disorder, although the medical community remains divided on that issue.) [NYT]

Food/Gardens/Locavores in Chicago

There is a community garden just a few blocks south of our place where you can get a garden plot for the summer. Now that I'm all married and stuff, I guess I'm feeling domestic (domesticated?) and was searching around on the web for information trying to figure out how to get a plot. I ran across many interesting Chicago and Hyde Park foodie resources:

The Local Beet - a Chicago locavore blog, nice name, eh?
Experimental Station - Artist's loft now hosting farmers market, cafe, garden plot coordinators and bicycle repair workshop/youth employment center

Oil, Lobster, Insecurity

It's sad that fuel prices and economic insecurity lead to this, but lobster demand and prices are down, according to the NY Times. One interesting thing noted here is that the fishermen are leaving traps for, say, two days instead of one to save on fuel. I wonder if that's a fuel efficient practice they'll keep for the long term.

So, if you are looking for a treat, why not go for lobster instead of beef or some other food that's also rising in price. Beef, in fact, gets the price bump from both transport costs and the huge rise in grain and feed stock prices.

Julia Child was a Spy

Check this out, Julia Child worked for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, during WWII.

Of course, Julia Child immediately brings to mind French cooking, but my favorite book by her and one of the only cookbooks I regularly refer to is The Way to Cook. It tells you how to poach and how to debone, as well as giving classic and delicious recipes.

Semolina Cake

There was an article in a NY Times Magazine section about a month ago on semolina cakes that I'd left out for George to read. It had a Greek version and a French version. G's ideal version should have yogurt in it, so I've searched around and this one, with lemon from a blog called Cooking Adventures, sounds good to me.

I'll let you know how it is if we actually make it. I never bake, so odds are slim even though it sounds so tasty.

English summer pudding

A few days ago I bought both red and white currants at a farmer's market and I did what anyone would do - I started looking for recipes for English summer pudding. And I found one on an English food blog called Becks & Posh. It's very simple, cook a bunch of mixed berries for just a few minutes with a bit of sugar then put into a bowl you've lined with white bread. Refrigerate for a few hours while weighted. Good stuff, especially with cream drizzled over it.

A roadside restaurant anywhere in the world

On the coastal road on the west side of the Peloponnesus in Greece, we stopped for the night in an unpromising village 15 kilometers outside the big, ugly port town looking for a hotel. We found quite a nice, modern guest house just above the municipal beach, with a view of the Ionian Sea and olive trees.

For dinner, the proprietor suggested either of the two tavernas on the main road through the village just 2 blocks away. Both had tables in the open air facing the road with the kitchens at the back. The one we chose was lit by an abundance of florescent lights, making it a pool of white in the black night that was otherwise broken mostly by headlights. As we sat down and ordered a very simple, very Greek dinner of souvlaki in pita it occurred to me that I had eaten at this same place by the dusty side of the road in Panama and in Brazil. Each time I’ve wondered, why would anyone want to eat along the side of the road with exhaust fumes and grit? Why wasn’t the restaurant designed with the outdoor seating to the side, or to the back, protected from the road by the building?

Is it that outdoor seating at the back would isolate the patrons from the people passing by? Is this type of set-up more conducive to drop-ins and impromptu gatherings, thereby benefiting the proprietors? If you can see as you pass by that a group of your friends have gathered for a meal or a drink, you’re likely to join them. If on the other hand they are hidden in the back, you may not realize they are there and therefore will not become another paying customer. Perhaps this outweighs any disadvantage that the patrons might want to be secluded from the hustle-bustle and grit. Besides, if that were the case, they might have just stayed home.

So, does such a roadside restaurant only exist in small communities where one is more likely to pass by and recognize other patrons? Or does it exist on thoroughfares where the outdoor roadside presence is advertising, letting passers-by know that a restaurant exists?

I do know that the ones I’ve eaten at tend to have simple, good fare. Perhaps nothing to write home about, but nothing that’s made me ill either.

There is also a different sense of private space in restaurants in much of Europe and Latin America than in the US or Britain. In the US few restaurants would allow people to wander into the restaurant or even any outdoor seating selling flowers, serenades or sunglasses, but sitting for lunch on a Greek Island the passing hawkers approached the diners both inside and outside. Is the restaurant more of a communal space in Europe and Latin America than it is in the US? And by communal space, I mean that it is accessible to all parts of the community, not just the customers.

Most delicious snack ever

I went to a new restaurant in town, Graham Elliot, this week. It was pretty good, but by far the best thing was the popcorn they brought to the table instead of a bread basket. It had truffle oil and parmesean on it. I made it the very next day at home and it was just as good.

Easy, delicious, and you'll get it next time you come to a party.

Food Riots & Climate Change

So, what are we to do? In many parts of the world, including the US, land is being diverted from food crops to energy crops - corn into ethanol in the US, sugar into ethanol in Brazil, palm oil into biodiesel in SE Asia. We're bring down rain forest to plant energy crops that ultimately increases food prices and decreases biodiversity so that we can drive big cars.

Washington has refused to increase CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards for years, allowing US auto manufacturers to continue producing gas guzzlers. For this, we are getting food riots in Thailand, Italy, the Philippines, Haiti, Uzbekistan, and many more.

The Rhubarb Trilogy - Jam

The things you can find on YouTube! How to make rhubarb jam, every step including picking it in the garden. I found this after watching the clip above.

Duck Fat

I have a feeling this new job is going to keep me running. On the morning of my 3rd day, Wednesday, my alarm was set for 4 o'clock so I could make a 6:30 flight to Los Angeles, where I met a colleague from the Washington, a major client and a whole scad of other people. That said, I haven't had a chance to give you any edifying posts until now. This one will only be useful to those of you in/near Chicago, but it's worth it.

Saturday, George and I went to Hot Doug's (The Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium) for lunch. It's a sausage/hot dog joint in the middle of industrial/commercial nowhere on the NW side of the city. You drive along these empty streets until you see a place with a line out the door and around the corner. Now I had heard great reviews of their homemade specialty sausages and the Fri/Sat specialty of Duck Fat French Fries, but I had no idea I'd be spending 40 minutes in line waiting for them. It was worth it. We waited in line, mostly with folks who looked like hip Bucktowners getting over their hangovers. We were the only ones with combed hair and un-ironic shirts. We got recommendations from the 20-something bleach-blond guy in skinny jeans in line behind us, and ordered from the list of daily specials. Our favorite was the Saucisse de Toulouse with carmelized onions and brie.