Meat (Sort of) And Farmworkers to Farmers

Two recent posts on Grist caught my attention and inspired some thoughts. The first is this piece on Taco Bell's lack of meat in their... meat.

The funny thing is that people are upset about Taco Bell's not using enough meat instead of praising them for using less. Yeah it's duplicitous to say something (oats and wheat) is what it isn't (dead cows), but let's not forget that factory farmed animal flesh is one of the leading causes of climate change.

Great thinkers on food from Thomas Jefferson to Mark Bittman all advise us to use meat as a seasoning rather than the main event, so isn't Taco Bell tricking people into eating less meat just like Jessica Seinfeld duping kids into eating spinach brownies? The right deed for the wrong reason? All's well that ends well? And other literary references?

This other piece shows the success of one program in helping farmworkers become actual farmers. That four letter difference translates to a tremendous change in quality of life and could not exist without the growth of farmers markets and CSA programs. More proof that the local foods movement has teeth as a vehicle for change and isn't just an arugula cult.

Though I LOVE arugula. And if you don't, you're a monster.

Winter CSA Article

Hi there. Check today's Globe for my piece on winter CSA programs around Boston, or see here. If you've experienced a winter CSA and have something to share, do tell.

A Sea of People and Produce

I'm lucky to live within biking distance of a year-round farmers market, no small feat here in the icy, snowy, slushy, sleety Northeast. That said, lately I've been driving because this is what the bike path looks like:



Last weekend the Northampton Winter Farmers Market transmogrified into the Northampton Winter Fare. This is part of series in which several local winter markets merge together and, like Voltron, create something even more formidable.

The Fare was jam-packed, partly with people selling packed jam. It was inspiring to see so many people come out on a frosty Saturday to support their local farmers, and the offerings were top notch: chickens, eggs, grass fed beef, honey, maple syrup, cider, apples, root veggies, blackcurrant cordial and so forth. My favorite purchase was a broccoli plant.



While most vendors were selling vegetables that had already been picked, one offered pots full of lettuce ($2) and broccoli ($5). For little more than the cost of a severed head of broccoli, you could buy a still-living broccoli and guillotine it yourself. The farmer assured me I'd have a nice, full crown and then smaller rabe-like offshoots for the next month or two. I'd say buying it was a no-brainer, except that the young crown looks like a little green brain.

While surfing the sea of like minded food devotees and gawking at people hawking frost-sweetened veggies and sacks of apples, I was overcome with a single powerful thought: imagine if none of this existed. A few years ago, it didn't.

I can't believe how quickly the local foods movement has come into being. A few years ago, the high school cafeteria that hosted the event would have been empty except for a few stale morsels of beefaroni and the ghosts of lunchtime insults still hovering in the air. Thousands of dollars would not have gone to small farms, and thousands of pounds of real food would not have had been bought.

Luckily, all that did happen. And luckily, the patrons had the good sense to ignore the sign on the door to the venue.

JJ Bistro and French Pastry

When Elise and I had the privilege of visiting our good friends Jon and Layla in Honolulu, we also paid a visit to JJ Bistro and French Pastry. I was surprised to find that there was more than meets the eye at JJ's, and much that meets the eye too, especially in the rainbow-colored pastry case. I wrote about JJ's for the Globe, which you can see in today's paper and online here.

Tragedy, Humanity, Bread

"There’s no better season than winter to have the smell of fresh baked bread in the house, to hear in a quiet clean kitchen the sound of a bread crust crackling as it cools." -- Michael Ruhlman

I can't get the awful news about representative Giffords and the other shooting victims out of my mind. Reeling from disappointment with our country, our race, and the world in general, my hands found themselves wrist-deep in flour and water.

I return to food, again and again, for countless reasons. Man and woman can't live on bread alone, but bread is not any one thing alone: it is sustenance, it is comfort, it is therapy, it is a celebration of life, and it is even exercise for all of the atrophying muscles in our modern hands.

