Quickie: Top Chef and Catalan Salad

The cooks love to talk Top Chef. Love it. The shit-talking that goes on about the contestants is on par with the shit-talking that we do about each other, and the challenges are fun little intellectual exercises for cooks prepping the same stuff day in and day out.


But my attention waned over the past two seasons. The show became more slick, and while the caliber of the chefs has increased, so have the egos and the attitudes. I'm a low-key person by nature, so this has been a turnoff. But the challenges are fun and it's inspiring.


What bugs me about it lately is the amount of branding. The chefs now are transported in Toyota Highlanders, as Padma informs us, they await the verdict in the Gladware dry storage room while drinking beers that looked like Michelobs instead of the anonymous (and not profitable) glasses of wine. And I swear I heard the product placement guy gasp with glee when one of the chefs drew Velveeta as an ingredient. It seems unnecessary for such a popular show to be so committed to greater and more specific product placement.


For lunch I made the Catalan Salad recipe that I've shared. Despite having to prepare the dressing by hand when our blender didn't work, it was awesome-spicy, nutty, nice and thick, I nearly ate it with a spoon. I threw it on some frisee from Crystal Organics. I think I'm going to eat more than an entire day's worth of veg in one sitting. I'll also probably reek of garlic all night.

Life in the Echo Chamber

I read and hear a lot about farms and farming. I go to farmer's markets weekly, I read The Omnivore's Dilemna and I subscribe on RSS to the NYT Dining page, Gourmet's free online content and my chef's blog. Then I go to work, where we talk about the farms supplying us each week, the produce that we get and the challenges faced in a drought-stricken state.


Honey likes to talk about the economics of it all, so I'm getting better-versed in that aspect of farming, and we take The Economist which does nothing if not cover exhaustively. And since I've been given free reign over a friend's backyard for gardening purposes this year, I've started reading about organic gardening. I've read lots about farming in the past year.


So I was tempted not to share the umpteenth farming article to appear in my Reader. It's good, don't get me wrong, but much of it is information I've already gotten in one place or another in the past few months.


What I forget is that people who don't work and shop where I do often don't think about the importance of farming and farm policy. They aren't aware of the current agricultural landscape in America, and the problems that it poses, economically, culturally, or environmentally. Maybe they didn't have time to read the last three articles that I diligently read and shared.


So I've shared the article from Gourmet. The first three pages are mostly about a specific family; it's interesting, but the most important stuff is on the last three pages. Read it so I don't feel compelled to post the same farm rant yet again. And check out the new links to the left. Atlanta Music Therapy is my old roommate's blog about his weekly music forays, and frontburner is chef's blog. Both warrant investigation and subscription.

He Came! He Came!

Mr. Edges visited us on Friday. It's like Christmas, but with sharp knives when that happens. He even put a sharp edge on the walmart knife I got when I was seventeen, and donated to the restaurant for cutting pasta. He even remade the tip. And nothing, nothing was better than the first shallot I cut with the new edge on My Knife. Such precision! Such control! Such ease!


Usually the day that the knives get sharpened a note goes on the board: "Caution- Knives sharpened TODAY!" A sharp knife is indeed much safer than a dull one. But if you cut yourself with a sharp knife, you'll do far more damage. Since the servers have to use a kitchen knife for their lemons, we feel a responsibility to warn them.


We cooks on the other hand know that someone will cut the hell out of themselves with a newly-sharpened knife, and joke about it, holding our collective breath. So far, no new wounds (knocks on wood). But the knives are still sharp...

What the Hell

Normally I share and leave it to my diligent readers to notice new stories, but this is outrageous. And I'm fond of tilting at windmills, but some times there are so damn many.

On Cooking, Science, and Learning

A quote from what I'm reading right now:

"It could be said that science is boring, or even that science wants to be boring, in that it wants to be beyond all dispute. It wants to understand the phenomena of the world in was that everyone can agree on and share; it wants to make assertions from a position that is not any particular subject's position, assertions that if tested for accuracy by any sentient being would cause that being to agree with the assertion. Complete agreement; the world put under a description--stated that way, it begins to sound interesting.

"And indeed it is. Nothing human is boring. Nevertheless, the minute details of the everyday grind involved in any particular bit of scientific practice can be tedious even to the practitioners. A lot of it, as with most work in this world, involves wasted time, false leads, dead ends, faulty equipment, dubious techniques, bad data, and a huge amount of detail work. Only when it is written up in a paper does it tell a tale of things going right, step-by-step, in meticulous and replicable detail, like a proof in Euclid."

What? What, Epicure? You're quoting a dystopian Sci-Fi novel on a food blog? Well, yes. I hang out with geeks obsessed with science. My fun reading during school was cookbooks and Carl Sagan. I like science.

The first real food text I read was the Bible, and I fully expected to develop my cooking career as a molecular gastronomist: one of those people with weird hair whose pantry included a stock of five-syllable chemicals that make the foams, the gels, the inexpicable possible. Chefs, as professionals and trendsetters must, I thought, work in this form. Otherwise what they produced could only be pedestrian, merely making what the home cook could. And the science involved in cooking seemed so powerful: if one understands how a process happens, one can control and perfect that process.

