Aroma Cucina

In search of the all crunchy potato

 Mundane tasks do have their benefits. Your mind can wander while performing repetitive tasks....like slicing potatoes or peeling carrots, and suddenly you have an AH-HA moment.
Inspiration stuck at around 5:00 am when I was loading the Thanksgiving turkey into the oven. Why I had to roast the turkey at 5:00 am is another story entirely, and not important.  What’s matters is that I also had to slice a boatload of sweet potatoes, and that’s when lightening struck.

Everyone loves the crunchy top of a potato casserole, and the browny bits stuck to the sides. What if I could expose every slice of potato to dry heat? Wouldn’t it create crunch on every slice, and not just on top?  Could I have invented the next best thing since popcorn??

The first experiment was done on my unknowing family at Thanksgiving. Not one to abandon inspiration,  I thought I’d try again with white potatoes, while adding a little refinement to  the process.

Turns out, no, I have not made culinary history. While it’s a good idea to turn the potato slices on their sides and expose them to heat, and you do get crunch, the bottom unexposed side of the potato remains soggy. 
Maybe  the problem is the visual expectation of crunch leads to disappointment when you hit the soft part of the slice? Like seeing a breathtakingly gorgeous guy, and when his sister walks into the room she resembles a troll’s older aunt. It’s such a jolt to the senses.

Maybe the slices need to be rotated while roasting so you have moderate crunch all around? Or maybe the potato gratin casserole is structured the way it is for a reason.

Who knows? What I do know is that we shouldn’t disparage the mundane kitchen tasks; they give us some well needed space in our lives to dream and imagine.
This post is dedicated to a dear friend who always called herself the  “Mistress of the Mundane”. Finally I’m starting to realize the value of the mundane. Thank you, Chris!

Holy Vegans! Locavores Divine! Rise of the Food Radical!

We’re back. Our re-entry into the U.S of A., into NYC, into Soho is  exhilarating, and more than a little dis-orienting. You come back into the ‘hood’ with fresh eyes, wanting to see what’s new, what’s still the same. 

Last year when we came back, blueberries were the new “lose weight, anti-oxidant, liberated radical foodstuff that will keep you young forever”.  The year before that is was pomegranates. I suppose the  jump the shark moment for pomegranates came when the POM people claimed drinking their POM juice would cure erectile dysfunction. Maybe they thought licking the sticky juice off of body parts was a natural cure?

This year it appears to be the deification of vegetarians presided over by those high priests The Vegans.  One of the silliest things I’ve read in promoting veganism was about the agony of a chicken laying an egg. Honey, get a grip. Go to a hen house. They cuddle up. They lay an egg. They go get something to eat. They’re chickens, there is reason they are called bird brains.

Another fringe cult that has blossomed into a full blown religion is the Holy Locavore. Has it crossed a sainted locavore’s mind that one of the earliest factors in civilizing our prehistoric selves was the creation of trade routes? Use some common sense, grow things that are native to your area, and trade for the stuff you can’t grow locally.

And what the hell is up with Stonyfield and their scary yogurt packaging?? They use Uncle Sam to scare us into eating organic?   The label ‘organic’ has been so abused, it’s literally meaningless, so I don’t appreciate being bullied by my yogurt carton first thing in the morning.

Let’s face it, nutritional science is a moving target. Once upon a millennium ago, sugar was considered a cure for the plague. More recently, margarine was the cure for high cholesterol, now it’s evil incarnate. Just a few months ago, a NYC bureaucrat decided we need to eliminate salt from our diet. Then he recants and declares he only said it for the publicity.
 
I’m not saying I’m anti-organic, anti-vegetable, anti-locavore; even though I just might be anti-vegan. All I am saying is let’s not get militant.

Is there a way to scale down this rhetoric or am I just being a naive rube? Do we have to vanquish someone who doesn’t hold the same opinion as us, or can we respect our differences?  Can’t we all just get along?  OK. I get it. I’m a naive rube.  Welcome me back.

Culinary Heritage: Prison or Platform?

I’ve been pondering culinary heritage for the past week or so, ever since Rachel Laudan posed this question on her blog: "What is culinary heritage and is it always linked to  tourism?"  I'm paraphrasing the question, but this is what I’ve been thinking about as I shell another batch of peas.