One of the many reasons I have devoted my life to immersing myself in all things edible (not literally, unfortunately) was a growing disappointment with nearly everything else. When I first got my laptop and made the Times my homepage, I noticed a pattern. It went like this:

1. Wake up. Go on-line.
2. Get barraged by news of political strife, ecological havoc, murder and mayhem.
3. Notice the link to Dining & Wine. Flee to it.
4. Read inspiring stories of heroes of the food revolution, synthesizing their desire for food justice, environmental stewardship, gastronomic sublimity, and the art of living.
5. Think "maybe the world isn't such a terrible place."

Escapism? Quite the opposite. In my senior year of college I took a class on storytelling, mythology and oral tradition taught by the professor and poet (and baker, I'm sure) Luis Yglesias. He insisted that we immerse ourselves in lore and legend in order to live a life fulfilled. To me, it sounded like hiding from reality. I told him as much, he tucked a thumb under his rainbow suspenders, twirled his mustache, gazed out the window, and finally said something along the lines of "It's not an escape; it's a return."

I feel the same way about food, and lately bread especially. At the moment I have a loaf of Michael Ruhlman's mulitgrain boule rising. Before that I made a 100% whole wheat from Beard on Bread, a buttered slice of which is pictured at top. It took coarse, whole wheat, two tablespoons of molasses, a tablespoon of salt, a little yeast, a little water, a few minutes of my day, and nothing else.

It was dense, hearty, flavorful bread. Food bread. The pieces of chaff left in the wheat crunched between my teeth like sparkly bits of Parmigiano Reggiano. This is the kind of stuff that you can feel in your bones was what your ancestors ate. Eating it, and making it, reminds me of one of the vows from Elise and my wedding: to help each other focus on what is most essential.

My thoughts are with everyone who has suffered from the recent tragedy in Arizona. My thoughts are wary of those whose hands are not completely clean of this blood, despite their backpaddling. They might threaten some of the values that are most near and dear to me -- peace, civility, tolerance, honesty -- but they can't shake my humanity. With my hands plunged in stiff, dark dough, my faith that what is good in the world will persist is immovable.

A Whirlwind Tour of Holiday Eating

Much was consumed during recent days of revelry.

Going back to Chanukah, at Amanda's Annual Hot Oil Party we made olibollen: the yeasty Dutch donuts (translation = "fat balls") for which our dog is named. And here's a picture of the canine Olibollen knocking a snowball out of Elise's hand.



Knocked out by Elise's hand was this fabulous chicken liver pâté. We used MB's recipe, substituting Maker's Mark for cognac, going with my beloved "because that's what we had" principle of cooking.



The bourbon turned out to be a welcome addition. If I ran a gastropub, I would have to serve bourbon pâté, and would be obliged to write something obnoxious about it on the menu, using the phrase "with a distinctly American bite." Later we mixed Maker's Mark with champagne, which was dubbed a Pagne-Maker or a Cha-Ma (for the Jews). Because that's what we had, and because we'd had too much.

Christmas was spent feasting with former T&F contributors Dave and Karen. Karen made cassoulet, and while she chopped the bacon, the heavens showed their approval by spilling buttery light all over the kitchen.



While the cassoulet gurgled, we warmed gingerbread cookies on the lid of the Dutch oven.



Dave made an aspic from a Chez Panisse cookbook. It was like chicken salad from space.



E. and I made D&K some edible presents. These included too-gingery apple sauce, pink kraut, currant-coconut granola and anise-black pepper cranberry-cider compote. Yeah, we're foochebags.



Perhaps the crowning achievement of holiday season eating was a breakfast of homemade bagels and lox.



Earlier in the week Karen cured gravlox, and I made scallion bagels using a foolproof Joan Nathan recipe that ran with one of my first articles. I let the dough sit in the fridge overnight, which was an improvement. I also over-greased some of the pans, which means a few bagels came out with their butts fried in olive oil. Again, an improvement.

Hope you ate well too.

Sculptured Rocks and the Indian Amphitheater

See here and here for two of my writers' picks from a recent travel feature in the Globe. Apparently I like rocks and water. Next year I'll try to pick places that involve wind or fire.