But I was going back and forth between the Bible and my CSA box, where sometimes the greens were wilted, the strawberries already starting to degrade, and I found myself less interested in the chemistry and manipulation of flavor, texture and aroma than in the processes that would elevate what I already had in front of me.

I've learned that science is cool, and cooking an art. There are strict rules to follow to produce the best results consistently, but cooking itself is not cool. It's painful: I'm averaging a burn a week, and I've learned that the story about how a towel will protect one's hand while shucking oysters is a dirty, dirty lie. I look forward to my days off not for the leisure, but for the fact that my body can recover from what I've done to it.

I've also learned that I love food treated simply and minimally. The CSA introduced me to vegetables in such great variety that I was astounded. Work has only furthered this fascination. The colors, textures, and rich flavors found in what most Americans view as side dishes are inspiring. Much as I love the art of curing meat, vegetables are my first culinary love, one that I feel compelled to friends, with comments like "I never knew that I liked turnips." gratifying my efforts.

I don't have much interest in foams, though I know how the hows and whys of whipping cream, and take a measure of pride in doing it just so, time after time: one Thanksgiving a relative asked if we couldn't just buy Cool Whip as I wore out my arm on a cold whisk. "It's my time, and it's worth it." I snarled. Likewise, I will probably never make noodles out of gelatin, but the body of a jus, the way a glace sets hard in the walk-in give me a sense of pleasure that warms my cynic's heart.

I will be forever indebted to OFaC for fostering my attention to culinary detail: I measure for everything, try to quantify my results. Even if we cook by hand and instinct, I think it's imperative to know why we do what we do. If we know our science, we can correct for woody beets, stubbornly weak stocks, risotto that wasn't toasted properly, and coppa that must, per the health department, cure at far too low a temperature, and thus ferment slowly, or, god forbid, not at all.

Science is knowledge, and knowledge, of course is power. Enough typing for now. I fine-diced a half-pan of onions for mirepoix tonight, and my hands ache. I dream of the day that we're visited by Mr. Edges, and I get a sharp knife again.

What I learned today:

Focaccia does not take kindly to nearly doubling its cooking time. I can, however, run in my clogs without spraining my ankle.

I sent Honey to the UK yesterday and went to work on a grand total of 5 hours sleep. I'm definitely feeling less than awesome.

But tomorrow? Tomorrow, I start planting my garden proper. Somewhere there are pictures of seedlings, and when I find them, I post them.


And there's apparently a 150-page state health code that I have yet to read. I just started a very cool novel that I need to finish by the end of the week. I don't feel like adding 150 pages to my workload, but I need to learn it eventually, right?

Finally, the breakfast sausage recipe in Charcuterie is pretty durn tasty. We had roughly 15 people consume 5 pounds of pork at family meal today. I can't wait till my sage plants yield leaves though: dry stuff is OK, but I love the flavor of fresh sage. And it never occurred to me that ginger was a normal flavor in breakfast sausage until the oven cook guessed what I was making from the ginger alone.

Dammit.

We had a health department inspection yesterday. The inspector didn't take kindly to our cured meats, house-made sausage, or our new chemical system: instead of buckets of cold bleach-water from the unlabeled ecolab dispenser, each cook had a bottle of food-safe sanitizer with mild detergent on his or her station. Apparently the buckets are OK despite the fact that dirty rags inevitably find their way in their, and I swear I've read that chlorine in water loses its sanitizing abilities with time, but the new chemicals we'd bought? Verboten.

It was a rough night. We work hard on the sausages and cured meats, and had to literally throw some things away. Nobody was in a very good mood.

So today I pulled up the health code for Fulton County, and read through it. Quite a bit of it was irrelevant, since we aren't new construction or mobile, but I read nothing prohibiting the grinding of meat or making of sausage. Nothing prohibiting meat-curing at refrigerated temperatures, and nothing that prohibited our sanitizing system.

This would be reassuring but for the liberal usage of phrases like "in the opinion of the inspector" throughout the code. Ours had apparently attended some servesafe training, but appeared to lack a basic understanding of the processes at work in the restaurant: that curing and cure salt make foods less attractive to harmful microbes, that sanitizer is sanitizer is sanitizer, no matter how it's stored. Some inspectors dock restaurants for having unwrapped straws for guests; some don't. Many, many parts of the inspection are open to an individual's interpretation. And there's no supervisor to talk to when a restaurant feels that they're being unfairly penalized.

It might be ideal to request a re-inspection, health code in hand, and to counter the missing points with references and explanations, but we scored too high to request one, and they're only granted at the discretion of the department of health. Since we hadn't been inspected in 18 months-the code states that restaurants will be inspected every 6-I suspect that very few restaurants get the requested re-inspections.

It seems that our best bet is to know our code and wait to see what the next inspector says. Or to lobby. You know, with all the free time and money that we have.

Culinary Milestone

Tonight I ground 119 pounds of pork. Then I went upstairs and finished the cure on some coppa and seasoned it with Spanish spices. Meanwhile, chef seasoned two lomos, and the sauté cook wrapped them while chef cured two bellies. Our sausage guy showed up as we were working on our projects, and watched us make 72 pounds of the pork into sausage.

I now have a theory that Christ was mis-transcribed when he said "The poor will always be among us." I think he really said "The pork will always be among us."