 

After turning this over and over, and using Italian cuisine as fuel for thought, it came to me that if the indigenous people eat a certain food all the time, like prosciutto and melon, then it's heritage. If a particular dish appears only on restaurant menus or is served up just for a photo shoot, then it's tourism. This could be a simple answer to a complex question.

 

Now that I'd resolved Rachel's query, and had some artichokes to clean, I was free to wallow in a query of my own. Is the Italian culinary heritage a prison or a platform? Please feel free to insert any nationality into that question.

When we were busy opening the new Erba Luna ristorante here in town, all of our Italian friends assumed I would be cooking hamburgers. The ubiquitous hamburger defines the rich US culinary heritage with all of its glorious regional quirks.  That's a culinary prison.

 Friday night we sat with friends and laughed about the Umbrian government-issued menu. Virtually every trattoria and most ristorante will offer the same 6 or 7 pasta dishes. The starter menu always includes sliced salumi, cheeses and crostini, and for a main course there is always a grilled meat selection.  This is another sort of culinary prison, everything is good, and there are no surprises whatsoever. Sometimes that is comforting, sometimes its just plain dull.

  There is a marvelous ristorante in the Emilia-Romagna region, about 45 minutes north of Montone, called Locanda al Gambero Rosso. Open since 1951, it's been in the family for three generations, and they are expecting the fourth generation to show up some time this summer. The debate has already begun if the baby will be in the kitchen or working the front of the house. 

La Locanda al Gambero Rosso is the finest example I know of using culinary heritage as a platform. They are deeply, totally bound to all things Romagna. There is a passionate confidence that comes with knowing they are absolutely eating delicious food. The beef comes from the locally raised Romagna cow, the wild herbs are foraged from the hills in the early morning, the cheese is so local you'll never find it in your Whole Foods, and I won't even be able to find it in Umbria.

 The Italian word for history is 'storia', and at a recent lunch at Gambero Rosso, each dish was presented with its storia. Moreno, the 'babbo' or papa of the restaurant served us a deep green wild herb soup, studded with tiny cheese pearls. It was an herbal cornucopia, but so balanced, so nuanced...a hint of bitter, a subtle mingling of herbaceous flavors, finishing with a mild, refreshing, persistent note of mint. Yeah, it was that good.   As we are swooning over our bowls of soup, Moreno comes by with a flat of the fresh wild herbs to explain to us what they look like, since he’s the one who was up this morning doing the gathering. He let us know that he hated this soup when he was little. It was a chore to go out and forage for the greens and it made him dislike the soup. It was poor people's soup. Now he loves the morning forages and the soup and laughs at his own childish dislike. That is culinary heritage preserved and honored.

 

As a final course, we had a meat dish that involved the entire barnyard; it had eight different types of meat, cooked in a delicious broth and served with pieces of hard toast for sopping up the juices.  Moreno explained this was something that was usually only served at an important festa dinner, and then he confided that they made it a little different than the traditional recipe and that he liked his version of the dish better than the old fashioned way. That is using culinary heritage as a platform.

 There is honor and respect paid to the origins of the dish, but no one felt the need to be a slave to the recipe. I've never eaten at any of the Spanish culinary palaces, like iBulli, but from what I've read, the Spanish chefs also seem to embrace their heritage as a platform, not as a prison.

 There is another aspect to the culinary heritage as a prison, that should be explored, and that is the jailbreak phenomena. Modern chefs thumb their noses at history and vie for extreme flavor combinations, extreme preparations and presentations. It's all a part of the mix and flights of chef fantasia can be touched with the divine or be just plain silly. And silly is in the eye of the beholder.

 Here in our little corner of Umbria, I'm literally watching a culinary heritage melt away.  I just came back from the COOP supermarket and the refrigerated section carried no less than 5 variations of Kraft pre-sliced flavored cheese products.  Above that was pour and bake sacs filled with batter for a lemon cake, or a chocolate cake, etc. These products didn't exist two years ago.  Our usual cheese offerings are mostly pecorino (sheep cheese) variations, parmigiana, maybe Gorgonzola or some mild cow cheese.  All of these cheeses are delicious, but when a friend shows up with cheese from France, we melt with happiness, as we taste these wonderful cheeses. Our friend Brent, of Valle di Mezzo has so much trouble selling his goat cheeses because the locals won't even taste them. Culinary heritage as a prison that leads to the jailbreak: Kraft cheese slices.