Bittman on Socialism, Vegetables and Hypocrisy

"So here's my question for every politician who has ever riled up an audience with the notion that liberals will 'force' people to eat their vegetables: Why is it okay to encourage people to buy junk food if it’s not okay to encourage them to eat vegetables? And if it’s not okay to encourage people to buy junk food, then why is the government still doing it?"

http://markbittman.com/socialists-tell-americans-to-eat-their-veggie

Custard in a Pumpkin

I've wanted to bake custard in a pumpkin for so long that I think the urge must have originated in a previous life. Then, I assume, I was a rosy-cheeked hobbit with a fertile pumpkin patch and an overly productive flock of little hobbit-chickens (Cornish game hens?).

This year baking custard in a pumpkin (custkin? pumpkard? cumpstkin? pustard?) was actually one of my Four Fall Food Challenges, which also included crabapple jelly, acorn bread, and something else, because Four Fall Food Challenges sounds better than Three Fall Food Challenges even though I only thought of three.

Why haven't I blogged about the FFFC's? Because I didn't actually make any of them.

Until this past weekend, when I simmered lemongrass and star anise in homemade coconut milk to mix with the eggs and sugar that would fill the empty cavity formerly stuffed with seeds and bitter, stringy pumpkin pulp. I think it was definitely an improvement over a pumpkin au natural, and come to think of it, I know some people who would benefit from having their insides replaced with custard, too.

Baking a custpumptardkin is easy and fun, plus it's hard to imagine any dish that would be more at home in a fairy tale, with the exception of some sort of grim pie made from English orphans. I worked off of a recipe I found on-line, and I hesitate to share it without further tinkering. But the idea is really quite simple: make custard, scoop the guts out of pumpkin, and pretend that the pumpkin is a glass pan in a bain-marie.

If I were to do it over again, I'd use canned coconut milk, which is thicker than any homemade version I've ever concocted, less sugar, a pinch of black pepper, and not a pumpkin. Pumpkins are pretty, but I think a softer, sweeter squash, like a kabocha, kuri, or even an acorn (squash), would fare better.

And if I could really do it all over again, I'd still be that hobbit.

A Food Hero

Rejected Names For A Foodie High Horse

Yesterday's post included mention of my foodie high horse, which I called the Black Scallion. Here is a list of alternate names I decided not to go with:

- Feed Steed
- Epicurean Equestrian
- Appaloosa Pupusa
- Thorough Bread
- Venison Saddle
- Mark Bit-man
- Peanut Bridle
- Gallop Scallop (Or Paddock Haddock)
- Sel de Mare
- Pony of Brandy
- Idaho Stud
- Trotters
- Mane Plate
- Cote du Roan
- Port Clydesdale Fresh Catch
- Palomino Acid

What I Ate In St. Louis

When I go to St. Louis for Thanksgiving I eat things that I never eat during the rest of the year.

That includes the obvious Americana served alongside the turkey, like sweet potatoes topped with toasted marshmallows and "green" bean casserole, but there are other things I eat before and after the holiday that sometimes challenge my conception of food.

Omelettes in a bag, for instance. For the past two years, my makua (Hawaiian for mother-in-law) has laid out a make-your-own omelette in a bag station for the many friends and relatives who gather for the holiday. Making an omelette in a bag is a lot like making an omelette out of a bag up until the part when you put in a bag. You fill a Ziploc with the egg mixture and float it into a simmering pot of water. When the egg and the orange cheddar pull away from the sides, it's done.

Does estrogen leak from the bag during the process? Let's just say I don't own any bras. Yet.

Then there was Lion's Choice, not to be confused with a lion's choice, though if a lion were to ever sample the "seasoned salt" that is the primary condiment at Lion's Choice, a roast beef-centric fast food restaurant native to St. Louis, it would surely enjoy it. (And then kill you.)

I have no idea what makes the seasoned salt so addictive, though I suspect that it's one of those things that make junk food as addictive as hard drugs.

Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy eating all of these things, which is to say that I do. If nothing else, eating like a suburbanite for a few days permits me to demount my high horse, which I only feed local, seasonal Asian greens and which I've named the Black Scallion.

It reminds me that although I wouldn't live as long if I ate like this all the time, I don't die when I do.

Yet.

Anniversary Uno

I just returned from traveling for our first wedding anniversary and then for the anniversary of the apocryphal interracial love-fest we call Thanksgiving, though some Native Americans mark the occasion as a National Day of Mourning.

