Scrapin’ Up the Bits… Alton Brown Style

I’ve always been an Alton Brown fan. He always set himself apart from the other “personalities” on the Evil Network with his wit and style, and if I happen to be watching TV and Good Eats is on, I’ll watch it.

Now, courtesy of the folks at Grist, I’m glad to see that Mr. Brown is planning to use his television platform to talk about something that is glaringly absent from most Evil Network programming:

During his lecture, Alton announced that his TV show would begin focusing on sustainability issues: how crops are grown and animals are raised. The shift in focus would be a form of penance, he said. ...

"I've spent the last nine years influencing what people do with food, but I haven't taught them about the real essence of feeding themselves, and I feel that it's high time to step up to bat," he says. "I've been busy being clever, but now I want to use what credibility I may have to help people think about sustainability."

My DVR will be set, Alton.

We don’t drink much tequila. But when we do, we choose Herradura Silver, which is then poured over ice with lime juice and some Cuantro for an excellent margarita. For the uninitiated on the finer points of tequila – such as myself – here is a short and sweet primer.

And if you like to cook with alcohol, here is an excellent way to use just a tablespoon or two of some high-end tequila.

Michael Ruhlman asks for some feedback on dinners that are “weekly staples” in his readers’ households. Reading through the comments, I can’t help but be a bit taken aback by some of the fairly, shall we say, complex weekday meals?

Thin loin pork chops on the bone, bound with a breading of Wondra flour, eggs (beaten and strained to get rid of the chalaza), and Ian's panko, cooked in olive oil; cucumber salad with a sweetened vinegar dressing (Hungarian style); lima beans braised in heavy cream.

Also, I must now grill a whole chicken. That basting sauce sounds too good.

And, finally, two researchers at Carnegie Mellon took a closer look at the environmental impact of eating local versus other factors in the food production chain. Their conclusion:

Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.

Mental Masala at Ethicurean has a great post on the study and some factors it failed to consider, including pasture-raised animals for meat.

Redfish, Good Fish

As was the case last year, I spent a week of vacation eating way too much food, including ribs, lasagna, chicken thighs, fajitas, and Doritos… oooohhhh, Doritos. Every night I cursed myself for eating too much.

And as was the case last year, on the way out of the Outer Banks, we stopped at a fish market and picked up some locally caught, ultra-fresh fish to enjoy as part of a light dinner the night of our return. This time, instead of tuna, I picked out some beautiful, meaty redfish.

Also known as red drum, channel bass, and spottail, as well as other names, the filets I picked up, in their raw form, looked to me like mahi mahi. Our grill was out of propane, so I drizzled a little good extra virgin olive oil over the filets, added a healthy sprinkle of some pepper and smoked salt, and put it under the broiler for about 8 minutes.

When it came out of the broiler, I topped it with some sautéed mushrooms, very similar to the topping for mushroom bruschetta, replacing the heat with some finely diced shallots. Served it alongside a salad of local field greens with a tarragon vinaigrette, and it was an ideal – and much needed – way to end an enjoyable vacation.

Finally, if you're ever in the Outer Banks and looking for a family-friendly restaurant that serves excellent food, my highest recommendation goes to the Kill Devil Grill in Kill Devil Hills.

Green Garlic and Clams like Each Other

Picked up some green garlic from our CSA last week. A week before, the San Francisco-based chef Daniel Patterson had penned an article in the New York Times in which he recommended several ways to use this immature form of the bulbous garlic (which, like ramps, closely resembles a scallion, only bigger).

Chef Patterson's linguini with clam sauce sounded like an ideal dish to enjoy with a glass of white wine while sitting outside on a spring weekend evening. It was.

Admittedly, clams ain’t cheap, so while this is a “simple” pasta dish, it’s not something you’d have frequently. I have to think, though, that this could be adapted to include shrimp or mushrooms, among other things.

I’ve tried to lay out the recipe in a way that helps with timing, because I hate having to wait too long to finish a dish because something else isn’t quite done yet..

Linguine with Green Garlic Clam Sauce (adapted from Daniel Patterson)

• Extra-virgin olive oil
• 3 tablespoons minced green garlic, white and light green parts
• Crushed red pepper
• 3-4 pounds of well-cleaned clams
• ¼ cup white wine
• 1 cup of water
• 1 lemon, juiced and zested
• 1 pound linguine
• Handful of flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
• Salt and pepper to taste

Get a large pot of well-salted water boiling.

Put a few very good swirls of olive oil in a large pan over medium heat. After a minute, add the garlic, crushed red pepper, and a big pinch of salt and cook for a minute or two.

Put the pasta in the water.

Add the clams, white wine, and water, and cook over medium-high heat, covered. After about 3-4 minutes, the clams will start opening, in fairly rapid succession. As they open, transfer them to a plate with a slotted spoon.

Remove the clams from their shells and mince (the clams, not the shells! :D).

Remember to check the pasta, because you don’t want it to be fully cooked in the water. You want it to be a little less than al dente, because you’re going to be adding it back to the pan with the clam “sauce” and it’s going to soak up some of it.

Strain the sauce -- which will seem much more like a broth -- from the pan through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl that’s large enough to hold the liquid.

Give the saucepan a good wipe, and add back the clam meat and sauce/broth to the saucepan over medium heat. Add the pasta, parsley, lemon juice (hold a little juice back, though, and add the rest after you’ve combined everything if it seems to need it) and zest, and combine well.

