Scrapin' Up the Bits... Spooktacular Style

A little bit 'o everything here. No need to mince words. I'll just get to it.

First, and this is not the first study to reach this conclusion, but a new study from the United Nations concludes that, in Africa at least, yields on farms that are organic or "near-organic" have superior yields compared to large industrial farms.

The study found that organic practices outperformed traditional methods and chemical-intensive conventional farming. It also found strong environmental benefits such as improved soil fertility, better retention of water and resistance to drought.

Next, and this is very late in coming, but if you didn't read Michael Pollan's latest in the New York Times -- a letter to the next president -- please do so now. It's quite long, but well worth the read. At the heart of this letter is a central proposal, to return to a food system based on the power of sunshine.

Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

More locally, Cafe Allegro, a Pittsburgh dining standard bearer for the better part of the last two decades, is closing. I never ate there, and had heard its better days were behind it. Nevertheless, it's sad to see.

Meanwhile, the Passport Cafe, a restaurant where I have only eaten lunch, gets raves from the City Paper.

The subtitle of Passport Café, a year-old restaurant in an upscale strip mall on Perrysville Highway, is "Global cuisine, local harvest." Worthy, to be sure, but ... not to put too fine a point on it, but lately every other restaurant we visit seems to tout a variation on this theme. What then, we wondered, would distinguish Passport Café? Let us count the ways.

That's a long way from this Post-Gazette review from nearly a year ago, not long after the restaurant opened.

With all this effort, I expected to be impressed. Instead, I found myself perplexed and disappointed.

When we eat steaks anymore, I've given up on the grill. Instead, I opt for the cast-iron, seared first on the stove top, and finished in the oven. While I enjoy a burger, the ones I make at home are just never that great. I place part of that blame on the grill and its lack of temperature control. I know it sounds like heresy, but I've been thinking if, for burgers, we should likewise abandon the grill altogether.

This, however, convinces me that a combination approach, may be worth at least one try. Now if I could only find those brioche buns!

Scrapin' Up the Bits, Jet-Lag Style

Just back from the Left Coast to cover a medical research conference as part of my day job, but there is plenty to report on, some important, some not-so…

An example of the latter? Cindy McCain, the wealthy wife of the Republican Senator and GOP presidential nominee, apparently has a little thing for borrowing other’s recipes without proper attribution. Some of her sources? Rachel Ray and…

Also on Tuesday, the Wonkette site posted a recipe, “Cindy McCain’s 3-Minute No-Bake Cookies,” which appeared in the December 2007 issue of Yankee Magazine and was identical to a recipe from Quaker Oats.

You mean the one from the back of the can?

I missed Tony Bourdain’s recent talk in Pittsburgh. Thankfully, the Post-Gazette and Corduroy Orange were there to provide some of the nasty bits.

I also missed the movie “King Corn” when it was in (a few) theaters. Thankfully, PBS’ Independent Lens has my back. It’s being shown all week.

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, andpowerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm.

Here’s a little… taste, so to speak:

Next, a fairly new Pittsburgh food magazine, Table, has a feature in its spring issue on the Heinz company and how it develops its latest and greatest food “innovations.” One interesting tidbit from the article:

More important, though, are the views of the Heinz Sensory and Insight Panel, a group of 50 or so part-time expert tasters who work 20 to 30 hours a week tasting and rating the company’s products.

[snip]

Interested? Watch the newspaper, Matthews recommends. Heinz occasionally runs an advertisement seeking candidates [for the panel].

And, finally, while on my previously mentioned business trip, I took the opportunity to eat at The Linkery. Like Pittsburgh’s own Bona Terra, The Linkery was named by Gourmet magazine as one of the country’s best farm-to-table restaurants.

Now, typically, when I go on business travel, I seek out great restaurants and, when I can, I try to order dishes that reflect the local culinary specialties. But, at The Linkery, I ordered the “complete burger.”

I know it’s strange to travel to other side of the country just to order a hamburger. But this was not any regular old hamburger. In fact, it was, hands down, the best burger I’ve ever had. Here’s how my burger broke down:

house-ground beef from Brandt Farms

house-cured red oak-smoked bacon from Vande Rose Farms

medium aged Gouda cheese from Winchester Farms

grilled onions

pastured-chicken fried egg from Wingshadows Hacienda

house-baked bun

The burger, ordered medium rare (with an emphasis on the rare), was just ridiculously tender. And when combined with the cheese and bacon and the onions and the egg, with a little arugula for some bite, all on a fantastic bun (which is, undoubtedly, the single most overlooked part of the burger in pretty much every restaurant, even those that claim to pride themselves on their burger), it was perfection. Best burger eva’.