 

Tell me, what do you think about your culinary heritage? Is it a prison or a platform?  Is it evolving or devolving?

 

 

NYC: Watch Your Back, We Have Competition!

   

I’m worried about my hometown. Are we New Yorkers resting on our foodie laurels instead of being at the forefront of the culinary movement? Are we becoming a faded rose'? Past our prime?

To be fair: the Great Recession hit New York really hard. The financial industry is housed here and when their bottom fell out , NYC was devastated. Restaurants and shops were empty, not quiet…empty. But things are turning around and you can feel the buzz start to build again.  But, that’s not the whole answer. Its hard to be fast and nimble in NYC: the stakes are high, the start up costs are high, so that’s why you get a lot of big name corporate type restaurants and fewer of the edgy start-ups, but something has to change or we are going to lose our creds’ as a food Mecca.   Granted there is a much longer growing season in the Pacific Northwest and that certainly has an effect on what shows up on the table, but their markets are affordable, while our require pre-approval. “Oh you would like to buy a dozen of our organic eggs? Have you been pre-approved by our bank or do you have independent financing?”  What’s going on here? I've asked this question before, the markets in Italy is where the common person shops, the markets in NYC is where rich people shop. 

 

When I tell someone to go to Philly for pizza instead of NY, that’s ominous.

 

Portland was an eye opener.  The upstart, entrepreneurial, “hey guys lets open a …food cart, or a winery, or a restaurant, coffee bar, or bread bakery” attitude that was so prevalent in Portland, is simply missing from the NY scene.  Maybe I’m jaded, maybe Portland’s food scene seems so vibrant because the city is small and its easier to be a big fish in a little pond, maybe I just sampled the best of the best because Portland wanted to showcase their finest for IACP, but something is going on there that isn’t going on here. I know I’m talking heresy and trash at the same time.

 

You want examples? Let’s start with coffee. Coffee is a freakin’ religion in Portland, the entire city smells of coffee, you realize that the scent is making you crave coffee ALL day long. It’s the home of Stumptown coffee, which has cult status in Portland and can be found in select places in NYC. They used to be at the Chelsea Market, and Jeff, who hates going grocery shopping, would come along with me just so he could get a coffee. They were given an award at IACP in part because they donated a bunch of specially tricked out cargo bikes to Rwandan coffee growers.  I can barely get the guy at Café’ Café’ to smile at me, let alone care about his coffee.

 

Then there is Joel Domreis of Courier Coffee. Joel sources his organic coffee from sustainable growers, he does the roasting and hand delivers his coffee beans on his bicycle. To say he’s obsessed doesn’t quite describe his level of coffee devotion. Joel will be opening a brand new coffee bar in early June at 923 SW Oak St.  No take out paper cups, because Joel thinks coffee is like wine, it tastes better in a cup, it deserves to be in porcelain. I agree. His coffee is already an underground secret; his coffee shop is set to become addictive.

 

It’s hard for me to describe the food cart scene in Portland.  There are random stand alone carts (my sister tries not to go to one near City Hall because she says its like crack…you eat that and that’s all you want to eat, day after day after day, his name is Pete, and its Indian food, go sniff it out for yourself).  Then there are the parking lots that are filled with row upon row of food stalls. Almost like what I’ve seen in the Far East, like in Hong Kong when the sun goes down and Cat Street converts to a food stall haven.  I know, it’s an unfortunate name for Chinese food stalls, what can I say? They also have stands where they sing Chinese opera, which can sound a whole lot like a herd of cats.

New York NEEDS these food carts! Yeah, we have Shake Shack, but I’d much rather go to Khao Man Gai’s stand at SW10th & Alder for some of Nong’s cooking. She was the unofficial winner of best food served at the fancy IACP opening reception at the Nines Hotel. Check out her webpage, she Tweets when they are sold out.

 

I love bread and NY has good bread, don’t get me wrong. I love Balthazar and Sullivan St, but Little T American Baker has the most flavorful bread that I’ve tasted in a long time.  He uses one tasty all natural mother!  Of course we also have bagels, and no other place on earth has good bagels. Only NY. Period. End of statement.

 

New York has  local vineyards, but nothing on the scale of Oregon. It’s the weather, the soil, the location, and we can’t change that. Yes, we have Long Island, but its never going to be like the West Coast.  One elegant Oregonian wine to look for is Domaine Drouhin; their pinot drank exactly like an Old World wine. It wasn’t huge smack you upside the head fruit, it was soft and elegant and refined and perfect for pairing with food.