Let it cook together for just a minute, taste and adjust for salt, pepper, acid (aka, the lemon juice), and serve immediately with a small bit of freshly grated parmesan.

On Why You Should Make Your Own Guac

Avocados are not a local ingredient. They are native to Mexico and Central and South America, and 95% of the avocados produced in the U.S. come from the Golden State (thanks, Wikipedia).
 

Avocados are also expensive, and, to boot, if you’re trying to serve them on a specific day, it’s a fine art of learning how to purchase them ahead of time and ensure they’ll be ripe when you need them to be.

All of that said, if this doesn’t make you think thrice -- or more -- about buying already-made guacamole at the store, I’m not sure what can:

Kraft's Guacamole Dip in the dairy case looks tempting -- until you learn that its vibrant green color doesn't come from avocados (there are almost none in it) but from synthetic food dyes Yellow 5, Yellow 6 and Blue 1.

Perhaps that’s why the prefab guacs I have sampled – which admittedly hasn’t happened in a long time – seem to be so bland and, well, unavocadoy. 

So, please, I beseech thee, make your own. Look for the little bags with 4 or 5 avocados in them, which, from what I can tell, pound for pound, appear to be the cheaper route than buying individual avocados. Be sure to taste after you’ve combined all of the ingredients, adjusting for salt or lime juice. 

You can also roast your jalapenos, as I’ve taken to doing most times. Or you can substitute roasted poblanos, if you’d prefer a little less heat and a slightly different flavor. You can omit the peppers altogether and add a half cup of finely chopped pineapple, if you’d like something a little bit sweeter.

But, please, make your own. When people eat it and say, “This is fantastic. Where did you get it?” You can proudly say, “I made it,” and then proceed to scarf it down.

Scrapin' Up the Bits... GO PENS! Style

I’ll be honest, I really don’t consider Domino’s to be pizza. Rather, I see it as cardboard layered with tomato- and cheese-like products and ridiculous amounts of processed meat products overflowing in saturated fat.

Nevertheless, this is swee…eee..eeeT:

"We basically just had to keep the fluids going, get some food in you," Sykora said. "We had some pizza coming. We had some power bars and stuff like that."

Asked if the pizza was Little Caesar's, the company founded by Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch, Sykora flashed a smile.

"Domino's," he said.

The first pick-up of the year from our illustrious CSA included carrots, spinach, field greens, local honey, local syrup and a few other things.

The selection is limited this early in the season. Nevertheless, the carrots worked very well in an excellent carrot-ginger soup. The spinach accompanied some (mediocre) Italian sausage, onions, garlic, among other things, that ended up atop some gemelli. The field greens were fantastic eaten along side some homemade pizzas (including a fabulous experimental pie with red sauce, arugula pesto, and goat cheese), topped only with a standard balsamic vinaigrette.

And speaking of pizza, here’s a shot of our house specialty pizza: just sauce, chopped kalamata olives or, if you can find them, Moroccan olives, and, just as it comes out of the oven, a healthy sprinkling of freshly grated Pecorino.

A good addition to this pie are some thinly sliced roasted red peppers.

My mushroom hunting adventure had to be scrapped. Instead, got to see my soon-to-be 6-year-old score his lone soccer goal of the 8-game season. It was game 8.

I ordered and have received Michael Ruhlman’s Elements of Cooking. When I first read about this book last year, it seemed, well, kind of pretentious. But after reading some posts on his blog based on some of the “elements” included in the book, I decided maybe I was the one being dumb.

Inspired by Mr. Ruhlman, I hope to make my first homemade mayo this weekend.

And to wrap things up… For our 11^th wedding anniversary, we finally made it to Bona Terra in Sharpsburg. Tremendous meal. Can’t say enough good things about the food and service.

We ate:

• Chicken mouse tart with bacon-tomato relish (compliments of the chef)
• Foie gras with finely diced mango and guava (the foie gras looked like a grilled pork chop, the mango and guava like corn and carrots!)
• Brioche rolls with a roasted tomato butter (at least I think it was “roasted” tomato)
• A field greens salad with candied pecans, dried blueberries, a Spanish cabrales blue cheese, and a raspberry vinaigrette
• Potato, parmesan, and leek soup with ramp oil and hot chili oil
• Beef tenderloin topped with ramp butter
• Roasted duck with a pomegranate sauce
• Cheese plate with English toffee cheese and a wild berry compote

My only disappointment, and this is admittedly nitpicky, was the failure to specifically note on the menu the source of much of what was on our plate. After all, Bona Terra was named one of the top 100 farm-to-table restaurants by Gourmet, so I think Chef and owner Dennis Dick, now the three-time Chef of the Year according to Pittsburgh Magazine, owes it to his customers to be as explicit as possible about the local sources of the food being served.

We’re hoping to make Legume in Regent Square, another farm-to-table restaurant with a burgeoning reputation for fantastic food, for our next dinner out.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: GO PENS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Compare and Contrast

Last word on the Farm Bill, I swear. But here is something terribly indicative of the subsidy problem and the lack of priorities in Washington.

First, a classified from the January/February 2008 issue of Passages, the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture’s newsletter.

