food museum blog

"Food 2.0" Energizes!

Charlie Ayers is my kind of food guy and cook.  Most associated with being the fellow who "fed Google," he was the head chef there from 1999 to 2005, responsible for feeding 1500 people each day, 4000 lunches and dinners, in 10 cafes at Google's Mountain View, CA, campus.  His goal was to feed a diverse and smart group of people tasty, healthy food. Evidently, he succeeded.

His book , Food 2.0,  $25,  just published by DK Publishing, reflects his Google-ish commitment to  fast, unfussy, fresh food that might even push you into the genius category.  His tips upfront are utterly sensible and smart,  laid out with crisp, readable efficiency. What to keep on hand and how to keep it so that when the yen for a snack wafts over you, the veggie munchies are right there, ready to go.   I imagine he's the kind of person who stands at the fridge, eating a handful of blueberries, a couple of carrot sticks, a few lettuce leaves, and calls it salad on busy days.

What utterly won me over, however, was his love of full-fat, plain yogurt. He speaks my mind, indeed.  That ambrosia is good for the digestive system, satisfying, and bears no resemblance to the manufactured sweet, fruity little cupfuls of junk all over the supermarket. He also praises Trader Joe. Yes! Also: "Chocolate is a non-negotiable part of my life."

One of his early recipes is for "Mystery Fondue," made from assorted bits and bobs of cheese he saves up and then melts together with white wine and mustard seed.  And Apple and Brie Quesadillas, Silicon Valley Split Pea Soup, as well as Seared Southwestern Ahi Tuna Tornadoes, and a further slew of eclectic offerings.

The ahi is rubbed with a chile-spice mix, seared, and then wrapped in a tomato tortilla spread with a lime and spice avocado mayo and a stack of jicama, carrot, napa cabbage.....

OY--he even makes spinach latkes.

Food 2.0  is a solid and satisfying book, even in review-copy grainy black and white.  The retail hardback is in resplendent full-color from fabled Dorling Kindersley Ltd.

Home Cooking from the Mediterranean

In these troubled times of an expensive out-of-control war, food crises, political shenanigans and more, it is always a comfort to, well, eat. But before that, cook something homey and warming and reminiscent of a more tranquil time.
Armenian-American chef and restaurant owner Zov Karamardian's self-published book  ZOV--Recipes and Memories from the Heart offers up multiple tasty, colorful dishes that fill that bill.  The first entries I checked were under "eggplant" in the index, because one of my all-time favorite pleasures was a bubbling rich eggplant casserole perfected by a friend's Armenian-American Mom. To my delight, Zov presents an inviting vegetarian Eggplant Tagine, made with chickpeas as well, typical of the North African stews that combine subtle flavors with slow cooking. She recommends with it Roasted Rack of Lamb with Pomegranate Sauce --the pomegranate, today's latest health juice item,  reminds us of the possibility of enjoying "new" ( albeit ancient) tastes.
Kooba Hamoud, appropriately an Iraqi dish--a "meatball soup with lemon and mint," reminds me of the garlic, mint and lemony dishes we enjoyed as Peace Corps volunteers in Iran.

Can anyone tell me why human beings waste  lives, money, time, energy, spirit and resources in the archaic pursuit of warfare in the 21st century, when we could be sharing aromatic dishes of food with one another?

"Cooking Light's" Gargantuan Opus

Eleven million readers! So claims Cooking Light magazine on its website. Established by Southern Progress Corp, Birmingham, AL,  in 1987, the magazine's aim is to scale back the fat in not just fried chicken--( NB--fried chicken empire KFC apparently is now offering grilled hens)--but in a wide range of traditional as well as global recipe favorites. Its approach is readable, practical, and utterly specific. And younger cooks in my family have praised the magazine's suggestions over the years.

