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.

Price of Rice Hits Home While Gas Price Keep Diners Home?

"You can't charge enough to keep up with food prices."  So said Tavee Yaparwong, owner of my favorite Thai restaurant in Albuquerque, who just told her customers she would  be closing down the $7.43 lunch buffet in favor of $7.95 daily specials. "Rice alone, jasmine rice, has gone up 150% in the past month, " she added.  And apparently the buffet was starting to have excess food going to waste on a regular basis.  Fewer people driving the extra miles to eat out, due to gas prices? Fewer people eating out at all, due to the need to put extra cash towards gas?

Fat David, Plus, Foodie is Baaaack; Also, Usage!!

Back, at last, after a long time away, and a road trip across these USSSS of A from St Petersburg to Albuquerque, a journey not noted for its fine cuisine, alas. So while I organize my foodie thoughts, experiences and pix, and prepare to resume, I thought you might enjoy this lovely image at left, forwarded to me, origin unknown. Clearly Dave has returned to his pillar in Florence after a few weeks holiday in the U.S.

Oh--also---consumed with following the Dem primary on line, I am once again urging all bloggers and posters to understand that "loose" means untied or unconfined,  while "lose" means go down to defeat. Also--"led" is the past tense of "lead", as in "she led in the PA polls by 20 points a few weeks ago."  And "lead," the noun, is the stuff appearing in all those Chinese-made toys. Thank you.

"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.   

Krackers, Manatees, Mermaids...

Last Sunday we plunged into a tad of Florida's roadside Americana. No, we did not eat here (left), but were inspired once again to ponder the age-old American fascination with using K when a C is called for.

We did buy boiled peanuts from the man selling smoked mullet from a colorful wagon, clearly a local, but no, actually he was from upstate New York and no more a Kracker, um, Cracker than say, I am. ( You may recall that "cracker" derives from the crack of the whips used to drive cattle by early folks in Florida.)

These compelling sightings occurred on a visit to Homosassa Springs to wallow in manatee-viewing. The m's decidedly relish their in-captivity diet of carrots and sliced raw sweet potatoes, as well as Romaine lettuce, augmented by green peppers.

But the human highlight of the day was the mermaid show at Weeki Wachee, where the young women of the area have been plunging into the springs, grabbing air hoses, and posing prettily wide-eyed, hair streaming not directly into their eyes and mouths as with ordinary mortals but flowing up and out into the bubbles, since around the time of the GI Bill. ( While wearing tight mer-woman tailed costumes.) The foodish underwater highlights of the show were : A--apple eating and B-- soda drinking. Do not try this at home!

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)

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.)