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.


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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.

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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)."

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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.

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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.

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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."