Yesterday the company launched Cooking Light Complete Cookbook--A Fresh New Way to Cook, published by Oxmoor House, $34.95,  part of the Southern Progress group. Again, the practicality of the approach stands out. The 5-ring binder book containing 1200 recipes allows for easy removal of pages. Its surface is washable, for messy cooks like me, and the book comes with a DVD labeled "Bonus--Cooking Light Dinner Tonight Cookbook" featuring 100 recipes and multiple how to's.
( Yes, I have printed up recipes from the Internets but I have never allowed my laptop anywhere near my cooking arena, lord no. ) Calories, fats, carbs, etc., are listed at the end of each offering.

But, and here come the "buts," where's the joy? The exuberance of eating well --oops, that's another food mag---the taste, the aromas, the cultural background? Not here.

The layout begins with a section on In Season, all well and good. Then it gives a primer on what Healthy Eating is about, according to the authors, who must be congratulated on a thoroughly vetted, complicated project, mind you.   Next up are Entertaining and  Appetizers & Beverages, thereby making me feel I had stumbled into a 1950's  tome from Betty Crocker. Wha? Maybe the 21st century has reverted to home entertaining on a big scale while I was blogging--maybe gas prices are thrusting us back on cocktail hour with the neighbors. Maybe?

But having to flip through a major cookbook in search of main courses??  See-- after doing the Wasabi Bloody Marys--OY!-- and Mini Black Bean Cakes--yum, we are really salivating for dinner, and yet the cookbook offers us mega pages of BAKED GOODS next--breads, and cakes, and cookies and, and...

OK, I am possibly making too much of a fuss, but the fruit and veggie sidedishes are smack dab at the end next to substitutions and what a cup is and whatnot. The fish section neglects to inform the reader about the health benefits/sustainable issues of fish, but I suppose there's no room, sadly. And, alarmingly, an entire section of luscious looking fare is labeled Meatless Main Dishes. Please! This is so..........Betty Crocker?  Mushroom Tamales, Tomato Basil Tart, Corn Fritatta, yes. I think 21st c. Americans can handle Vegetarian Main Dishes, I really do.

I realize this is not intended to be the kind of cookbook one gets into bed with, red wine and oozing cheese on the night stand, for a sensual romp through phantasmagoric foodland.  Sitting bolt upright at my desk,  however, I utterly fell for the recipe for Swedish Limpa Soda Bread--it's seasoned with anise and orange rind. Excellent.

Congratulations, Cooking Light, on a major opus many will find perfect--the superlative recipe for Grilled Fries ( white and sweet) on p. 381 has been duly noted.   

Crawfish, Gators, Armadillo and All That

We had a crawfish festival here in St Pete recently, complete with Cajun bands---and we had a hankering to go eat mounds of the little freshwater mini lobsters but the cost was $12 to enter a park here lined with the usual kind of vendors selling earrings and funnel cake and assorted tacky items, so we passed. After all, the music was so "enhanced" we could hear it for free from blocks away, and my local fish store has crawfish, along with cooked $5 apiece lobsters, and great local clams, and oysters, ditto, though not as superb as Dutch oysters, and a slew of local fish with wild nicknames, as well as flounder and arctic char and , and.....
I ate gator once a few years back, unmemorably--the fish store has frozen gator--but a few days ago a friend visiting from the frozen tundra of Vermont joined me on a walk in a park smack dab in the center of St Pete where we spotted three 12 inch-long baby gators, all sweetly small and stripy, slowly swimming along with their cute schnozzes up out of the water.

ps Just a day before we had seen an armadillo snuffling about in yet another naturey place within St Pete.
Haven't eaten that.....But here's a recipe--oh goody--how does one remove the armor plate, though?

( Thanks to http://www.nuawlins.com/crawfish.htm for crawfish pic.)

Obama Leads in Ohio Department of Food Provision

Referring back to the motto of The FOOD Museum, "First, we eat. Then we do everything else," stated by writer M.F.K. Fisher, I would say that the Senator Obama volunteers in Columbus clearly have their priorities straight. Along with building a strong grassroots, interconnected presence in Ohio, they have made feeding their hard-working vols a priority.