FOR SALE – Organic, 100% grass-fed cows. Traders Point has a unique offering: Nature is not always the nurturer and the summer of ’07 will attest to that. The combination of unseasonably warm temperatures and half of the normal rainfall has exacted its toll on the farm. We really have no other choice (emphasis mine) than to sell off a portion of our herd. Traders Point remains one of the only creameries in the nation to have a year round 100% organic grass-fed herd. USDA certified by Indiana Certified Organic. Care has been taken to find high protein levels as well as higher fat content. The Brown Swiss heritage is also foremost in the field of health nutrition with the highest CLA. Call or email…

And a repeat from an earlier post, from a farmer commenting on the Washington Post’s Web site on a Farm Bill story.

My farm is bordered on one side by a river. The bank on my side is between 20 and 30 feet high, and my property never floods in the fall rains and none-too occasional hurricane. The bank on the other side is only about 5 or 6 feet above the average water level, and it routinely - I could even say reliably - floods in the fall. The land on that side of the river amounts to about 200 acres, and every spring, my neighbor plants it in corn. He gets paid to. It doesn't matter the floods ruin the crop every year, that the floods leave all the ears mildewed and unfit even for cattle feed. He gets paid to plant his 200 acres in corn, and so he does. I'd hazard to guess that he gets paid for the loss, too, by federal crop adjustment insurance.

One dairy farm, pursuing the most sustainable approach, has to sell one of the cows that produces its end product, because of conditions far beyond their control that have eliminated the cows source of food and nutrients.

The other knowingly plants corn that nobody will eat -- at least not in the form of actual corn -- in a field that will very likely flood, thus ruining the crop, and gets paid for it. Twice.

(Sigh)

Egga Disha

As previously mentioned, we eat a good bit o' eggs… at least once a week… typically for dinner.

I’ll often make egg burritos for lunch, tossing in whatever I can rustle up in our fridge and pantry that seems like it might taste good.

The other evening we had an egg burrito for dinner, slightly tweaking a Mark Bittman recipe for “spicy scrambled eggs.” On the side we had a tomato, red onion, and avocado salad. (Yes, yes, I know: tomatoes and avocados? Obviously sourced far, far away from Western Pa. Hey, I do my best. The eggs were local and free-range, so there!).

The burrito was absolutely delicious, but just having these alone as scrambled eggs is also perfectly acceptable.

Spicy Egg Burrito

• 1 jalapeño pepper
• 1 small clove of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 1-inch knob of ginger, peeled and finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon of canola oil
• 5 eggs (there is no flavor substitute for truly free-range eggs)
• Salt and pepper
• ¼ cup of cilantro, chopped
• Shredded cheese of your choice
• 2 tortillas

Roast the jalapeno: Using tongs, hold the jalapeño over a burner, turned to high, rotating as needed, until the skin is charred all over. Wrap it in a small bit of plastic wrap and let it sit for five minutes. Unwrap and scrape off the char. Remove the top and seeds and dice. If you want a spicier burrito, be sure to leave a decent bit of the ribbing on the pepper when removing the seeds.

Crack eggs into a bowl, beat, and add salt and pepper.

Put a large sauté pan on a burner of medium-low heat. Warm tortillas on both sides, until you see just the first bits of brown, move to a plate and cover with a dry dish towel.

Heat the oil over medium heat. Add the jalapeño, ginger, and garlic, and sauté until fragrant and the pepper bits are sufficiently tender, about 2-3 minutes maximum.

Add the eggs, let them begin to set, and proceed as you typically would for scrambled eggs. [Mark Bittman advises removing the eggs from the heat every few minutes, then stirring up, then putting back on the heat. I tried this, once, and it didn’t make any difference in the final product.]

When the eggs are ready, lay out the tortillas, add some shredded cheese in the middle (some manchego would probably be fantastic), top with the eggs, the cilantro, and, if you wish, some of your favorite hot sauce. Wrap ‘er up and enjoy!

And, as for the title of this post, a word from a truly celebrated chef…

As Expected

The Lame Duck in Chief fulfills his promise. Farm Bill vetoed. The House pulls off a first under the current administration, and, as expected, overrides the veto.

The 316-to-108 tally, far over the two-thirds needed to overcome a veto, sent the five-year, multipurpose bill to the Senate. Barring a last-minute shift in that chamber, senators appeared certain to vote overwhelmingly for the bill, sealing the president’s defeat.

Yes, more money for food stamps and a little more conservation and some more farmers markets.

But remember this: in this bipartisan-supported bill, you can make up to $1.25 million in farm and nonfarm income and still qualify for a subsidy for your commodity crop. In every sense, that is a failure to do the right thing.

The Inevitable Farm Bill

After all this time, the Farm Bill has passed the House by a veto-proof margin, so the President’s threats to veto the bill are meaningless. He’ll veto and it will go back to the House, get the requisite two-thirds vote and, poof, it’s law. The Times offers up a pretty good summary.

While I’m nowhere near a Farm Bill expert, and from what I’ve read there are some good things about this behemoth, the subsidies still render this bill a stinker on par with worst CAFO waste pond. This sums it up well:

Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said: “Sometimes here in Washington, we tend to drink our own bath water and believe our own press releases. And to hear some of the debate here, you would think this is the best bill in the world and that everybody out there has just got to support it.”

This comment on a Washington Post story about the Farm Bill – from a real farmer, no less – is even better.