Do I care that it's a cheesy joke? No.

In a shoutout to my friends: tonight I quantified the amounts of seasonings for the coppa. Generally we eyeball it, but I wanted something more reliable. And so tonight I say: SCIENCE!

It works, bitches.

Those who can't write, share

I haven't been keeping up with my goal to write once a week. I tried a Valentine's Day post, but I try every year, and eventually I just get bored with failure. I tried a Sunday supper post, but I bake bread every Sunday, and writing about the menus without trying one seemed disingenuous. I'm looking forward to spring vegetables, but I still love my winter greens and turnips, and a wishy-washy post about vegetables feels pointless. I'm planting a garden, but feel like updating on that is about as welcome as coworkers' baby pictures. What do you care that the first thing to sprout was the broccoli raab from a 2003 seedlot?

I'm sure that I'll snap out of this soon. Until then I'm still sharing what I'm reading and enjoying; maybe that's worth something. The Golden Clog nominations were announced today, but for some reason, Eater is only offering me the option of subscribing to its comments, so I'm linking through Ruhlman's blog, which I love. Check it out while I languish.

Time for the NYT Dining and Wine Recap!

Getting it Backwards: OK guys, if this is gluttony, why are you replacing butter and rendered beef fat with margarine and vegetable oil? There's trimming costs and there's cheapening the meal. Fascinating article, though.

This would normally be my soapbox article. But frankly, I think that Bittman does an excellent job of summing up the problems with modern meat production and consumption, the myriad economic and social factors, and he provides the more compelling statistics when it comes to meat and the environment.

Speaking of health and the environment, yes, I did read about the high mercury levels in sushi tuna, and I'm not reading anything else from the NYT about it. The article that came to my reader last week was shameful: there were no scientists explaining exactly what the heightened mercury levels meant, the recommended rates of consumption of fish with certain mercury levels, or the health repercussions of consuming too much mercury, just quotes from consumers who appeared to be as woefully ill-informed as I was. I've since read good articles that gave me all the facts I wanted, but they weren't in the NYT. So I will be going elsewhere for my mercury information.

I've been looking for a Cocida recipe since it was mentioned on lobstersquad

Here's the Soapbox Article

Georgia's got some special liquor laws. We're one of 15 states (as of 2006) that doesn't allow off-premise alcohol sales on Sundays. We have multiple dry and half-dry (beer and wine only) counties. In Atlanta, last call is at 2:30 a.m., except for Sundays, when the bars all close at midnight, but bars in Dekalb can stay open till four, seven nights a week. If you want to buy booze and take it home on one of the six legal days, you have till 2:00 in Atlanta, and midnight in Dekalb. I haven't tried to buy beer at midnight on a Monday in years, but my experience is that if the clerk is even a little dubious as to the legality of the transaction, he or she won't sell, terrified that the customer is a cop.

The most onerous, of course, is the Sunday sales law. I hate the early closing time on Sundays--haven't we all done whatever worshiping we want to by midnight? Let us drink!--but far more people have been tripped up by not buying enough beer for two days on Saturday. For a couple of years, various bills allowing Sunday sales have made their way in front of the state legislature. And every time good ol' Sonny has taken a break from fishing to get on the horn and insult the city that pays the bills for the teetotalling evangelical rednecks who elected him. It's delightful.

But I was born and raised in Georgia, so I can't exactly claim ignorance with the laws. No, what really bugs me, what seems completely intractable, and what is deeply, deeply unfair to small breweries and wineries--we dream of distilleries--in Georgia is our three-tier distributorship system.

Here's how it works: a brewery that wants to sell in Georgia finds a distributor to market and sell its products to grocery and liquor stores and restaurants. The producer of the booze pays for this sort of marketing, as well as the more traditional sort, usually print and billboard ads. The distributors pay lobbyists, who take lawmakers out to lunch and on other free outings to talk up the "purity" and standards that the three-tier system ensures.

It works for Budweiser and other massive companies that can find the money in their budgets to pay enough for the distributors to promote their newest almost-craft-brewed, low-carb, hair-regenerating product. But for small local companies, it's a bit more difficult. Local brewers here have difficulty getting their small-volume products promoted (with the notable exception of Sweetwater, which will give away kegs for anything) by distributors that are getting way more cash from the big guys. It's a system that works for everyone but the small brewers, who don't have the cash to wield influence anyway. It also shut down Dogwood Brewery in 2003.

What about the purity, you say? The standards? Well, the distributors don't actually inspect any of the sites for safety or health codes, and there are laws about what constitute safe beer, wine and liquor in this country. At the end of prohibition, local and state governments weren't inspecting alcohol producers, so distributors fulfilled the roles that those agencies now perform. Importers are responsible for verifying the credentials of foreign-produced alcohol, which, in most countries, is going to be produced according to standards far more strict than the ones we use over here.

