food museum blog

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.

Recipe Theft, Deceiving Your Kids, And All That

You may have heard about Jerry Seinfeld's defense of his wife against charges of what he dubbed "vegetable plagiarism." Apparently Jessica Seinfeld's book, Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food, (Harper Collins,) came out about 6 months after Missy Chase Lapine's book on the same topic, The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals  ( Running Press.)  Ms Lapine evidently thinks it's possible that Ms Seinfeld took her ideas and reworked them for her book. Ms Seinfeld says she has never seen the book.

The ideas? Stuffing mushed up veggies in other foods--inside a burger?--in truth, I have read neither book--to get kids to eat them.   According to an AP story, on The David Letterman Show recently Jerry Seinfeld put it this way:

"I love the term 'plagiarism' for this little event," he said. "Because it used to be you had to really take a theme from a major novel, some sort of literary narrative. Now, you're in your kitchen making brownies, you sneak a little spinach in there, your name's dragged through the mud."

Funny! ( Humor defuses many things,  even  possible lawsuits (?), so Jessica is lucky to Jerry on her side.)

A few things here irk /interest me---

1---This "sneaky" and "deceptive" route regarding kids and good food raises many red flags with me, not least the sneaky bit.  What, are you afraid of your kids?  Invite your kids to eat a bit of everything, or at least to try a taste, from the moment the kiddo can do solid foods. Make the food delicious and colorful and unseasoned at first. ( And if she/he won't eat more than a whisper of a veg, do not panic--I recall several little kids who ate only white foods for months, or ate almost nothing, or ate only hotdogs, and they all survived and today are adults who cook  and eat extremely well.)

2--The titles....the  first  is awkward and badly written. The second is waaay too long.

3--The cookbook recipe thing--I have often wondered about this, even as I contributed a couple of "my" recipes to a series of books I wrote about food plants.  I mean, who knows where one gets these things?  A while back I was sauteeing shrimp in some red chile, scallions,  olive oil and garlic and I wanted to make a nifty sauce--so I removed the cooked shrimp, randomly grabbed some tequila, swirled it around in the pan and added a bit of half and half, and had a terrific "new" dish, served with quinoa and baby brocc. Did I really invent something new?  Had no other chef before me put together that combo? I have no clue, but remember, YOU READ IT HERE FIRST, dammit. 

Weigh in, people.

Summit Springs Farm--Garlic Salvation

I invite you to read the first entry in an occasional diary--that of a newly minted farmer, my nephew, John Sayles. ( NO, not that John Sayles.) Together with his wife, an experienced farmer, they are creating their own organic spread in Maine.   

October 2007

     Once we’d returned home for good from our season at Riverbank
Farm in Connecticut and taken a few days to unpack and organize some
things inside, garlic became our priority…getting beds ready, planting
the cloves, and mulching the beds.  We picked a spot on the western
side of the house, an area recently cleared and plowed by our helpful
neighbor and fellow farmer, Pete Bolduc.  The area was now carpeted with a
spray of weeds and grass, so we measured out what we needed--two 5-ft
wide, 100-ft long beds--and began weeding.

     We still don’t have a tractor, so we’d decided to try a
technique called “double digging” for the garlic.  Here’s how it
works:  You dig a trench about a foot wide and a foot deep across the
width of the bed.  The soil you remove goes into a wheelbarrow for later
use.  Once you’re a foot down, you then use a pitchfork to loosen the
next foot or so of soil.  Then, you move back another foot, and begin
digging your second trench, this time placing the soil you’re removing
into the first trench, then loosening the next layer, etc.  In this way
you move down the length of the bed, really aerating the soil and
preparing it for planting.  It’s a great idea, and while Sonya continued
to weed, I started digging.