We may not have the wine industry, but there is no excuse for the micro-brewers and the distillers to not be more prominent in NY.  There are some excellent distillers and a lot of good brewers, but again nothing like the scope of what I saw in the Pacific North West.  Philly has a great micro-brewery culture, check out the Brewer’s Fest if you want to see passion.  Hot tip: If you happen to spy Pacific Distillery’s absinthe anywhere, give it a try, it’s mellow and herbaceous and just plain delicious.

 

It’s not that I’m down on NY; I just think we are getting a little bit lazy and its time to step up our game.   And if you are in NY and want to experience some of this passion I’m ranting about, then head over to Roberta’s in Flatbush, these guys would be right at home in Portland. Wonder how their garden is growing….

The other area where New York is on top of the game is cheese. I tasted some very nice cheese in Portland, but we win for diversity and overall quality.

 

It would be fun to do an Iron Chef type competition by location…Portland v. New York making steak, or Philly v. Portland brewer comp. Foodnetwork, are you listening? 

 The big picture moral of the story is that no matter what, there is a burgeoning local food culture in every part of this country, and it is a good and wonderful thing.  Now, if everyone would just cook a little more at home with all this wondrous stuff, life would be better for everyone! Good eats indeed.

 

 

Best Cooking Show Ever?

OK. Somebody explain to me the point of this NY Times Editorial: Best Cooking Show Ever.

Are we celebrating mediocrity? gay partnership? cross dressing? chicken thighs? a search for the real Southern mama's boy?  giving pointers on making mayonnaise?

Why does this wind up featured on the editorial page of the NY Times?   Sometimes our culture confuses me.

On a blog housekeeping note: We are packing up and closing down our beloved country house, so blog posts for the next few weeks will be slim.  I'm thinking that we may come out of this a bit slimmer as well...packing boxes and eating whatever we can scrounge is taking its toll already. Think positive thoughts for us! Thanks.

Picture of the roses is just to make me feel better and to remind me that every ending leads to a new beginning.

J & J  

Weekend Menu: Tagliatelle ala Bolognese & A Wild Turkey

The dedicated chefs at ItChefs have declared this Sunday, January 17, to be the International Day of Italian Cuisine  and the honored dish this year is tagliatelle al Ragu al Bolognese. One of the missions of the organization is to preserve and uphold the quality of Italian cuisine. Fair enough, although the rest of their mission involves getting paid for their work and was started by an Italian chef in Bali so I’ll let you work that out for yourself.

 

I see their point. Italian food in the States is usually Americanized Italian and a far cry from what is served in Italy. But, in authentic Italian tradition, of course its more complicated than that and as soon as you start to learn about Italian cooking, you begin to realize that the term “Italian cooking” is too generic to mean anything. A few basic things you need to know: Italy didn’t become a unified country until around 1860 and even though they do have a national anthem, they are deeply ambivalent about having a ‘national’ identity.  First you belong to your family, then your town, then your commune, then your region, then Italy, so by the time you get to Italy, you have identify fatigue.  In terms of cooking, it means: you make it like nonna, you share the same soil and weather with your town, you argue about recipes with the neighbors on the next block and all mention of “Italian cuisine” is reserved for the international press.

 

The ItChefs have declared war on “Italian cooking” by trying to raise awareness of the regional differences and they strive for accuracy in terminology.  For example: spaghetti Bolognese, that dish enjoyed everywhere in the world, doesn’t exist in the city of Bologna. That’s because the region is known for fresh egg pasta like tagliatelle and dried spaghetti style pasta is a southern Italy food product. That’s just the noodle and that’s fairly easy to explain. The ragu or sauce is where there are true fighting words. Should the sauce be beef only, just beef flank, can it include pork and do you get drummed out of the corps altogether if you use veal? It took the Accademia della Italiana Cucina 38 years (!!!) to agree on a definition of this dish. I am giving you fair warning, unless you have 38 years to devote to the conversation, be careful about starting any conversation about the authentic version of a treasured recipe because it will be a long night. Over the years, I’ve learned to seal my mouth, look momentarily engaged and then wander off whenever the conversation turns to the ‘right’ way to make a dish. 