That's why I bristled when I read Craig Wolf's comments in this article. First, Mr. Wolf, a system that has "worked" since prohibition isn't necessarily the best one out there, especially since your industry was created as a compromise between dries and wets. Second, jackass, you and your industry have been promoting the "bottle of 1997 whatever" red herring for too long without getting called on it. It's a great way to make your critics seem elitist and unreasonable but it's also disingenuous. Most of the people who want to see you gone want to see a healthier, more competitive market for small, local and emerging businesses. Finally, your business has no need to exist. Every brewery, winery, and distillery is inspected for safety and quality, and you can bet that no outfit worth its salt is going to stand for someone counterfeiting its product. We have laws and lawyers to ensure it; you're simply one more redundancy. If any body of lawmakers ever gets serious about cutting the fat, it will see you, Mr. Wolf, realize that it's already paying more citizens to do the job that you claim to do, and if said government is functional enough to handle basic inspections, it will free you, your lobbyists, and the legislators who oversee you, to fulfill more pressing obligations. Like anything.

Epicure's Bolognese



I've been at work till 11 watching my chef make Bolognese sauce; pans and pans of it, in fact. And yet it never occurred to me to do so till the other night when we had dinner guests, some expensive pasta and a pound of ground beef. So I broke out The Art of Simple Food and adapted it to what we had on hand. I used less meat, and I didn't bother mincing skirt steak. It was a touch soupy, but after the remnants had reduced during dinner, it was perfect to swipe at with bread. And great the next day with grits.


(1) T Butter, melted


(2) oz. bacon, small-medium dice


(1) medium onion, small-medium dice


(1.5) celery (about 9" total) small-medium dice


(1.5) sticks carrot (=celery), small-medium dice


(1) lb. ground beef


(1) C. dry white wine


(2) C. chicken stock


(1.5) C. milk


(2) T. tomato paste





1. Brown bacon and beef with butter


2. Sweat veg


3. Deglaze with wine


4. Mix stock, milk, and tomato paste, and add to pot. Let simmer for as long as you can-at least a half hour. It gets so much better the longer you cook it, though. And if you can wait a day before eating it, do so.



We also had little beets that I'd roasted off just for Honey and me. I pulled the little gray lumps out of the oven and began to peel them, and discovered those vibrant colors underneath. Ms. Waters suggested a little good olive oil and sea salt for vegetables. I was a little dubious, but I halved and skewered the beets, hit them with some olive oil I bought in Granada, and realized to my chagrin that I only had kosher salt. They were still gorgeous, and they made awesome hors d'oeuvres. The white ones with the red center are Cioggas (I think) and the purple one was a Red Ace, which we've been pickling the heck out of at work.

I've Got a Post All Ready to Go

Seriously. But I have to leave for work now, and I've spent the past hour fiddling with format changes. Check out the new picture! That's me, 2-3 years ago, in pants that have long since been bleached to a light Georgia Clay. I was chagrined to see, in the other pictures taken that day, that I was such a messy, messy cook. I'm no saint now, but...damn. It was pretty bad.

I want to share articles from my RSS feeds with blogger from my reader page. I can't figure out how to do that, so for the time being, direct your attention leftward to "The Meat of the Matter" from the NYT. We have guanciale at work. And pasta...

Epicure Makes Sushi



A few months back, a friend's mom contacted me: she was part of this organization and they needed someone to supervise about 40 international students while they made dinner for the 150 people they stayed with over Christmas break. The students ranged in age from about 19 to 35. There were undergraduates and graduate students, a couple of MBA students and a seminary attendant.



I stayed up till 3 in the morning, immersed in the constant activity of the possessed. I made lists, more lists, maps, copies, spreadsheets, sent e-mails, printed things and left the printer running while I went to bed, where I slept lightly for about four hours. It was an 18-hour day, which is really OK by me.



The students were enthusiastic about the challenge, and were grouped by country. China and Taiwan, by far the largest group, made a menu of seven items. Not to be outdone, the Japanese students increased their menu from two to four. All of the students were optimistic, established leaders naturally, and worked diligently after I walked away. They were really quite a crew, although I failed to convince them that a dish could be cooked by fewer than 3 people. I got to chat with a woman from Tunisia who was very pleasant, and very particular about her salad. And I, the pig-worshipping Southerner, was forced to develop some sensitivity to the Muslim students' aversion to the bountiful pork that the Chinese students were mincing, making into dumpling, and frying.



I bought more food than I needed, per usual. But it's getting old, especially since this time I didn't stay in budget. I felt pretty bad watching the subtotal cross my spending limit.


Highlights of the day:


--Realizing that we were going to the International Farmer's Market on Buford Highway instead of the Dekalb Farmer's Market. The choice was fine, even practical given proximity and the need for different ingredients. But I'd copied maps of YDFM on the back of the shopping lists.


--Saying no to making dumpling skins and having make-your-own sushi for the buffet. The Chinese students made the dumpling skins anyway, but gave up when I showed them my old roomie's secret Chinese meatball recipe. (I'll give you a hint: it's just like dumplings, but without the skins.) And the Japanese student who had her heart set on sharing how much fun it was too make sushi went and moved the dumpling-cum-meatball project along. She also cleaned like a sport.


--Similarly, I loved watching the students go work with other groups. They worked very well together, and were incredibly positive the whole time. One Chinese girl in particular minced pork, made sushi and seemed to magically appear whenever someone needed an extra pair of hands. And one of the guys seemed to relish the repetitive prep tasks, and spent the entire time joking.


