food museum blog

Eat/Fiddle with Food Before You Die............!

The foodies over at the Observer Food Monthly in the UK decided to celebrate OFM's 50th edition by publishing "the top 50 things every foodie should do."  Resident Foodie zeroed in on a few of these suggestions, adding her spin.

Make toast    Thick slices dripping with butter, especially eaten with frothy hot chocolate a la francaise---in our new book, Gastronomie: Food Museums and Heritage Sites of France,   published this fall by Bunker Hill Publishing, we suggest you visit Chocolat Casenave in Bayonne to try this.

Boil a new-laid egg    First, take the egg in your hand, feel its warmth, marvel at it.  Put egg back, await chick. ( But first, ascertain a rooster has been involved.)

Dive for sea urchins-- Travelers to southeastern France, don't miss the "Oursinades" , sea urchin events held in Carry le Rouet, from December to February. ( see Gastronomie: Food Museums and Heritage Sites of France.)

Wolf down a hot dog on Coney Island  Foodie  passes on this one. Give me a ballpark dog anyday.

Take a coffee at Caffe Florian   For the Brits to write that "you will pay dearly for your tiny espresso,"  but do it, the scene is worth every penny, means that for Yanks traveling with the dead/doomed dollar, that viewing experience in the Piazza San Marco will probably cost more than a meal at one of Venice's terrific  hole in the wall joints well off the touristed piazzas.  So do it anyway.

Visit Highgrove   The P of  Wales' showcase for organic farming expresses the ideal.  We will be going there next trip for sure.   (  Just learned there may be a five year waiting list..........)

Eat chocolate cake in Vienna   Duh!

Queue for fish and chips    Frankly, my dear, Foodie would rather queue for fried clams and fresh onion rings . There's this terrific place in Point Judith, Rhode Island whose name escapes us but where the f.c.'s are  sublime.

Poach a snail   ( Are we pushing our book, or what??)    According to Gastronomie: Food Museums and Heritage Sites of France,  you can visit the escargotiere of Valerie Samac in Pouilly en Bassigny and observe all aspects of snail raising, snail cleansing, and snail cooking and tasting. Look for the big wood sculpted snail out front.

Homage to Paul Keene and Walnut Acres

We first disc0vered the remarkable organic products of Walnut Acres about 21 years ago, when we were living in Washington, DC. We had tasted some of the company's mayonnaise  at a friend's house and soon ordered the Walnut Acres catalog. Superb soups, peanut butters, dressings, apple juice, and apple butter,  and that mayo. I recall that we would order with other people in the neighborhood so that the driver brought to one address, and our order was thereby discounted.

Today Walnut Acres ia gone, though its label lives on with a few soups from Hain Celestial Group. Its founder, Paul Keene, died recently at age 94. His central Pennsylvania farm was one of the first commercial organic entities in the country, selling both to natural foods stores and  mail order customers around the world.   When he started in the 1940's  many people thought his efforts were "kookie", even subversive.  But he and his wife Enid persevered, taking 100 broken down acres and turning them into a 500 acre organic showcase in Penns Creek, with a thriving bakery and retail store.   The strongest pest controls they used were ladybugs.

Evidently the family did not want to continue the business, once Keene left the day to day running of things. After changing the catalog and clogging it with items such as rice cookers and kitchen gadgets--did they ruin it?--they sold Walnut Acres in 2000.

Foodie thought of Keene on a recent visit to one of those mega house and garden centers--at the entrance to the plants section were two or three boxcar sized displays of chemicals for killing every imaginable creepy crawly or flying  thing, every soft furry burrowing beastie, every unwanted bit of anything.   ( Sigh.)

Miss the mayo.

Menu English: "We serve Pork with fresh garbage!"

Foodie pal Marc recently sent us a book called Here Speeching American--A Very Strange Guide to English as It is Garbled Around the World, by Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras, Villard Books, NY.  The authors are quick to note that, yes, they do not speak Hindu well either, and that American travelers butcher the world's languages regularly.

Having said all that, they offer some funny tidbits,  such as  these menu examples translated into English by the locals:

                                 

Shrimps in Spit   

Bacon and Germs

Chicken Mouse in Tartlet

Appendix Salad ( Pork)

Toes with Butter and Jam

Children Sandwiches

Pork Condom Bleu

Deep Fried Peking Dumpings

Lobster Thermos

Horse-Rubbish Sauce

Boiled Tasteless Jam Pork Soup

Bon appetit!

 

Divinely Inspired and Other Eats, III

Alert foodie Freda informs us that "a face of Jesus" marble cake is on eBay UK, currently going for about  9GBP ( $18) with six days to go.  Seems that someone was baking a cake for a child's birthday--when he/she went to slice it in half in order to frost middle and top,  " I noticed a face looking out of the cake at me bearing a remarkable likeness to Jesus Christ. Realising the important nature of this discovery I have now frozen the cake to preserve it's religious significance."