 While I applaud their good intentions, it’s like closing the barn door long after the horses have fled. Spaghetti Bolognese is now an international dish with as many variations as a hamburger, so my suggestion is make a pot of tagliatelle or spaghetti this Sunday, and enjoy yourself.

 With the whole delicious weekend in front of us, and Sunday dinner planned, tonight’s mission is to get the brine ready for Saturday night’s wild turkey. I’ll share more of those details once I get a little more intimate with the bird.

 Well, Saturday and Sunday are taken care of, but the more pressing issue of what’s for dinner tonight has yet to be resolved. Happy Weekend!

Food Trends in the Aught-Naught Decade

Its 2010 and a new decade beckons us, but what did we eat in the Aught-Naught Decade? Here is a random and completely subjective compilation of food trends in our recently departed decade.  Collected from popular trend lists, I'm not editing, just reporting the facts.

 

2000

Buzzword: Local

Hot Cuisine: Latin, Indian

Prediction: People will grow their own herbs

IN: Eating in restaurants, going out to eat becomes the evening’s entertainment

Wine: Syrah, Zinfandel, restaurants add more wine by the glass

News: Slow Food opens its first US office in NYC

Statistic: 10% of meals in the US are eaten in McDonalds, 65% of restaurant meals are fast food.

Quote: “The trend toward gourmet borders on a hobby.” –Bob O’Brien Pres. Foodservice Info, NPD Group

 

2001

Buzzword: Local, Gourmet

Hot Cuisine: Mexican

Prediction: Raw food movement is over

IN: Cheese carts, healing foods, bulk food dispensers (whole grains that come in big plastic containers and when you lift the trap door they spill everywhere but in your plastic bag), flavored vodkas, bottled water for kids, water sommeliers at restaurants, exotic foods

Event: Rachel Ray debuts on the Food Network, egullet.org launches and foodies unite over the keyboard

Food Recalls: ground beef, hot dogs

 

2002

Buzzword: Local, comfort food, Antioxidants and free radicals enter mainstream vocabulary

Hot Cuisine: Latin, Italian

IN: smaller restaurants, affordable cuts of meat, Japanese ingredients, comfort food with exotic ingredients (lumpy mashed purple Peruvian potatoes), Freedom Fries

OUT: Balsamic vinegar, sundried tomatoes, foccacia, French food

Wine: Late Harvest Anything

News: Obesity lawsuit is filed against McDonalds

Food Recalls: ground beef, cantaloupe

 

2003

Buzzword: Local, Organic

IN: South Beach Diet, meat, protein, Flavored potato chips, beer can chicken

Out: All Carbs

Food Network: Alton Brown’s Good Eats show is HOT

Statistic: Grain production drops dramatically on a global scale and meat consumption is 5 times higher than it was in 1950

Food Recall: Friendly’s Apple Pie a la Mode Ice Cream because it may contain small pieces of a rubber-like material that could present a choking hazard. (Note: it is recalled because we might choke on pieces of rubber?? Not because it contains rubber like material??)

 

2004

Buzzword: Healthy, Organic, Easy

IT Buzzword: Low….low-fat, low carb

IN: Very complicated small plate dishes, El Bulli restaurant in Spain, Molecular Gastronomy, tasting menus, chocolate, yuzu, agave syrup, vertical food presentation

Obsession: Obesity gets world wide attention, the global weight loss industry reaches $240 billion with about $40 billion coming from the US market, energy drinks are the fastest growing supermarket category, bottled water outsells coffee and beer

Consumer trends: 50% of consumers want to eat healthy, the other 50% want convenience

News: Martha Stewart is in prison, Julia Child dies

Food Recalls: The news is full of reports of recalled food staying on the shelves or being returned and mixed with other foods and being reshipped.