Government incentives are calculated against planting (no one can forsee harvests). My farm is bordered on one side by a river. The bank on my side is between 20 and 30 feet high, and my property never floods in the fall rains and none-too occasional hurricane. The bank on the other side is only about 5 or 6 feet above the average water level, and it routinely - I could even say reliably - floods in the fall. The land on that side of the river amounts to about 200 acres, and every spring, my neighbor plants it in corn. He gets paid to. It doesn't matter the floods ruin the crop every year, that the floods leave all the ears mildewed and unfit even for cattle feed. He gets paid to plant his 200 acres in corn, and so he does. I'd hazard to guess that he gets paid for the loss, too, by federal crop adjustment insurance. Nevertheless, the incentive to plant various crops adds a weight to the base cost of seed, and this cost is distributed in the yield. That means the price of this fellow's 200 acres of sacrificial corn seed gets figured into the cost of seed for crops that are actually harvested - driving my costs, and your food prices, ever higher.

Scrapin’ Up the Bits… Lucy Style

I don’t know whether this is a good thing, but the Post-Gazette has discovered Lucy! The PG’s Marlene Parrish has anointed Lucy, and her delectable banh mi, as a “fresh find.”

Since I have declared Lucy’s banh mi as one of my favorite all-time foods, I am torn. Because this could mean, you know, that when I do get to the Strip to get a banh mi, there might be a long line! And there is nothing worse than waiting, in line, endless minutes ticking by, stomach gnashing, mouth dribbling, eyes open so wide they burn from lack of blinking, for that … first bite.

Too bad it’s on the other side of the state, because I’d love to attend the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture’s inaugural Grass-Fed, Grass-Finished Beef Challenge Cook-Off. The name needs a little work, though.

One of the worst things about not being independently wealthy and having to, like, ya’ know, work for a living, is not being able to spend tomorrow afternoon at Piper’s Pub on the South Side, watching the Champion’s League final between Chelsea and Manchester United (which defeated my Roma side in the semifinals!! Red Devils, indeed!), sipping on a mug or two of “real ale” from one of Piper’s many new firkins. Bloody shame, that is.

And while mushroom hunting is still in the works, I also have intentions of doing some additional foraging for exotic wild foods, about two feet off of my back patio. Because there, you see, resides a single growth of garlic mustard:

What is garlic mustard? An invasive weed, actually. While picking up flowers and veg plants for our garden at Harvest Valley Farms recently, Art King mentioned it to me, after it was mentioned to him by Bill Fuller of Big Burrito fame. This is one nasty weed, explains Iowa chef and Grist contributor Kurt Michael Friese:

It came to New World from Europe in the 1800s as a culinary and medicinal herb. With no natural predators here, it soon grew out of control. Extremely prolific, a single garlic mustard plant can spread into a patch of 20 to 120 feet in just a year. Garlic mustard will shade or crowd out native species of flowers and mushrooms and cause massive disruption in a habitat if left unchecked.

In Hickory Hill Park near where I live in Iowa, garlic mustard's invasion has reached such heights of success that local volunteers pull out nearly a ton of the stuff every year!

Based on the nibbles I’ve taken out on the patio, seems to me that it should have some natural predators: Humans!

I’m hoping to use it in place of arugula in some pasta or to make a pesto out of it, as chef Friese advises. But some smart local farmers would be wise to pick this stuff and package it as a new “gourmet European herb” for their markets. At a production cost of $0 (aside from picking it, I suppose), seems like a winner.

And to end things sort of where they began -- with street food -- one of my favorite songs (and my kids’ favorite songs, too) comes from the late-great Joe Strummer, from his post-Clash career with Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros.

The song, “Bhindi Bhagee,” is an homage to the glories of multi-culturalism, particularly its influence on food and music. In case you can’t understand it, the first verse – the stuff about food – is below the clip.

My daughter particularly likes the “toxic empanada.”

Well, I was walking down the High Road
And this guy stops me
He'd just got in from New Zealand
And he was looking for mushy peas
I said, no, we hadn't really got 'em round here
I said, but we do got

Balti, Bhindi, strictly Hindi
Dal, Halal and I'm walking down the road
We got rocksoul, okra, bombay duck-ra
Shrimp bean sprout, comes with it or without - with it or without
Bagels soft or simply harder
Exotic avocado or toxic empanada
We got akee, lassi, Somali waccy baccy
I'm sure back home you know what tikka's all about - what tikka's all about

To Test or Not to Test?

In the mid- to late-1980s and early 1990s, the first automobile manufacturers began to sell cars with airbags as a standard feature (they weren’t a federal requirement until 1998). Imagine if the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration had sued those carmakers, arguing that they should not be allowed to sell cars with airbags because they were trying to create “false assurances” that people driving those cars would be safer than cars equipped only with seat belts.

It’s a ludicrous proposition, I know. But the government has been actively engaged in a very similar type of action. Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture -- which is charged, in part, with assuring that farms and meat packers produce food free from things that will make consumers sick – sued a Kansas-based beef outfit, Creekstone Farms, to prevent them from testing all of their cattle for so-called Mad Cow Disease, known in scientific circles as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

The feds lost. But they decided to appeal. And it’s looking like they’re set to lose again.

Chief Judge David B. Sentelle seemed to agree with Creekstone's contention that the additional testing would not interfere with agency regulations governing the treatment of animals.