Admittedly, there was more than one time that I wanted a cigarette, just for the excuse to step out for a few minutes. I got pretty snappy more than once too, hearing three people calling my name all the time. I swore that next year, I'm printing "If it's not food, it's in the storeroom." on a T-shirt. I've heard fellow cooks say that cooks are the reason chefs don't have children. I believe it. I made a French Press of coffee at noon. I drank it at six. I might as well have been wandering around in a dirty T-shirt with stained jeans. Oh wait. I was.


Seriously, it was fun. Honest.


And when I delivered the leftovers to Cafe 458, I got to check out my old stomping grounds. It was looking pretty nice these days.

The Care and Feeding of Yourself...WITH BACON!




This bacon was brought to you by two of the finest pigs in Georgia: Berkshire breeds from Gum Creek Farm in Roopville, GA and Riverview farms in Ranger, GA. They were grass- and forage-fed. If you want to try their products yourself, contact Gum Creek through this site. Riverview sells pork every Saturday at the Morningside market, or you can place special orders by emailing wcswan at yahoo.com. A word of warning, though: Riverview's butcher is less than consistent. Their pork is wonderful, but if you want the same cut of Boston butt or ham roast that you get at Kroger, you need to be specific, and will likely have to place a special order. Feel free to ask me for specifics on cuts.



Bacon is the meat from the belly, where there's lots of fat, a little muscle, and no connective tissue. In roast form, this makes it almost impossible to overcook, because it can never really "dry out." It's cured by coating it twice: once with a mixture of salt, sugar and nitrate to suck out the water, keep it a nice pink color, and temper the salt flavor, and again in a seasoning mixture. It's then left for osmosis to work its magic. All of this bacon has been roasted once to a temperature of at least 150°F, but should be cooked to desired doneness before eating. While there's practically no risk of trichinosis or any other food-borne illness in high-quality cured meat, the cautious among us are advised that the FDA recommends a minimum temperature of 160°F. I heat mine to a minimum temperature of hot enough to eat.




Slicing is easiest when the bacon is really cold--just this side of freezing. Stick yours in the freezer for about 20-30 minutes before you slice.



Bacon#1 a breakfast bacon, cured with a sweet mixture of honey and molasses and smoked with a combination of pecan wood and a little hickory. It's just a touch Southern. Slice it for breakfast as thick or thin as you like and can, and if you don't want a long slice, you won't lose anything by cutting it in half and making smaller slices. A word of warning though: the sugar in the cure means that the edges of the bacon will burn before the middle is crispy. Try cooking it in an oven at 250-300°F if you like your bacon crispy. A sheet of parchment paper or aluminum will save the lazy from cleaning the pan. And even when it looks burned, it's delicious.



Bacon #2 was flavored with a mix of fennel, black pepper, and garlic from south Fulton county. It's great to slice into batonets (fancy culinary term for little sticks: 1/4" x 1/4" x 2") or lardons (somewhat less precise), cooked briefly in a little water, and sauteed for salads, sauces (try a traditional amatriciana sauce for your pasta), or ground and mixed with beef for meatloaf or burgers. Not that it's bad sliced into strips and fried, either.




Bacon #3 is the "Rendezvous Roast." Coated with a dry rub from Charlie Vega's Rendezvous Ribs in Memphis, it's best browned on its sides and roasted at 350°F until you decide that it's done. It's great sliced against the grain (the opposite of the way that you slice it for breakfast, or on the short end) and eaten with lots of fall and winter vegetables: bitter turnip greens or spicy mustard greens, sweet roasted turnips or radishes, any vegetable with a strong flavor to complement the salty, intense flavor of the rub. If you want to experience an old-school farm family meal, use the bacon as a condiment and eat most of the meal as vegetables. But if you want something a little more modern and meaty, sliced bacon roast goes great with a slice of pork loin, or other lean pork. You can also coat it in honey-mustard to roast. Just brown it first.

Shoutout


Honey's traveling a bunch lately: nine weeks out of 11. Since his work starts at 6 AM and mine ends at 11 PM, actual talking can be haphazard. When I got out of work at 11 and saw that his last call was 40 minutes prior, I assumed that Honey was asleep.


When I was at GSU, we didn't get to spend much time together. My decision to work in the kitchen rather than the newsroom meant that our catch-as-catch-can lifestyle didn't end with my graduation. I wasn't exactly evasive about this: every time Honey praised my cooking, my ambition, or my dedication I was quick to remind him that we wouldn't have Friday date nights, I wouldn't be home to make a hot meal during the week, and I'd probably become a work-obsessed, insufferable grinch. And yet we're still together.


About two years ago, we decided to go modest with our birthday gifts for each other: we went to Borders, and he gave me a choice between On Cooking and On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. I can't remember exactly why, but I picked OFaC, and have been calling it the Bible ever since. And for 18 months, he patiently put aside what he was doing so I could read him whatever excerpt was enlightening me at the time.


I read it cover to cover. The knowledge demystified so much of cooking for me, and I'm occasionally surprised by how much I can recall. When I posted the link to the Menu for Hope 4 earlier today, I was thinking of wine, Vosges chocolates, salumi, and other hedonistic little things. I saw the lunch with Harold McGee, and dinner with Heston Blumenthal, but figured the demand would be so great for prizes like those that my paltry $10 ticket stood next to no chance of winning. I figured I'd give myself a day or two to think it over, and see what I still wanted.