 

2005

Buzzwords: Fresh, Local, Healthy, Organic, Whole Grain, Probiotics

IT Buzzword: NO…no trans-fats, no carbs, no calories, no preservatives

IN: Small meals (used to be known as snacks), meals on the go, individual meals, quick fix meals, breakfast, portion control, garlic, layering complicated flavors and exotic ingredients in a single dish, Las Vegas as a dining destination

Out: raw food diets

Perversity: “Healthy” kid foods flood the market: sugar coated whole grain cereals, sugar-loaded yogurt in brightly colored containers

Obsession: is it a good carb or a bad carb

Openings: Alinea Restaurant in Chicago, Iron Chef America débuts, the movie Sideways brings us all a little closer to wine tasting in California

Closing: Atkins Nutrition, founder of the Atkins diet files for bankruptcy

 

2006

Buzzwords: Healthy, Easy, Gourmet, Local

IT Buzzword: Free…Trans Fat Free, Gluten Free

IN: Dark chocolate from a single source, Superfoods: blueberries, avocadoes, green tea, beans, walnuts, chocolate will make us all live long and prosper), Super Tuscan wines, Flavored bottled water, Quinoa, faro, wheat berries, bulgur, amaranth, whole wheat pasta, healthy take out food, convenience food

Hot Cuisine: Mexican, Latin, Tuscan

Libations: Cocktails are in and bartenders are now mixologists

Comeback: Fat is back, 75% of people report using low fat products v. 2001 when 82% report using low fat products

Banned: Trans-fats in NYC

 Published: Ominvore's Dilemma

Preversity: Industrial chicken processor Tyson's Food offers a free downloadable prayer book

2007

Buzzwords: Local, ethnic, exotic, crispy, crunchy, organic, grass fed, free range

IN: small bite deserts, cupcakes, single serving meals, 100 calorie snack packs, pre-cut veggies, premium quality ingredients, Nyotaimori naked body sushi, specialty sandwiches (PA raised ham with NJ organic brie and French mustard on whole grain pita wrap), Super juices (Odwalla with Amazon rainforest ingredients), pomegranate everything, Omega 3 fatty acids, exotic sea salts, Celebrity Chefs

News: Mario Batali’s contract with the Food Network is not renewed

Bigger News: Wal-Mart introduces an organic section

Libations Gone Wild: Very Elaborate Jell-O shots, Flavored Ices, Molecular Gastronomy inspired cocktails, Layered drinks

 

2008

Buzzwords: Local, Farmers Markets, CSA, Cheap, Ethical

IN: Home cooking, chef run noodle bars, offal, barrel aged beer, Fair Trade anything, caffeinated anything, Super fruits: blood orange, acai, goji, yumberry, no knead bread

Hot Cuisine: Korean

OUT/OVER/DONE/FINISHED: Bottled water (oh, really?), raw diets

Marketing Gone Wild: Enriched white bread will improve memory, natural butter flavor makes a comeback, probiotics move beyond yogurt and into Kraft’s Live Active Cheese (they’re kidding, right?), P&G introduces Pur Flavor that will flavor your water as it comes out of the tap, a good night’s sleep is equated with weight loss and Nakazawa Adult Milk is marketed as coming from cows milked at dawn so the milk has a higher melatonin content so you’ll sleep better and wake up skinnier.  (I’d love to see the snappy translation of that marketing concept.)

Recession News: Ruth Reichl at Gourmet magazine publishes a recipe for meatloaf with ketchup

Nanny State News: NYC requires calorie counts on chain restaurant menus, LA bans fast food restaurants from opening in certain neighborhoods

Statistic: It’s an even 50/50 split on money spent for food for home consumption and food away from home

 

2009

Buzzwords: Local, Sustainable, Locavore, Comfort foods, regional, simple, value, bare

IN: Home cured meats, charcuterie, butchers, home cooking, rustic foods, slow cooking, braising, clay pots, beans, bacon, smoked anything, peanut butter, blueberries in everything, gardening

Hot Cuisine: Peruvian (huh? This turned up on everyone’s hot list. Am I missing something??), butchers, recipes are now on the web, on your desktop widget and in your iPhone apps, cookies are the new cupcake

News: Best year ever for the Food Network, the film Julia & Julie is released and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a hot item

 

 

The only prediction I have for 2010 is that Local will be the buzzword and maybe raw food diets are over. Why does everyone pick on raw food diets? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Happy New Decade!

A strega without her broom.

A strega is a witch and I’m feeling like a strega without a broom.  No, I'm not talking about cleaning; I’m talking about not having my familiars about, my spices, herbs, oils, vinegars, my tools of the kitchen trade.