"All they want to do is create information," Sentelle said, noting that it's up to consumers to decide how to interpret the information.

Hmm… Now why would the government object to wider testing of cattle? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Ensure the safety of meat. Isn’t that one of the most important functions of the USDA and FDA and other government agencies, protecting the public well being?

For example, the FDA requires that every single unit of red blood cells and plasma intended for use in patients is tested with exquisitely sensitive (and intensively regulated) tests for HIV, hepatitis C, and hepatitis B, among other things.

Ironically, there are even specific inquiries on the FDA-mandated questionnaires that prospective blood and plasma donors must fill out specifically intended to screen out donors who may have consumed beef that may have come from… wait for it… BSE-infected cows (e.g., From 1980 to 1996, did you spend time that adds up to three (3) months or more in the United Kingdom?)!

So, yes, if you even visited certain countries in the U.K. for just a week between 1980 and 1996, you cannot donate blood in the United States.

Yet, only approximately 1% of cattle intended to become integral parts of chili cook-offs and drunken weekend barbecues across the United States are tested for BSE.

So, again, why would the government – or, to be more accurate, the current administration – object to a cattle company wanting to test more of its cows for BSE?

Larger meatpackers have opposed Creekstone's push to allow wider testing out of fear that consumer pressure would force them to begin testing all animals too. Increased testing would raise the price of meat by a few cents per pound.

This action by the Feds just reeks of the same kind of corrupt behavior of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture when it attempted to outlaw milk labels that used phrases like “hormone free.”

As Creekstone’s attorney told the appeals court judges:

"This is the government telling the consumers, `You're not entitled to this information,'" Frye said.

This is outrageous behavior. And it proves yet again, as Sen. Barbara Boxer once said, that “elections have consequences.”

Scrapin’ Up the Bits… Rampin’ It Up Style

I’ve heard ramps – aka, wild leeks or baby leeks – mentioned on Iron Chef America and Top Chef, read about them in Food & Wine and the New York Times, but until today, I’d never eaten them. They look like a cross between leeks and scallions.

I approached the ramps sans recipe, the great Mother’s Day adventure of 2008, if you will. Decided to grill halibut fillets (from Penn Avenue Fish Company) on a bed of braised ramps (from Farmers @ Firehouse) and wild mushrooms. Kept the halibut simple: olive oil, salt, pepper. Ramps, braised for about 20 minutes in white wine, olive oil, butter, adding the mushrooms for the last 10 minutes of the braise.

The result: holy s@#$! My poor photography skills prevented a photo, but I won’t forget this meal any time soon.

Speaking of holy s@#$… had my first taste of a raw-milk baby swiss from Pasture Maid Creamery in New Castle. Unlike any cheese I’ve had before. Hopefully the farm market at Harvest Valley Farms—where I had my sample while picking up some flowers and veg on a rainy Mother’s Day morning—will be able to procure it on a regular basis.

And speaking of wild food like ramps, it seems like it’s time to take my new-found addiction to mushrooms to the next level. I’m goin’ mushroom huntin’! This week I’ll send my $15 membership check to the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club and, if all goes as planned, take the wife, kids, and do some foraging on one of two upcoming WPMS events: May 24 at Moraine State Park or May 31 at McConnell’s Mills. My one hope: Not to poison myself!

Finally, some good reading. First…

… via Ethicurean, I came across this series at Edible Portland, “Diary of a Young Farmer.” Here, Zoe Bradbury is recounting her efforts to, well, become a young farmer. Given the shrinking number of true small farmers left in the United States, you’d think the feds would be doing everything they could to help one get a foothold in some soft dirt. Um, actually, maybe you wouldn’t. But nevertheless, it’s compelling reading.

… and via The New Yorker, the story of Grant Achatz. About two years ago, I was convinced for a day or two that I had oral cancer. I had just finished an article on researchers developing tests for the early detection of oral and head and neck cancer. A common symptom of oral cancer, tongue numbness. You know what else makes your tongue feel numb? Eating a huge bag of sour patch kids in two sittings!! In any case, Grant Achatz is, by all reports, an incredible chef running one of the most highly respected restaurants in the country. Now he has tongue cancer.

Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. Go Pens!!!!

Food a Spicy Plate for the Media

In the mainstream media, food is hot news right now. The “food crisis.” Corn-based ethanol. Farming. It’s as if somebody opened a window of a room that’s long been shuttered.

The New York Times, for example, has been running a series of agriculture-focused articles. The most recent article looked at farmers and the growing cost of chemical-based fertilizer. The cost of these fertilizers has reached the point, the Times explains, that some farmers have taken to the “age-old” practice of using pig manure to fertilize their fields.

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post also has been running a series of articles on food and the “food crisis.” In today’s paper, the focus was along the lines of other articles recently documenting how rising food prices domestically are affecting people’s lives.

One response, the Post notes, is an increased use of scissors:

Take the uptick in coupon clipping. According to NCH Marketing Services, a coupon clearinghouse in Chicago, the number of grocery coupons redeemed in 2007 increased by 100 million, or 6 percent, to 1.8 billion. The rise reversed a seven-year decline. "Every year, manufacturers have made coupons more difficult to redeem by shortening the expiration date and increasing the purchase requirements. And every year, people redeemed them less," said Charlie Brown, NCH's vice president of marketing. "This tells me that consumers are now more determined to save money."