When I got home, I saw this message in my inbox:

"I saw your blog post on my Google Reader. I donated $100 - and all of the raffle tickets were to get you to lunch with Mr McGee. If you win I'll worry about the plane ticket to San Francisco then (I want to go too) :) We'll see January 9th. Otherwise, the UN World Food Programme has an extra hundred dollars on our account."

Then he called, and we got to chat for 30 whole minutes.

So I'm giving a shoutout to Honey, who puts up with this insanity and encourages it, apparently just because it makes me happy. I couldn't ask for anyone better.

Choices...

So I don't have much money today, but this is a worthy cause, and there are so many awesome prizes. Maybe today's paycheck will be extra big...

This is what happens when the NYT Food & Dining section comes out every week.

I stay up till 3 in the morning, like I have nothing better to do, and read.
Cheese
I ate this. I think it's reason #1 that we nearly needed a sedative to get Epicure on the flight home.
I really want to be interested in this. But I don't drink liquor that much.
Sigh. Raciones.
So I read the ham story before the front page. And it's three in the morning. I miss Spain. But I have something to say here. Perhaps in New York City, there are entirely too many restaurants that offer entirely too few entrees. That's fair. NYC has long been an arbiter of trends.

This afternoon at about 4:45, I ate dinner in the kitchen before service. I'd already had a cookie; for dinner I had a salad, some pasta, and a few pieces of garlic bread. And then another cookie (ginger this time, the first was chocolate-toffee). An hour or so later, I got to drink a latte from the bar.

I'm making two points here: one, I love my job. Did you just check that list out? I got dessert twice and coffee.
My second point is that this was a meal that allowed me to work through the night, drive home, and drink a few beers until 3 in the morning with no problems. It was supremely functional. Perhaps if I worked in an office, I'd want to have this meal for lunch. But there was no entree for me tonight. I had some pasta, but not much more than I had salad.

When news gets slow, or the restaurant industry keeps chugging along inexplicably while the rest of the economy is faltering, pundits are apt to point out two facts: Americans eat out more than ever before, and restaurants keep serving fat Americans far more food than said Americans should eat. Has it occurred to anyone that perhaps Americans have been reading the press about their eating habits and waistlines, and have chosen to at least attempt smaller meals that provide more variety and less filler? I can assure you, as someone who's worked in restaurants that were a la carte, and those that serve all-inclusive dishes, that starches are seen in both kitchens as a great way to make up food costs. And as a consumer, I don't necessarily want to pay for mashed potatoes when I've already had bread, a fried appetizer, and may be tempted to order dessert. Entrees, like it or not, are often seen as one "star" dish surrounded by supporting players that the diner may or may not be interested in. And if I want the greens, but not the fish? I appreciate a place that lets me order a small plate of them.

Finally, small plates sell, and restaurants make money off of them. Honey is wise in the ways of the economics, and has pointed out many times as a server boxes our food, that we'd both be perfectly happy to pay 3/4 of the price for 1/2 the food; the leftovers don't get eaten anyway. We'd have a little more money, we'd enjoy our appetizers and main courses more, and we might even think about a cheese plate and some after-dinner drinks.

Restaurants, particularly the big chains, are terrified that a customer will leave hungry and never return, and portion size has been ratcheted up accordingly, to the extent that many, many entrees at the restaurants that most Americans patronize feature at least half the calories that an adult should advisably eat in a single day.

At The Big Chain Italian Place where I used to work, we were told in training where we could find nutritional information for diners. One employee bought her wedding dress early in her engagement, and knowing that she'd eat most of her meals at a place famous for big portions, she looked up the information. I still remember my disbelief when she informed me that one meatball had 1.5 times the fat that a human is supposed to consume in a day. Never mind the spaghetti, let alone the sauce. One meatball. But no one ever left hungry, and a few months later, I asked for the binder with the nutritional information and was told that we didn't have one.

I just don't believe that I'm the only person who goes out for convenience and still wants the functionality provided by my meals at work: enough energy to get me through the day, and enough flavor to make it worth my money. Restaurants have been slow to meet this demand with entrees, and many of us are happy with small plates. If I'm dining out, and I mean all-out: blow my money on four glasses (not a sensible bottle, I want variety) of wine, take three or four hours, soak up the ambience, I want to taste everything. I don't do this often, and I want my palate begging for mercy. I want to know, intimately, what the chef is proud of, what's good, and what will bring me back. I don't get much time off; if I'm going to dinner, I want to make it worth the dollars I'm not earning. Entrees don't always do it.

I'm also a devil's advocate. Check back for my argument in favor of the entree.

The Wheels of Justice Turn, Sometimes, not so Slowly.

The Georgia Department of Agriculture moved the public hearing on coloring raw milk from downtown Atlanta to Forest Park two days before the event to accommodate a larger-than-average crowd. Apparently there wasn't a room in downtown Atlanta that could hold the 150 people packed into the meeting room in the back of the Georgia State Farmers Market Exhibit Hall.