My travels included several interesting foodsperiences, which is a word that I just made up. I'll start with the anniversary.

First there was an indoor anniversary picnic of pâté (not to be confused with pâte), triple creme, baguette, sliced cucumbers, grapes, wine, and so forth. As I assembled that spread I learned something about myself: as much as I love Sichuan, when it's time to celebrate, all I want is French (or faux-French, as our meal may appear to connoisseurs, though it had the desired effect).

Breakfast the next day was Iggy's bagels and (responsibly farmed) smoked salmon, and thanks to my purchase of a champagne-saving cork, we drank dry mimosas then and throughout the day. In fact, we did little else, though we did walk up a ski run, where my elfin wife mugged for the camera.



An Indian dinner in Williamstown that night was unremarkable, but the moon looked pretty cool, and kind of like a buffalo.



Oddly, there was a John Harvard's Brew House in the hotel complex we were staying in, and on the same date for the second year in a row I found myself drinking their inoffensive, cartoonish beers: we went to the one in Harvard Square the night before our wedding.



We ordered a flight and did blind taste tests until we got them all right. And then, feeling even more celebratory, I guiltily ordered some buffalo tenders. Guess French isn't the only way I like to party.

Next time: culinary adventures in suburban St. Louis.

The Magic of Fair Trade

See here for my good friend Andrew Slack's Huff-post on chocolate, fair trade, and Harry Potter. They go together better than you might think.

Also, just because this is my 666th post doesn't mean that I think Harry Potter is satanic.

Mimi and Me

See here for my Q&A on the Forward's food blog with former NYT restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton, who was a pleasure to speak with.

Quote of the Day

From this NYT article:

"The end of the meal caused some confusion. A sweet custard seemed to conclude the meal, but it was followed by a salty sea slug topped with green chilies."

So that's where Calvin went: Chengdu.

Neither Tea nor Food

I have evolution and selective breeding on the brain as I'm finally reading Guns, Germs and Steel, which answers all those questions you never thought to ask, like "Why didn't we domesticate zebras?" (Answer: they bite and don't let go.)

And so when I last took my dog to the field across the street from our new digs in Northampton, MA, I couldn't help but think the following: after thousands of years of survival of the fittest, learned behavior and so forth, dogs have scored an extremely secure niche in the human world. For proof, consider the (shameful) existence of cupcakes for dogs.

Formerly dogs had to be good hunters and guardians to earn a spot at the campfire, as well as the bones and scraps of the kill. But today's dog earns its keep by doing goofy stuff like this.



My dog Oli, the pinnacle of canine evolution, has perfected his meal ticket by perfecting his desirability in terms of companionship. Because who could answer "no" to the question so clearly posed by the above photo: won't you be my pal?

Cinnamon-Chili Braised Brisket

There is only one word to describe the cinnamon-chili braised brisket I recently made: "uf."

Though I've used a Jewish word to describe it ("uf" is as Jewish a word as "Jewish"), this one was not cooked with tomato paste, carrots and the other accoutrements that so often accompany this cut of meat when served by members of the tribe. This brisket was a little smoky, a little spicy, a little sweet, and a lot delicious.

It was a Southwestern fantasy brisket, perfect for a day of watching Southwestern fantasy movies. My friends and I holed up for a Sergio Leone movie marathon, and as we've learned before, braised meats are a movie marathon's best friend; just thinking about it makes me want another pork butt pancake.

I like to think that I did for brisket what Leone did to the Western: I took something already very good, ignored genre, added some foreign flavor and weird music. So maybe I didn't add the music, but it did come in later.



Three days before I defrosted a three pound hunk of locally raised, grass fed beef, which by the way cost as much per pound as "natural" supermarket meat (about ten bucks). I believe that we should all be cutting down on our meat intake, but I also believe that there is nothing quite like an enormous piece of raw meat to stir one's blood. Quinoa just doesn't have the same effect on me.

As I prepared the meat my dog wandered in with a dazed look on his face, like he was getting a contact high from the aroma. I made him a little dog agua fresca by pouring the juices from the bag into his bowl.