This is interesting, in large part, because these days we buy very few products from the big name brands, meaning that even if our family wanted to, we’d find very few, if any, coupons for the products we regularly purchase.

This was also surprising:

One thing consumers haven't skimped on are organic products. Over the past 12 months, organic food and beverage sales jumped 25.5 percent, to $4.3 billion, according to Nielsen. Many shoppers who prefer organic are finding other ways to cut back rather than give up products that they think are healthier and better for the environment.

Case in point: Poli Marinova, a Bethesda marketing communications manager, said she has cut her grocery bills by almost 30 percent without switching to conventional foods. Instead, she skips "luxury items" like sushi and prepared sandwiches and soups. "We're buying a lot less overall at Whole Foods. We used to buy juice, biscuits and baby food from there," she said. "Now, we get a lot of that stuff at Costco or the Giant so we can afford to keep buying organic."

It's gotten to the point where Congress is actually holding hearings on the topic, so they must see this as a politically expedient way to make themselves look like they give a rip be hearing from their constituents about this.

At a hearing on the high cost of food on Capitol Hill, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) summed up the current situation this way: "When you walk down the street, you hear people complaining about food prices almost as much as gas prices."

Yes, because Sen. Schumer spends so much time walking through the neighborhoods in his home district.

Even some of the big networks’ evening news programs -- in between must-see segments on teen pop stars’ bare shoulders and self-centered Midwestern pastors -- have found time to report on this topic. Talk about miracles.

The former 2007 Farm Bill, now the 2008 Farm Bill, is also making news, as the House and Senate search for a bill they can agree on. As much as it pains me to say it, this is the one time where the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is actually doing some good. According to the Wall Street Journal, the White House thinks the subsidies in the bill are way too big and is promising a veto if they aren’t slashed.

Some of the regulars from The Ethicurean are at a conference in Phoenix where the Farm Bill is a hot topic. Good reading.

Speaking of farms, two new reports that have not received the media coverage they are due – one from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the other from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production -- have reached unsurprising startling conclusions: CAFOs and industrial agriculture are bad things.

Finally, as for actual food, this recipe for a banana-poblano sauce sounds extremely interesting and quite delicious. In this case, the Washington Post food folks used it on turkey chops, but a white, flaky fish feels like a better option to me.

I'm mixin' up a cocktail...

A nonfood-related item with which to kick off this glorious spring weekend:

The new single from one of the most underrated bands out there, the UK's own, ELBOW.

The Food Crisis: Coming to a City Near You?

Well, a new meme burning through the popular news media at a rabid pace is the international food crisis that might, just might, be starting to nudge its way into the land of large waistlines and large TVs, the good old US of A.

First, the global perspective:

Increased food demand from rapidly developing nations such as China, the use of crops for biofuels, global stocks at 25-year lows and market speculation are all blamed for pushing prices of staples like wheat, maize and rice to record highs.

That in turn has sparked food riots in several African countries, Indonesia and Haiti, and the FAO has warned that 37 countries face food crises.

This is not something that came from no where, however:

"The situation we are in is the result of inappropriate policies over the past 20 years. Between 1990 and 2000 we lowered food aid for agriculture by half," U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Director General Jacques Diouf] said.

Generous farm subsidies in wealthy countries had also discouraged agriculture in the developing world, further aggravating the situation, he said.

"Above all we have not invested in water management in different countries of the third world... In Africa only 7 percent of land is arable," he added.

If you didn’t catch that, the “Generous farm subsidies in wealthy countries” is shorthand for the United States.

Which brings us back to the situation domestically, where food prices are rising dramatically. And it appears that it’s having some perhaps surprising effects. The big box stores, for example, are seeing indications of strange purchasing behavior:

The regulatory clash came amid evidence that a rash of headlines in recent weeks about food riots around the world has prompted some in the United States to stock up on staples.

Costco and other grocery stores in California reported a run on rice, which has forced them to set limits on how many sacks of rice each customer can buy. Filipinos in Canada are scooping up all the rice they can find and shipping it to relatives in the Philippines, which is suffering a severe shortage that is leaving many people hungry.

More about those moves by Costco and Sam’s Club:

The two biggest U.S. warehouse retail chains are limiting how much rice customers can buy because of what Sam's Club, a division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., called on Wednesday "recent supply and demand trends."

[snip]

The limits affect 20-lb bags, not retail-sized portions. Costco could not immediately be reached for comment on its limits or whether they are the first ever.

Sam's Club said it will limit customers to four bags at a time of imported jasmine, basmati and long grain white rice.

In the United States, at least, whether this is an indication of any sort of actual crisis, or something altogether different, is unclear:

The move comes as U.S. rice futures hit a record high amid global food inflation, although one rice expert said the warehouse chains may be reacting less to any shortages than to stockpiling by restaurants and small stores.

In a related story, there is a growing backlash against the boom in corn-based ethanol production as a way to alleviate the dependence on oil. In an Earth Day column in the Washington Post, Lester Brown and Jonathan Lewis, of the Earth Policy Institute and Clean Air Task Force, respectively, say it’s time to end the experiment:

…we call upon Congress to revisit recently enacted federal mandates requiring the diversion of foodstuffs for production of biofuels. These "food-to-fuel" mandates were meant to move America toward energy independence and mitigate global climate change. But the evidence irrefutably demonstrates that this policy is not delivering on either goal. In fact, it is causing environmental harm and contributing to a growing global food crisis.

