food museum blog

Spuds Are In At Summit Springs Farm

Reddale, Carola, Butte, Cranberry, Russian Banana Fingerling, and All-Blue--they are in!  Potatoes, of course. Glorious tubers orginating in the South American Andes and now growing worldwide.
Our intrepid farmers in Poland, Maine not only planted them in recent days but they've already harvested some local media coverage in Portland from a tv journalist who has joined SSFarm's CSA and wants to chronicle her experience there over the season. The details at 10!

( Sonya plants, in the trench dug by John.)

"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.

But Has She Won New Mexico??

Hot news--In an interview with  Washington, DC, tv station WJLA, right before today's primary, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton revealed the following:

...she eats hot peppers because “years ago, I was told that hot peppers would keep me healthy.”

– “Jalapenos, banana peppers – any kind of hot peppers,” she said. “I eat them raw, I eat them cooked. I don’t whether it’s for everybody, but it’s worked for me."

(I would love to be Fair and Balanced and post additional up to the minute gustatory goodies about others running for Prez but, thus far, that's it.)

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.

Lettuce-Loving Sirens

O the sirens of Florida, the graceful behemoths that lie like gray logs just under the surface of the water. We recently examined manatees up close at the Tampa Zoo, where those under repair and rest after injury from boat propellers and other human hazards, chomp down barrels-full of lettuces. They and their gizzard-possessing fish friends, the local leaping mullet, are vegetarians of reknown.

From manatees.net--"Manatees eat over 60 different species of aquatic and semi-aquatic plants. Their diet includes manatee grass, turtle grass, various species of algae, mangrove leaves, and water hyacinths. They may consume 10% of their body weight daily in vegetation. Their digestive system allows the bacterial breakdown of cellulose in the hind-gut. To accommodate the great volume of high-fiber food they eat, manatatees have intestines up to 150 feet long."

Fresh Food's Tiny Space

Just a quick thought--my local ( this winter) Publix supermarket is gigantic yet its produce area is tucked into a tiny space way in the far corner of the joint. Here lie the "fresh" fruits and veggies that are supposed to make up the bulk of what we Americans are urged to eat, far too many of them packed and sealed under cellophane, the food, that is. The rest of the store is stuffed with acres of processed foods, some cleaning items, some pet food, and so on. Yet the produce arena is pathetically small.

ps The produce section backs up to the bakery, for which Publix is favorably known, apparently. Hydrogenated fats still are rampant here. No thanks.

Spuds on NPR

On New Year's Eve we donned our potato skins and did an interview with Melissa Block for All Things Considered on National Public Radio. Her producer called us in line with the United Nations' dubbing of 2008 as the International Year of the Potato.
For those of you who do not know our story, we started out in the food history biz focused on the powerful potato. Tom began The Potato Museum in 1975 as a classroom project for his students at the International School of Brussels in Belgium. It grew as word spread, its pioneering  museum about a food effort turning up a few years later as part of two major exhibitions--the Smithsonian's Seeds of Change event for the Quincentenary and Canada's remarkable Amazing Potato exhibit at Ottawa's National Museum of Science and Technology.
The FOOD Museum On Line and this Blog is an offshoot of that venture. Listen below...

Finding Food---First Steps in Florida

Somewhat settled into the Florida lifestye now--real Floridians do not swim in "winter" even if it's 80 degrees out, so maybe not--I am just beginning the search for decent food sources. ( I plan to be here through March.)My own brother, not known for his gustatory interests, is begging me to find him "good bread." ( In Vermont in the summer he has access to the best.) Truly, NM and environs are solid good food spots. Anyway, cruising through Pass- A- Grille, a beach village previously blogged here, we saw a sign for Fresh Produce. It's sold at a place named The Front Porch, where the goodies out front truly are grown by local farmers, and if the two women who run the joint aren't there, you can leave your money in a mailbox, and take the tomato or bunch of herbs you want.

Not bad, for a start. Not bad at all.