The cake owner feels this is a sign right in line with the ecclesiastical grilled cheese, pretzel, etc, previously reported right here.   One waggish eBay commenter suggested that with sugar being bad for us, surely Jesus should appear in a lettuce leaf or broccoli. The cake seller was not amused.

Mona Lisa, maybe? Modigliani/Picasso, maybe? Japanese Anime, maybe?

Go (Away), Escargots!

Yes, Foodie has eaten escargots ,  though she has wondered if the real eating treat was dipping good bread into the butter and parsley they were awash in.  In any event, now the escargots  in her perennial bed are having their revenge---they  are munching zinnia seedlings as fast as they can, seedlings Foodie personally grew in those good sized mini greenhouses plastic strawberry containers make. Snails have also nipped off a major leaf of the cardoon  planted in the veggie garden area.  Curses!
Foodie will not kill the garden snails--they are lovely creatures, leaving their glassy perambulating signatures on the brick at night--but she does relocate them. In the compost pile, in the vinca..........Last night she followed instructions on discouraging snails politely, by putting out some tired Belgian beer in shallow dishes, at the edge of the perennial bed.  ( To distract alcoholic  snails from their machinations.) Then she sprinkled ashes from the fireplace around the seedlings, as a barricade. ( Evidently snails cannot cross ash, as long as it is dry, or so said the info from a "green" website.)
Well perhaps these  snails are not well informed, as Foodie found two of them inside the ash barrier, next to slightly munched greenery.
We welcome  snail discouragement suggestions, short of slow death by poison, fast death by crushing or otherwise, from experienced gardeners.  Oh--were  Foodie's garden across the pond, she would encourage the hedgehog population to take their share of snails. Nature's way, after all.  Who are the  snail predators in the Americas?

The National Noshtime--Ballpark Eats

Play ball! Baseball games these days are entertainment and eating events, as thousands of fans glimpse bits of the game from long lines as they  wait for their food, sipping on local wines or micro-brews.
Cannolis at Shea, fudge at Coors Field, boiled peanuts in Hot-Lanta, gyros at Pittsburgh's PNC Park, fish tacos at PETCO Park San Diego, pierogies in Cleveland, and, according to PETA's latest survey, for vegetarian baseball fans, the Bay Area is the best. ( PETA is the animal rights' organization based in Norfolk, VA. ) The Giants at SBC Park offer veggie dogs and burgers, edame, veg sushi, even portobelllo mushroom burgers. Over in Oakland, the A's do the veggie usual, plus baked potatoes and a "savory bean pie." ( Sounds terribly Brit, the last one.)

Of course hot dogs, whether meaty or veg, still rule at ballparks across the country, though when in Chicago, remember never to let ketchup near your dog. Evidently it's a cultural affront to the locals.

How Green was My Desert--Foodie Visits Canyon de Chelly

Foodie is just back from a brief hop into Navajo Country, visiting Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley. It was not a visit replete with breathless gustatory moments---although the red chile beans and tortilla at the El Rancho in Gallup, New Mexico, were indeed tasty,  and the blue corn mush for breakfast at The Junction  in Chinle, Arizona was a pleasant surprise.

The major news?   Greenery.   The Canyon itself had been closed for a few days due to flooding of the canyon floor-----sage was thick and had filled in all the empty dirt patches all over this part of the world. Farmers could not get to their lands by truck ( no one walks down anymore as people did in the olden days) so no corn, beans or squash had yet been planted.  And cold temperatures were amazing the locals.  " By now it should be real hot down here,"  said one jewlery-seller on the canyon floor, who added he had not seen the land as  green for at least seven or eight years.

In Monument Valley we stayed at fabled Goulding's, a lodge started in the 1920's by a young couple  who built a trading post.  You can visit the original post, now a mini museum---canned green grapes were a big item with the Navajos along with huge sacks  of Blue Bird flour from Cortez, Colorado, a brand begun in 1920 and  still dominating  in the 21st century.  Blue Bird seems to be the only flour traditionally used by Navajos  to make fry bread, a delicious and popular lard-based dish that many think has contributed to the rise in obesity and diabetes among southwest Indians generally.

The vibrant blue bird on the cotton sack continues. ( Cortez Milling says it may be the last mill putting flour in cotton bags, used by generations of natives to make purses, clothes, even diapers.)
I bought a 25 lb bag at Basha's supermarket in Chinle for $5.33, and now it sits on my hearth, a colorful reminder of the cherished song of the blue bird at dawn in newly-green Navajo country.

( Photo from  philipgreenspun.com)