Their charges consist of:

• It requires tons of energy, mostly coal-based, to produce ethanol
• Ethanol production produces beau coup pollution
• It’s driving up the cost of other food staples – that is, exacerbating the international food crisis.

More than a year ago, some researchers from the University of Minnesota, also in the pages of the Post, predicted some of these problems.

Some biofuels, if properly produced, do have the potential to provide climate-friendly energy, but where and how can we grow them? Our most fertile lands are already dedicated to food production. As demand for both food and energy increases, competition for fertile lands could raise food prices enough to drive the poorer third of the globe into malnourishment. The destruction of rainforests and other ecosystems to make new farmland would threaten the continued existence of countless animal and plant species and would increase the amount of climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It’s funny, in a sad sort of way. So many of these things are discussed directly or alluded to in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. I have yet to read his latest, In Defense of Food – I’m desperately trying to actually finish a fiction book – but I did read Pollan’s most recent essay in the New York Times Magazine. It, too, touches on the environment and food prices.

It’s one of those must reads. Exhibit 1:

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing [about global warming], but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

Seriously. Read the whole thing.

Pizza Fusion: Eco Friendly and Pretty Darn Good

I’ll get this out of the way right up front. I had my doubts. Yeah, yeah, organic. Yeah, yeah, local. Yeah, yeah, hybrid delivery vehicles and old Levi’s masquerading as insulation. All part and parcel of this new “green business” known as Pizza Fusion.

A small chain with only four locations at the moment, three of which are in Florida, I can honestly say I was expecting to leave disappointed. And, I’m happy to report, my expectations were greatly exceeded.

Located on route 8 in Gibsonia, not far from the Turnpike exit for Butler Valley and in the same plaza as one of the relatively new Atria's outposts, Pizza Fusion makes a good pie, even if it is oval.

We ordered a large, half-plain (for the kids), half with sausage and roasted red peppers (for the nonkids). The pizza was thin, with a slightly crisp crust that offered just the right amount of chew. The sauce, just a touch too sweet, the cheese, and the toppings all were obviously of above average quality. The roasted red peppers were organic, the sausage was not.

Overall, an enjoyable pizza. We’ll be back. In the meantime, though, some other observations:

1) Pizza Fusion offers beer and wine, all of which are organic. My wife and I both had a pale ale from Peak Brewing, which wasn’t bad. My personal opinion, however, is that, ecologically speaking, local can be as important as organic, so it would be nice if some local beers of a certain quality (cough, cough… any from Penn Brewery) were offered.

2) Some of the pizza options are, to my mind, unnecessary, bordering on the irrational. A “surf and turf” pizza with steak, shrimp, and lobster? It’s bad enough that there is a BBQ Chicken pizza on the menu (abomination!), but a pizza laden with steak and lobster? For $48? I don’t know what that is, but it ain’t pizza.

3) The service was pretty slow. But this was day two for this restaurant. I was amazed the service wasn’t worse.

4) Finally, our bill was over $40, which most people might say is expensive for dinner at a pizza joint (anticipating a long wait for our pizza, we also got some bread sticks for the kids).

I’m not complaining. I understand that quality ingredients cost more. But when you can get a few (nasty) pizzas from the various national chains for less than $20, that kind of price is a hard sell for those who equate organic and anything “green” with pot-smoking hippies and bleeding heart liberals from San Francisco, and who actually think Domino's is an acceptable meal.

Light, Local, deLicious

Eggs. Love ‘em! I can’t remember the last time I actually had eggs for breakfast. They’re almost always lunch or dinner.

About once a week I make an egg burrito for lunch, usually with some finely diced onion or shallot, a little garlic, some form of heat, some type of cheese, a sprinkle of cilantro.

For dinner, we usually turn to the versatile frittata, my favorite being one topped with garlic-oil infused croutons, chives, tarragon, and multiple dollops of ricotta.

Tonight, with little in the way of time or good options for dinner and not a great variety of available ingredients for a fritatta, we turned again to eggs, very simple and very local.

The eggs, free-range, our last few from Heritage Farm that I picked up at the Farm to Table conference. The eggs would be scambled.

Into the eggs, just before they were set, went some freshly grated Parmesan.

Once the eggs reached the plate, sprinkled on top, some arugula, our first real pickings from the arugula plant I picked up at same said conference, which shares a spot in our dining room window with a field greens plant.

On the side, a few slices of toasted ciabatta, from, I believe, Penn Mac.

We were a little pressed for time, or otherwise I might have reduced some balsamic 'til it got a bit syrupy and drizzled over top of the eggs and bread. Next time.

By no means a stick-to-your-ribs kind of meal, but with some Pellegrino or glass of a fruity white wine, you’ve got yourself one satisfying meal.

They're baa...aack!

Fresh herbs, that is.

After a whiny -- probably overly so -- post last fall lamenting the disappearance of fresh herbs from our little patio-side and lawn gardens, I suppose it's incumbent upon me to likewise celebrate their return.

And, indeed, I'm waaaayyy excited. Probably overly so.

In any case, they may not look like much yet, but soon I'll be mining these bad boys on an almost daily basis.

First, and a nice surprise, cilantro, which, unexpectedly, returned of its own accord.