I was expecting to see a crowd of mostly urban, mostly young liberals, with a smattering of governmental conservatives, and some of the farmers who would be shut down by the rules change. The people who spoke were nurses, a doctor, lots of pet lovers, farmers of pigs, goats, chickens and cattle, and parents. Lots of parents with shockingly well-behaved children. I arrived 20 minutes after the hearing started, and at 11, people were still talking. Technically, the hearing was over, but tell that to the doctor who'd had the microphone for five minutes. He opened with "I can't believe that we're here giving you people a free education..."

Some, like the doctor, were angry and vented their frustrations on the three members of the Department of Agriculture, who furiously took notes and occasionally grimaced or chuckled at the comments. Others were polite and logical. Animal-lovers made personal appeals, and the Christians cited raw milk as a perfect creation of the "great architect."

The farmers were probably the most persuasive, and with good reason: the rule would have been a severe blow to a young movement. Farmers producing meat or eggs of any quality in Georgia feed raw milk to their animals. They're "small" farmers by today's standards, and Georgia know something about losing small farms. According to Chad Carlton of Carlton Farms in Rockmart, 3,729 Georgia dairies have closed in the past three decades. Carlton also criticized the Department of Agriculture for changing the rules, making it difficult for small farmers to sell. "You encouraged us to find value-added products like this," he reminded them.

Nobody wanted to talk about human consumption of raw milk. "For our animals" seemed to be the mantra, and it's probably best that way till Tommy Irvin moves on. He's been doing what he can to limit or end the sale of raw milk in Georgia since the 1980's, and he's unlikely to stop doing so anytime soon.

Four minutes before the start of service that night, chef tapped me on the shoulder and showed me an e-mail of the AJC story: Irvin had dropped the proposed rule change that afternoon, and the issue was dead for another year. Score one for civic participation.

Fingers Crossed


I'm driving down to Forest Park in eight hours for the Agriculture Department's public hearing on a rules change that would dye raw milk gray in order to discourage human consumption. It's a hard rule to protest rationally: The dye won't change the flavor or nutrition profile, but seriously, who would ever want to drink gray milk?

There are a few things in our favor: the Commissioner of Agriculture's comments to the press suggest that he might be open to more stringent warnings rather than dye, and the General Mills pizza recall comes as an auspicious reminder that industrial food sickens us far more frequently than raw milk.

Since most in favor of the rules change and further moves to make raw milk inaccessible view its consumption by people as a peccadillo of affluent highly-educated hippies, the argument that consumers are unaware of the inherent risks in consuming unpasteurized milk is ridiculous. Further, Georgia farmers getting Georgia dollars should appeal to anyone with an appreciation for basic economics. And the inverse: Georgia farmers suddenly losing a chunk of spendable capital should appeal to the supply-siders who lack such an appreciation. And since Georgia is a red state, down to the very dirt, I hope that the phrase "nanny state" will induce rabid cuts in governmental involvement, as it usually does in good conservatives, for at least the next few weeks until the newsmedia latches onto the teat of the recent study that finds higher instances of cancer in obese people.

Unfortunately, I've lived in Atlanta my whole life, so I've watched public officials ignore reason before. Are you there, Atlanta sewers? No? Blue laws, can you hear me?

I'm aware that I will likely leave Forest Park disappointed. But I hear that there's a great Oaxacan place with tlayuda down there. And maybe I can find a diner or truck stop with some good eggs and coffee. So hopefully the food with first fortify, and then cheer me.

Wish me luck!


Also:
AJC story by Kessler
Pizza Recall Story
It says they serve breakfast. Pero ellos tienen cafe?

E-mail the Commissioner of Agriculture at tirvin@agr.state.ga.us

Five Pounds of Fatback

There was only so long that I could be expected to watch the chef, sous chef, and various cooks making sausage, and tasting the results, before making it myself. In true epicure style, I went big. I sent an e-mail to 42 of my closest friends: the first six to reply could make sausage, eat sausage, and divide up the results. I had a party (expanded for extra demand) within a few hours.

My day off was Thursday, the party was Monday. I come home Sunday to an empty apartment, send out a shopping list for my guests, begin making a mis en place list, hyperventilate--five pounds of fatback?!--, pour some cava, clean the kitchen, and measure what ingredients I have. I listen to the Pretenders on Radio Paradise, which soothes the mood while measuring salt. I remember that people will need entertainment while their meat chills, and leave certain tasks for the guests. I make my shopping lists for party day and tell myself that I have enough time to sleep. I send off some last-minute e-mails, sure to be interpreted as drunken due to the hour. I write out a detailed schedule, and spill cava on my Spanish cookbook, thankfully missing Chef's copy of The Chez Panisse Café Cookbook. I write my shopping list and hope I can find cheap spices. I smirk at my naiveté. I remember that I'm making side dishes, look up the base for my collard recipe, and curse the amount of cheap sparkling wine required. I realize that I have no idea what the weight of my market-bought local collards is. I'm buying a scale in the morning, I tell myself.

I put dirty clothes in the hamper and vow to find a way to lock the messy bedroom shut. I shake out the table cloth that's been protecting the counters and ready it for the next day. I realize that it's 2:30 and the hour/cava have destroyed my ability to think cogently. I'm vaguely pleased to remember the word "cogently." I doubt my ability to wake up early enough, and pour one last glass of cava before bed. I stare at my unfinished schedule.