Check out this report comparing Obama's campaign with that of Senator Clinton:

"At the end of a regular e-mail to Democratic Party activists, the Clinton campaign attached a plea last week begging volunteers to bring food to staff members working at the campaign headquarters. When ( Obama head volunteer Valli) Frausto read the message, she chuckled. Obama's campaign already had a volunteer whose only job is to coordinate the dozens of people who pledged to cook lunch and dinner for Obama's 60 staff members in Columbus every day through March 4. "  Emphasis mine.

Now that's planning you can digest, darlings!

Lousy Chinese Food

After several weeks of enjoying Florida's citrus and fish and strawberries, this weekend we had a hankering for decent Chinese. Lured to Dunedin north of Clearwater by a coupon to Ivory Mandarin, we had lunch there yesterday--a generic Sechuan shrimp and veg dish and a mild cashew, shrimp and veg offering, with white rice, soup and an eggroll.

Ouch. The soup was slimy and salty, the eggroll, covered in a reallllllly thick, knobbly skin, tasted exactly like chocolate. I was so surprised by the taste--I love choc, mind you--that I set the e.roll aside forever.  The shrimp were cooked the right length of time, I can say that, but the Sechuan sauce was utterly forgettable and one assumed it had been prepared months before and stored in a jug. The broccoli was, you know, not bright fresh green--I ate it dutifully, however, ever mindful of the bennies of the cheery cruciferae family, though brocc has never been a fave of mine.

IM's website touts "cleanliness" as top of its list of sales points, and also refers to its cuisine's East-West Chinese food fusion. Huh? Cleanliness? I will gladly eat at a table encrusted with weeks-old spilled wonton soup, fanning away flies, if the food is terrific. But that's me.

We pondered how this place could have been named Best of 2006 and 2007, and Top 100 Chinese Restaurants and such.

So as we sat there and sipped the jasmine tea, nothing wrong there, we felt huge nostalgia for Yin-Yang, the only place we eat Chinese in New Mexico. It's in Santa Fe, in an odd building that houses small shops and artists' studios. The decor is basic older Chinese restaurant plus sagging booths, and the General Dao ( Tao) Shrimp is perfect. As is the Spicy Eggplant.  And the veggie dumplings!  (Sigh.)

Only one Chinese restaurant in an entire state is a bit much, I know. Chow's Chinese Bistro is quite good--we've been to it in Albuquerque--but..........we prefer no website, always open, often empty, Yin-Yang.

ps Chow's now calls itself Asian Bistro, for unknown reasons. I don't recall anything Korean or Thai on the menu....

Obama, Japan, Produces "Native Son" Bean Cakes

A town of 32,000 on the west coast of Japan has a bond with one of our candidates. The town is Obama, and apparently the locals there are rapidly becoming fans of that guy with the same name.

According to this AP story, "Obama's name graces posters hung in the main hotel. Headbands and T-shirts with drawings of the candidate's face will be available soon. Local confectioners are designing Japanese-style sweet bean cakes with Obama's portrait on them."

Now that's a candidate with broad, diverse appeal. Come March we expect to hear from the little known O'Bama clan in Ireland, backing their lad, Barry, with marzipan potato candies bearing his likeness.

( Thanks for bean cake pic from http://mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com/2007/07/fine-find-in-san-francisco.html)

Slaughtering News From All Over, Plus, A Teapot Scandal?

Grateful that I do not have 150 feet of intestines tucked inside, as do manatees, I see that the current crop of free healthy product magazines are recommending a huge roster of "cleansing" items this winter, none of which would be needed if the magazines' audience were eating as advised in the first place, right?

But I digress---a slaughterhouse video from Hallmark Meat Packing in Chino, CA, has prompted Los Angeles schools to withhold meat products from a company called Westland that buys meat from Hallmark, on the grounds that the "downer" cattle unable to walk towards their deaths were being dragged or pushed in, and thus might be suffering from diseases that could render their meat iffy for human consumption. Westland provides ground beef to the USDA's National School Lunch Program.  Many school systems around the US have chosen to reject meat from Westland, including some in Oregon and Florida.