Next, some very robust looking tarragon.


Finally, some illustrious oregano, soon destined to be mixed with crushed San Marzanos and gently spread atop some pizza dough.



Others are on the way: Chives already look fantastic. The tiniest leaves of mint and sage and thyme are peaking out. Flat-leaf parsley and basil will be planted within a few weeks...

Seriously, can I get an Amen!?

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’.

Food is Expensive

Food prices are climbing.

U.S. consumer food prices normally rise by about 2.5 percent annually, but they increased by 4 percent in 2007 -- the biggest increase in 17 years, according to U.S. Agriculture Department data.

And, if anecdotal media reports are any indication, they are starting to cause some serious pain.

[Patricia] Norris must purchase only what is on her shopping list, to avoid spending more than she can afford.

"Sometimes I cry," she said, when she passes items on store shelves she can no longer buy.

But not everybody is crying. Among others, Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, in last Wednesday’s New York Times, suggest there is a silver lining to these increasing prices, at least potentially:

“It’s very hard to argue for higher food prices because you are ceding popular high ground to McDonald’s when you do that,” said Mr. Pollan, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” (Penguin Press). “But higher food prices level the playing field for sustainable food that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels.”

I have to wonder how accurate this assumption is. There is at least one example in the Times article to back it up:

In the category of meat and dairy, rising commodity prices could very likely help the small but growing number of farmers who raise animals the old-fashioned way, on grassy pastures. With little or no need for expensive grain, these farmers can sell their milk and meat for more attractive prices.

That is welcome news to Ned MacArthur, founder of an organic, pasture-based dairy in Pennsylvania that sells milk, butter and other food under the Natural by Nature label. Unlike dairy farmers who feed their animals grain, people on the 52 farms in his consortium are looking forward to the coming months, he said.

“The grass is starting to grow now so within the next couple weeks the cows are really going to take off,” he said.

But Tom Philpott at Grist argues that, despite some of this (potential) leveling of the playing field, this ‘higher-food-prices-are-ultimately-good’ thinking is wrong-headed.

I have a hard time imagining people who are struggling to put food on the table rambling off to the farmers' market on Saturday to fill cloth bags with the sort of fresh, local, organic produce so beloved by Pollan and Waters (and me). Indeed, higher food prices are likely to send many time- and cash-strapped people in quite the opposite direction.

Rising costs may end up increasing the allure of large entities with economies of scale, cutthroat buying practices, and experience in transforming low-quality ag inputs into stuff people like to eat. I'm talking about fast-food companies, which can likely absorb higher input prices and still churn out crap -- and rake in profits. If that's true, prices at the drive-thru won't rise quite as steeply as those in the supermarket line, giving people yet more incentive to abandon their home kitchens and flock to the Golden Arches.

I believe he has a very strong point. Contrast the reality of Patricia Norris…

"I don't buy anything I don't have to," Norris said.

or of mother-of-three Laura Miller from California (from the same Reuters article)…

She plans meals two weeks in advance and shops with the daughter who doesn't ask her to buy snacks. Miller's printed shopping list, organized by item and place of purchase, shows that she does the bulk of her buying at Wal-Mart.

"I won't pay $6 for a box of cereal when I can get it for $3" at Wal-Mart, she said.

with reality as it is perceived by Alice Waters (per the Times)…

“Make a sacrifice on the cellphone or the third pair of Nike shoes,” she said.

I think part of what Pollan and Waters and others might be discounting here -- aside from how most people outside of San Francisco live and make decisions about food purchases (probably Waters, more so than Pollan) -- is that the local/sustainable food infrastructure, at least in most places, is not set-up to leap into this alleged breach. Local, sustainbly raised food still has to be sought out, through Farmers’ Markets, CSAs, specialty grocery stores, etc.

And even for those willing to undertake such searches, a Tyson broiler chicken at Wal-Mart is still probably going to cost a good bit less than the pastured one from the organic farm two hours away being sold at the Saturday farmer’s market. And a tray of 5 or 6 steaks at Costco with a big Swift sticker on it is still going to be far cheaper, and more readily available, than grass-fed steaks from a farm just down the road.

And it’s not like it’s the fault of the family farms or organizations that organize farmers markets. They are doing their best with the resources they have available. They could sure use some help from the feds or the state government.

In Pennsylvania, this is what qualifies as help:

Governor Edward G. Rendell today announced a new $75,000 investment in farmers markets to improve consumer access to Pennsylvania products.

Development and expansion grants of up to $10,000 are available through the Farmers Market Development Matching Grant Program for eligible farmers, nonprofit organizations, local government units and businesses or associations that manage or operate farmers markets.

$75,000??!! I think Paris Hilton spent more on some fancy bagels for her bevy of personal assistants and sycophantic, hanger-on friends for breakfast yesterday morning.

And while the Farm Bill bouncing its way through Congress increases funding for conservation and organic programs, it still most heavily favors subsidies for commodity crops. And a handful of mentally, and I would argue morally, bankrupt legislators aim to keep it that way…

Farm-state lawmakers, for their part, refuse to pare $5 billion in automatic payouts that go out each year to farmers who have historically planted subsidized crops - regardless of price or whether the crops are still grown.

In short: Less talk about how high food prices are good. More talk about food policy that makes fruit, vegetables, pastured/organic chicken, pork, beef, etc. more affordable and available.