Coming back to NYC, to an empty kitchen is one thing. But as I go around the kitchen seeing what I need to start cooking again, I’m realizing what a disconnect the average US person has from their food supply. I’ve gotten used to getting my eggs from Bruce’s obliging chickens, I reach for chili peppers that I grew and dried, I have jars of summer produce and I know I shared the same hot summer sun as that basil, buying cheese isn’t a plastic shrink wrapped affair, it’s a trip to the cheese maker, which involves having a long chat about life and only then do I get the carefully wrapped piece of cheese.  It sounds so romantic and nostalgic, but that’s because how many of us feed and clean out a chicken house, or get up pre-dawn to milk sheep? Romance is more fun that reality which is why we make love in the dark. The older you get, the darker the room…but I digress.

 

Romanticism aside, I was physically connected to my food and now I’m in the city buying food that I don’t know anything about it. According to the last US Census in 2000, 80% of us live in urban areas. Since you are reading this, it’s safe to assume you care about food and know what time of year tomatoes are at their peak. It’s also a reasonable bet that you are in the minority. After a screening of the film, Food Inc., at the New School, there was an excellent discussion panel led by Jill Richardson, and she told of talking to people who literally thought that spaghetti was a plant, or that pumpkins grew on trees. Sounds ridiculous, but what if you never had any opportunity or reason to know better? It’s like having street smarts: I don’t walk around with my handbag open or put it on the back of my restaurant chair, but that nice lady from a small town in Iowa who is an instant target for an urban pickpocket, how should she know better?  Tomatoes are always in the supermarket, apples are always in the supermarket, and cherries appear at Christmas time, how would someone know the season for these fruits?

 

Food Inc. is a cornerstone film in the way that Inconvenient Truth was. It’s a wake up call to everyone that we need to look at what’s going on with our food sources and the culture of eating. The film attempts to highlight many of the key areas of concern: industrialized meat operations, consolidation of crops, exploitation of workers, obesity, fuel and water consumption, cheap junk food versus expensive healthy food, the implications of patenting seeds, etc. etc. etc. etc. But, the part that struck home for me was the family that ate dinner together….in their car, after getting a drive through hamburger meal.  The mother’s reason was long working hours so cooking was impossible and it was cheaper.  She also had been under the impression that a drive-thru burger meal was healthy.  The camera then follows them into a supermarket where we see that chips and soda are much cheaper than some broccoli.

 My heart broke.  I think the family may have been Mexican-American, so somewhere in that mother’s history is a long and beautiful culinary tradition. Where did it go? How did it get lost? What happened that we are so disconnected from our food? What legacy will she give to her daughters?

After the film and the panel discussion with Peter Pringle, Bryan Walsh and Marion Nestle,  there was Q&A time and one audience member made a staggering point: food memories are a very strong touchstone. If the times you remember eating as a family are shared at a McDonalds, then the smell of McDonalds will always be warm and fuzzy and comforting.

 

There is no magic bullet cure, we are talking about a systemic multi-generational disconnect from our food, loss of cooking skills and the benefits of dining together.

The film cobbled together some band-aid slogans as a tagline to make us all feel better: Eat organic. Plant a garden. Etc.

These are noble sentiments, not a guide to a return to respecting our food.

The last audience member asked a simple question of the panel, “What can I do?”  And a very wise Marion Nestle replied, “Pick one cause.” She’s right; no one person can provide us with solutions. Stonyfield's Organic Yogurt is now available at Wal-Mart; that was Gary Hirschberg’s small step towards bringing a good product to many.

My battle? Bringing people back together to the dining room table and letting people know that cooking isn’t so hard.

 See the film. Make some choices of your own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hunting Season Conundrum

  The guns are blasting outside, so it must be hunting season in Umbria.  Mushroom hunters battle for territory, clusters of men dressed in camouflage gather on the sides of the road clutching walkie talkies in one hand and the lead of a barking dog in the other. Cinghiale is hunted ‘in battuta’ meaning the hunters and their dogs bark and whoop and flush the prey into a tight spot and then they shoot it. I have mixed feelings about battuta style hunting as it doesn’t’ seem very sporting to have 10 men with advanced weaponry, dogs and a lot of communication devices chasing after one wild boar. On the other hand, the terrain around here is seriously challenging, one misstep and you disappear into the bowels of a bottomless ravine, so maybe it’s best for everyone if they hunt in a group. That is, everyone but the cinghiale.

Dana McCauley’s recent blog post “How Bloodthirsty are you?” is a lively piece where she grapples with her own issues about hunting.