( Meanwhile, rival groups in Kenya have been killing one another not only machetes, but also with bows and arrows. )

Japanese whalers, despite concentrated efforts to stop them, continue to slaughter whales with impunity, though Australian authorities now claim the video evidence they have will bolster their case against the spurious legal claim of the Japanese that they are taking whales for "research purposes."

Apparently The Teapot Museum of Sparta, NC, was the recipient of a $500,000 grant from the Federal Transportation office back in 2006, a fact now revealed to all and sundry with great derision. This report from 2007 says the planned new museum idea has been scrapped. Now as one who applauds any museum effort directed however tangentially at the subject of food, the stuff that sustains us, rather than at yet another monument to war and destruction, I must say that chunk of change would have been a fine first step towards the creation of the National Museum of Food & Farm on the Mall in Washington, DC. Read more about The FOOD Museum's proposal here.

Which Fish?

Having finally found two reputable fish markets near my rental in St. Pete, FL, now I stand paralyzed in front of their numerous offerings. We all knew about mercury in fish, right, but largely ignored it? Recent articles on mercury, by Marian Burros in the NYTimes, among others, have poked us into researching what fish we can eat, either on an eco-friendly basis or a health basis.

Char, bass, trout, croaker? Wild Pacific halibut? Striped bass? None of my personal faves in that list, save pink trout.  Then there's klip, a delicious firm, white fish we had last week. A rockfish from S. Africa, Google tells me. OY. NG.  Croaker? One website tells me this fish is "full-flavored." This could be an iffy choice, then. Char, too, is apparently "strong."

Clearly I need to find a local fisherperson and grill her/him as to what's coming out of FL waters. With a tad of butter and Meyer lemon from our own small tree.

Scared of Cooking? No Time?

Michael Pollan, author of several well-researched books on American food and eating, recently said in an interview that Americans are making cooking a "spectator sport." And thus many are becoming intimidated by the world's oldest nurturing activity, as if it is the province only of flashy chefs with obscure ingredients at their knife points.

BBC America carries a slew of Chef Gordon Ramsay's shows, including one in which he invites to his restaurant a big crowd of youngish women in an effort to "get women back in the kitchen." The dishes he does for that show are relatively simple and quick to do, especially if you are accustomed to working fast and efficiently in the domain that many women determinedly tried to escape for years. But...several women interviewed still felt that cooking takes much more time than they have available.

What a dilemma--from being tied to the stove in the olden days, with tiny kids awash in a probably cramped house, to today when many have mega kitchens in which they barely prepare coffee, women are....what? Continuing the rebellion?

Apparently this is where Rachael Ray and her 30 minute meals come in. I have not seen the show but have read it being put down in some of the foodie press because Ms Ray has been known to use the odd can of mushroom soup in a recipe, poor retro thing...

People have always been amazed that I regularly cook freshed mashed potatoes. How this simple food became complicated, I do not know. In the time it takes me to peel a few spuds, cut them up "small" and toss them in water, an acquaintance can still be kvetching away about the lack of time for such a gourmandish and outlandish undertaking.

Ramsay grills, steams or sautees much of his food, all quick cooking methods no matter what. Yes, one must peel and chop some veg, maybe even wash lettuce, but this can be done while yacking with one's kids, sipping a glass of wine. We're not talking about stuffing ravioli or baking bread, those these activities, too, can be speedily done with decent planning.( Not so much by impatient me.)

Maybe it's time for a reality cooking show featuring dozens of average unfamous mortals who are competent and swift in the kitchen--with the final 5 minutes always showing a family or group of friends at table, enjoying the food, community and conversation.

Who does not have enough time for that, at least once or twice a week?

ps One of my pet bugaboos and a huge timewaster, is the American habit of involving their kids in organized sports, and attending practices, snoozing through every game, weekend after weekend.We did it too, friends, until finally the light dawned--the kid was a decent goalie but was never going to be of those gifted and balding World Cup goalkeepers--so as a family we took golf lessons, signed up for racketball sessions at the gym and so on. Lifetime sports! What a notion. 

This left much more time for whipping up cranberry walnut bread and making scalloped spuds.