I wake up surprised at my lack of headache and queasiness, discouraged by the fatigue that keeps me in bed ten minutes later than I planned, fifteen minutes after I woke up. I shower, realize that I'm dehydrated--hello Cava--pack the car and hit the road.

I like to think that if the butchers at the Dekalb County Farmer's Market saw me frequently enough, they would have the sense to run. As it is, I only show up every few months, wanting fifteen pounds of london broil or five pounds of fatback. But every time it's the same sad routine: the butcher weighs all of his cut meat, which comes to roughly half of what I need. He looks at me, looks at the pounds of uncut meat on the counter, and I cheerfully proclaim that I'll wait. I've got other things on my list.

I buy. I don't get paid till tomorrow, and I've got a long list driven by guilt at sending out shopping lists so late, and unexpected needs like three kinds of wine, herbs, and ham hocks--which aren't expensive at Kroger but I was already at Whole Foods. I go to Tuesday Morning for a scale, but theirs isn't accurate enough. I go to Target. They've got one, but it's ten dollars more than I have. I trudge across the lot to the Bed Bath and Beyond, and muse on the bleak landscapes provided by big boxes, the mediocre products they deal in--neither cheap nor valuable--and the culture of consumption, the cancer in our economy that their whole business model promotes. Inside I find the scale I need for $10 cheaper than Target. I curse myself for not remembering an expired 20% off coupon and leave with six dollars to my name.

At home I find that my knives are locked inside the (closed)restaurant, and turn to my Chinese cleaver, which has attained notoriety for the time that I stored it blade-side-up and discovered, with my knuckles, that Chinese cleavers are sent from the factory sharp. Surprisingly, it works well. Not as well as My Knife, which doesn't have a stainless steel handle that gets slippery when wet or covered in a thin layer of pork fat, but well enough. I look at my list, the messy apartment, the bags of raw ingredients and the cold stove, and consider hyperventilating again. I remember what I've been told at the restaurant, when staring at an endless line of tickets: one thing at a time. And each one thing takes less time, is less messy, and somehow less monumental that I thought it would be. Suddenly, I find myself doing all the things I'd marked as "optional" on my list.

I clean, lay out butcher paper on the IKEA island and dining room table, cover the counter with a tablecloth folded so that it looks clean. My first guest, the only one who's made sausage before, arrives and hooks up his grinder attachment to my kitchenaid. He makes sausage and grinds it. We set up my manual grinder to stuff on the island. More guests arrive with cheese, crackers, and a giant bottle of wine.

Nothing throws off careful planning like guests. They eschew working in the dining room, the kitchen gets crowded. People don't know what to do or where to go, and in the middle of making and stuffing sausage, start demanding to be fed. Someone asks if we can grill some sausage now. I desperately want extra bodies out of the kitchen, but grilling requires hauling the grill through the (now-packed) apartment to the cement pad across the lot, lighting it, sitting with it while the coals burn down, and generally making sure it's not stolen. The sausage guru points out that it's way faster to poach sausage in beer. Plus there's the great bogeyman of professional cooks everywhere: the possibility that cooked food will end up in the proximity of raw. This is how food-borne illnesses make their way onto people's plates, and the specter of someone's pork being contaminated takes years off my life. I say no, but we've got cries for sausage coming from the couch, the grill is way manlier (and thus more sausage-appropriate) than beer poaching, and after an hour of being asked repeatedly, I give in. The kitchen and living room are cleared out, the grill is hauled outside and started up, and there's at least some extra room.

Someone else asks if it's OK to turn on the TV for Heroes. Sure. As could have been predicted, all activity ceases once the TV's on. At 11, the sausage guru puts my sausage in the stuffer on the kitchenaid, to show me how it works, and we finish. As soon as we finish, someone is drunk and needs to go; is it OK to get their sausage right now, and leave the grill outside? Sure. We divide the sausage, hand it out, say goodbye, and the guru and a couple of saintlike friends actually clean my kitchen for me. I sit down, open a beer, and realize my shoes were quite possibly the worst choice for a day on my feet. After a minute, the kitchen is clear enough to bring the grill back in, and I find that it was set up not on the safe concrete pad, but behind Honey's car, marked by a pile of ash. At least it's closer. I keep my friends here till 12:30, completely oblivious to the fact that they have normal jobs to wake up for.

What have I learned?

1) I need to stop calling educational evenings in which we make food "parties." They're pleasant, they involve friends, but they also take more work, and frankly, partying at these things is a bad idea.

2) Nine people do not fit into our apartment.

3) Making restaurant-quantities of sausage is best left to restaurants. There's a fine coat of grease on my kitchen floor and I suspect that to get it really clean, I'll actually have to do some hands-and-knees scrubbing.


4) My friends are not stupid, and they can mix their own recipes at home the night before. This will actually result in better sausage.


I threatened, if this went well, to hold another evening like it in a few months. I think I might, but I'll take up my friends' generous offer to use their more spacious house, I'll actually stick to my guest limit, and we'll make three batches of sausage. That's it. I figure it's better to be in demand than to satisfy everyone's half-cocked desire to make their own sausage. But my chef was impressed. That's something, right? He also demanded that I bring some in to try. Honey's out of town though, so I have to save some, and frankly, after all the effort that went into it, I'm hoarding this sausage like gold.