I have to support responsible hunting because I love to cook and eat game, so I can’t be wishy-washy on the subject. But, could I pull the trigger? I just don’t know.

According to my dear friend Jay Cassell, a life long hunter and big muckedy-muck editor at Field & Stream, the number of hunters and women hunters has risen in the US to around 15 million, but as a percentage of the overall population, the hunting population is shrinking and women account for less than 10% of hunters. Jay thinks I should take up hunting, and maybe I’ll go out with him when we get back to NY, if only to symbolically honor the fallen deer (Because Jay, if I go out with you, I totally expect to come back with a nice buck, none of this, oh better luck next time nonsense like you pull with fly fishing!). 

In Umbria, hunting is so woven into the fabric of life, you just accept that in the fall it sounds like you are living outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, it’s best to wear a red bicycle helmet and you always hope that sooner or later someone is going to hand you a choice piece of cinghiale. This weekend, we are serving cinghiale with black olives at the Taverna del Verziere during our Festa del Bosco and I promise to say a small prayer of thanks to the animal spirit. It’s the least I can do.

So, what about you? Do you eat game? Could you pull the trigger?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Green Acres Syndrome

 

Remember Eva Gabor yelping, “Goodbye City Life!”  Well, I’m having my Eva Gabor moment. There was a time in my life when I wore red fingernail polish, uh, actually had finger nails, kept high heels under my desk for those special times and had more suits than pairs of jeans.  Life has changed and I’m not complaining, as we made some conscious life changes and living the way we do requires time and effort. We’ve gone through our first full orto season and as I clean the canning pot yet again, it leads me to wonder when the backlash to local, slow, seasonal eating is going to occur.

 

 It’s wonderful to plant a garden in the spring; the little plants are so full of the promise of good things to come. Then summer comes and you eat tomatoes until you burst. Then fall blows in…and by now, you are flummoxed about what to do with yet another large batch of produce.  I’ve canned tomatoes until my fingers shriveled, figs are embedded in my shoes and my rugs, and I even ground my own grape skin flour! And this morning, I’ve got liters of limoncello waiting to be bottled.

 

I’m not complaining, but I do wonder how many other people would do this. People who eat local for a year get a book deal! OK people, this is not Everyman stuff if you get a book deal.

 

I think its high time for the media to stop taking the easy way out and publish every word that falls out of Michael Pollen’s mouth, and I’m taking the easy way out here by making him the fall guy for what I perceive as an over-simplification. I’m thrilled that Michelle Obama has a garden at the White House, but not for a second do I think she’s loosing sleep over what to do with the green tomatoes that are still on the vine.

 

There has been a huge disconnect from our food source, and I’m completely in favor of acknowledging that chickens actually die to make Chicken McNuggets, but expecting people to grow their own, eat only in season or not eat any food that’s traveled more than 50 miles, is just plain nuts. It’s also not going to solve the problem of e.coli in frozen hamburger patties or spinach, because the bulk of the population uses bagged spinach and stashes frozen hamburger in the freezer. Its time to open up the discussion to reality: food will need to be mass grown to feed the masses, it will need to go through distribution centers, but that doesn’t’ mean that we shouldn’t take a good hard look at what’s going on and fix it.

 

Ask yourself some questions:

Are you willing to wash your own spinach, cut up your carrots?

Are you willing to travel to find a good, responsible butcher, pay more for your meat, and probably eat less of it?

Are you willing to eat fish that hasn’t been filleted and still looks like a fish?

Are you willing to give up coffee or olive oil, because not that many of us live close to coffee growers or olive groves?

Or what about that gorgeous Australian syrah you recently tasted. Willing to give that up?

Are you willing to give up sleeping in on a Saturday morning so that you can weed the garden?

Do you know how to make a pie crust? 

 

None of us are saints; everyone has something they don’t want to do without and I’m not advocate of paralyzing food guilt. Not all of us are cut out for the Little House on the Prairie routine and I’m absolutely certain that if a woman from the mythical Old West Prairie was to drop down into a 21^st century kitchen she would sink down on her knees in tears of gratitude.

 

So, let’s step up the discussion and stop damning all that is mass produced or shipped, stop feeling guilty for buying potato chips instead of growing the potatoes, and start getting creative in our thinking about how to fix what is wrong with our food distribution systems. We should move beyond sound bytes and media slogans to truly, honestly debate how to develop a sustainable food model.