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.