Neither he nor I could leave the kitchen while the meat was around. I tasted a piece of it raw. I tasted a piece of it seared and unseasoned: pure cow. And then it disappeared for several hours into a dutch oven inside of a non-dutch oven. I could have done it in the crockpot, but this way the radiant heat from the oven would also warm the house, killing two birds (and one cow) with one stone.



For spices I used cinnamon, whole dried chiles and black peppercorns, chipotle powder, an absurd amount of cumin that still wasn't too much -- when have you ever thought "this has too much cumin?" -- some coconut sugar and cider vinegar that was still fermenting, so somewhere between cider and cider vinegar. It simmered with all of the above plus a little water and several seriously browned onions.



After a few hours in the oven-within-the-oven, the meat had become tender and the liquid, onion and spice mixture reduced to fantasy beef candy. I pulled the meat, keeping the strands as long as possible (I love brisket for that -- meat noodles) and put it back into the pot to marinate for another two days with all of the goodies.

During one of the Leone movies we reheated it and then ate it on slices of Iggy's with sprigs of cilantro and a little smoky bean dip I'd made as well.

And then the weird music did come in. It was the squealing of our ecstatic stomachs.

Uf.

Slow Food

Watch as much of this as you possibly can. If you can't handle it, skip to the three minute mark.




Sometimes you have to slow something down to realize how weird it is. For contrast, here's the original.

I've Gone Soft

It's been said that life is what happens when you're making other plans, but I think that statement rings more true with a few tweaks: life is what happens only when you plan it.

When I was a touring sketch comic, life was interesting by default. A little too interesting, which is one of the many reasons I'm no longer on the road. Now most of my days are spent in front of the friendly little robot on which I'm currently typing (R.W. Apple called his "the piano"), and if I don't force myself to get up, get out and go stumbling around the woods just for kicks or for wild edibles, it doesn't happen.

Last Friday I was reflecting on how long it had been since I'd slept outside, and so Elise and I hastily factored in a camping excursion for that night. What I wanted was to scale a mountain with everything we needed on our backs, but that wasn't going to happen with only a few hours' notice, so we settled for car camping at a nearby state park. Of course campfire cooking would be part of the allure.

We arrived at dusk and barely had time to set up the tent and find firewood, so it was a good thing we didn't plan anything elaborate for dinner, else we wouldn't have eaten for hours. Instead we had burritos I bought that afternoon. We nestled them in the fire pit to warm up, protected by their aluminum second skins.

Breakfast the next day consisted of foraged tea -- hemlock, not to be confused with Plato's last beverage -- bacon cooked over the fire and eggs cooked in the bacon fat. Yeah, we went there.

Even though we had a cell phone and a car and were parked just off of a paved road that led back to civilization, the trip felt rough. It was cold, the ground was hard, and the dog kept waking up and shifting around throughout the night, and in a tent as small as ours it was impossible to not notice.

Also impossible to not notice was the howling wind and the howling coyote that got us up in the middle up of the night and made us wonder about whether the tent was a strong enough psychological barrier against predators, since it certainly wasn't much of a physical one.

In the morning I realized I'd been on edge since we got there, either because I was cold, busy coaxing flames out of damp wood, or just unused to unfamiliar surroundings. As the title of the post says, I've gone soft.

That's when I decided I had to turn things around. I took a swig of the bright, warm hemlock tea, straining the leaves out with my teeth, took off all of my clothes and jumped into the pond.

The air temp was in the 30's, and since there wasn't any ice on it I'm guessing the pond was in the 40's. I remember one instant of opening my eyes under the frigid, murky water, and it seemed that if I lingered any longer my head would implode from cold. I dried off with my pajama pants and sat on a piece of cardboard by the fire, watching my feet steam. Until then, I didn't know that feet could steam, and I wouldn't have learned that from sitting in the apartment watching Netflix.

As an 18th century Hassidic mystic once said, "Just as the hand, held before the eye, can hide the tallest mountain, so the routine of everyday life can keep us from seeing the vast radiance of and the secret wonders that fill the world. "

Just as a computer screen can hide from view the nearest state park, so can jumping into a freezing pond remind you why it's important to plan the good stuff.