Thanksgiving Dinner Thoughts, PLUS, Confessions of A Retail Saboteuse

Martha's Living is all into briny turkey,  though the November cover features a turkey grilled in Texas, the WaPost wants me to crush the bird's backbone,  and Gourmet is offering a maple-glazed bird. Every autumn the home and food mags twist themselves inside out to do something "fresh" with America's own gobbler. But some of us say, hey, it's a large fowl, so roast it like a chicken, already. Big whoop.

Appropriately, the beast is not my assignment this Tgiving---I am working my mind around a new approach to sweet pots, sticking to the same old, same old for mashies made from Yukon Golds, and pondering a creamy leek gratin dish (from ?? ) instead of creamed onions with sherry/bourbon/brandy or whatever. The leek recipe is too rich but will do, once I am finished making it simple, stupid.  And I am building a crunchy offering from a base of Belgian endive.

So I was fondling the B.E. the other day in my local Sunflower Market when my red pencil eyes noted the labeling above the endive basket--"Belguim endive."  Now this is so wrong. First of all, the glorious country of Belgium is spelled incorrectly. But, more to the point,-- Do we say France toast? Or England mustard?  Or Spain onions? Come on!  ( OK, Vienna sausage...)

But when I gently asked the produce guy to correct the label to read "Belgian endive", he looked at me as if I were the village crank, ( testy older dame, more like,) and said, "It's that way in the book."  "Well in that case "the book" is incorrect," said I.  He waved the little sign around a bit, huffed and puffed, and then graciously waved me off.  ( I didn't go into the pronunciation of endive, honest!)

Of course he didn't know with whom he was dealing....I asked the checker to show me "the book," where, voila, "Belgian endive" appeared.  So.........On my next visit to the store, I wandered over to the endive to eyeball the sign. Same one, unchanged. Armed and dangerous, I whipped a Sharpie out of my pocket, plucked out the label, turned it over, wrote the veg up properly, reinserted the label, and sidled off.

Off the subject, but still---  If you happened to be in Lowe's in St Pete, Florida this October and wondered who had unplugged all the Christmas singing merry-go-rounds and talking Santas, wonder no more.

( Thanks to http://www.belgianendive.com/ for the pic.)

Halloween Excess, Plus, Homage to Peg Bracken

USA Today tells me that Americans spend on average $65 per head on Halloween-related cr*p. $20 of this goes for candy, apparently. I spent $4 on two small bags of seasonal-looking candy kisses,  some of which has gone into the craws of  assorted pals, one utterly inadvertently into the dawg ( she lived!,) and the rest, most of the bags, is sitting near the front door wondering what in hell ever happened to Trick or Treaters? !  I had a carved and lighted punkin up, too.

Moving on--I noticed belatedly that the Queen of mushroom soup in a can,  Peg Bracken, had died in Oregon. Her "I Hate to Cook Book" is out of print, "doubtless a casualty of the Age of Arugula," as the NYTimes obit put it.  Back in the day when mothers like mine left Halloween costuming to the kids, as in --"go look in the closet-- be a tramp? ( The freightcar riding variety.) A ghost?" -- Peg Bracken was a blast of sardonic joy. "Some women, it is said, love to cook. This book is not for them," began her classic tome, published in 1960.  If a recipe was fast, easy and straightforward, it was good, period.  ( Frozen foods, canned foods, dried foods in cans, all were stars in this anti-Fanny Farmer, nothing- from- scratch, approach. )

Mind you, by the time Bracken's book came out, with no tiny kids to feed, my mother had already moved rapidly away from once-a-week meatloaf and pork chops with apple sauce. ( The meatloaf was never really jettisoned it was so damn good .) She subscribed to Gourmet and enjoyed experimenting. Urged along by her, ours was the first family to walk through the red and gold doorway of the first Chinese restaurant to open in our suburban area.

Peg Bracken was funny and liberating,  freeing multitudes of women from guilt, on a topic traditionally taken very seriously. Throw fodder at your family-- spare me the cutesy baby veggies, for gawd's sake--- and then go have a ciggie.