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.

Flavored Snapple Antioxidant Power Waters Under-Amaze Foodie

Water, water, everywhere, including from the tap, but Americans choose to buy it in both big and little plastic bottles--or wrestle home the 5 gallon jugs from the water store ( my choice thus far,) or install filtered gizmos at the kitchen sink, or pour tap water into those Brita pitchers...or.....

Now, yes, flavored water has been around a while--and I'm not talking about the Cokes and the Dr Peppers and all those hideously uber-sweetened fizzy things that once were merely made with sugar and now are all corn syrup all the time--the drinks that made Americans Great, and I mean, like, Huge.
No--I am tiptoeing into the topic of , maybe, specialty waters?

A pr person emailed to ask if I would try some Snapple Antioxidant Waters and comment about them on this blog. Sure, I said. They arrived. I tried a half glass of chilled Agave Melon, subtitled "The Power to Restore."  Then I sipped Raspberry Acerola--"The Power to Defy."  Wow. The literary context of these drinks is formidable, maybe to provide the breakfast reading we once enjoyed on the back of cereal boxes, before we shifted to bulk grains in clear bags, who knows?

Ok, so--the restorative one is presumably for use after working out. The defiant one is aimed at keeping me, ( me?) "young at heart." Oy. Even worse, it "wants to keep my mind spry." And it contains a heckuva lot more "protective anti-oxidants" than the Agave Melon.

The taste? Like very diluted regular sweet juice. Curiously flat. Reminiscent of the watered-down  juice  we gave our kids back in the day, after realizing they were getting crazed on the full-fledged liquid.

The waters arrived in a box containing absolutely zero product info. Dutifully, I went on the Internets and enjoyed an amazing fantasy website put up by the Snapple people--a plane flying over lovely landmasses and such, but the hard facts were elusive. In fact, when I clicked on "Real Facts," the first thing I learned was that a goldfish's attention span was three seconds. Now this did not surprise me, given that my childhood fish, Joe, swam around ALONE in the same bowl for 12 years until being flushed down the toilet by my mom. He was dead at the time. ( In later years, I became fairly certain that numerous "Joes" had entered and exited that bowl during my happy childhood. )

Note to Snapple: wha???

But I digress.

Finally, driven by the need to be a responsible recipient of free drinks, I looked at the labels of these not really waters.  Modified corn starch???  And Epigallocatechin Gallate. ( Among many other ingredients.) OMG!  I'm off to have a slug of a real health drink, Cabernet Sauvignon.

Good luck, Snapple. Thanks for the Nutrient Enhanced Water Beverages you sent me. Full disclosure: a friend of mine walked off with the Mango one, and the other one, whatever it was.

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?

Of Islands, Hunger, and Yes, We Have No Eggs

Haitians are apparently not satisfied eating mudcakes for survival---in Port Au Prince they are rioting, and looting, and demanding the resignation of president Rene Preval in part because global food prices  have risen 40% in the past year, a fact particularly affecting islanders who import most of what they eat. Their staple, rice, is expensively imported more than it should be, thus diminishing local production. Taxes on food, too, appear to be an issue. Food that is on shelves in cities is too costly for the poor to buy. According to today's AP story, about 80% of the people struggle to survive on about $2 per day.

Many of those who marched on the capital chanted "we are hungry!," according to a report from The Canadian Press. Haitian riots followed protests in Egypt and elsewhere, prompting a UN official to state that "food insecurity" is a major threat to world stability.

Meanwhile, speaking of islands, when we recently visited family in the Abacos, Bahamas, we stayed in Hope Town, a place filled with well-off vacationers. Food, and most other domestic goods available at local groceries, was outlandishly expensive when compared to prices for the same items on the Florida coast. Even eggs were not raised locally for sale---people are dependent on small ferry boats for everything, and during a three day period of stormy seas, the hunt for eggs became paramount. Not, mind you, for human survival.  It was Easter weekend, you see.

Early one morning, still in my robe, I walked from our seaside abode onto a small road heading into the lush undergrowth, following the sound of a rooster crowing, hoping  to locate at least one local source of something to eat. After a bit I turned back on reflecting that my inappropriate garb might have caused the rooster's owner to have me arrested by the constabulary ( one guy) for some form of peeping or stalking or other addlepated old dame behavior.

Even the mere threat of " food insecurity" has me pondering( not for the first time,)  where to live,  what to grow, how to harvest enough water for growing, and how to get "off the grid" in time to do all the above.  Perhaps my Jack Russell might be cajoled into trotting along on some kind of power-generating treadmill so that I could maintain my link to the Internets, too.

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!

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....

Remembering Sugar Workers

Remember that sugar plant explosion two weeks ago in Georgia? I kept hearing the story but never encountered a discussion as to why sugar is such an explosive material. Today I found that Slate.com had provided this lengthy explanation.

Earlier this morning a report on NPR quoted a local florist working on a wreath for a memorial service--nine people were killed in the accident. Here's what she said about the people who made Dixie Crystals possible:

"When I use that sugar, I've always thought of these guys, and now, of course when I use my sweet sugar, these guys that help put it in that bag are gone," Brown says. "And the whole plant's gone and the whole community just suffers, so I think it kind of does bring it home."

Dixie Crystals brand, today owned by Imperial Sugar, began in 1917.  The new business venture was then known as the Savannah Sugar Refining Corporation. According to Imperial's website history, " Nearly 400 people, white and black, moved from Louisiana to Savannah to help build and run the plant."

We try to remember with gratitude every day the people who bring us our food, of all variety. Those who fish commercially, farmers and farm laborers, scientists, truckers, supermarket workers, agronomists, chefs, servers, botanists, soil experts, and on and on.

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.

Tiptoeing Into The Cuban Thing

Recently we wandered into a storefront Cuban eatery on 49th street North in St Pete to explore its black beans and rice, Cuban coffee and so on.

The waitress, NOT Cuban, as she told us, rolling her eyes, said all the beans contained meat, but you could try the white rice and tostones???  Hmmm. All veggie Son of Foodie wanted beans and rice...well, he ordered a cafe con leche and salty, dry as pressed wood, plantain cakes, while I leapt on the fish sandwich, having been told by the same waitress that the owner/cook caught his own, and at only $7.95 each.  Tatsy fish, lightly seasoned, was cooked just right, albeit smashed in the Cuban sandwich manner between two large slices of bread.

As I removed the bread casing, I found zero sauce, oil, nada, between fish and bread. And no garni of any kind on the plate. So the fish really rather resembled aquatic roadkill. When I got to talking with Cuban-born Nelson Guerra of The Cuban Delight Cafe, he said that the stark presentation was "the way we always do it," and then elaborated on the differences between Tampa Cuban bread--authentic!--and Miami Cuban bread--Not!  Apparently the earliest immigrants brought their traditional breadmaking ways to Ybor City, the cigar-making section of Tampa I have blogged about before and Fidel crushed this bread style once he took power in Cuba. Huh? Really? Did it represent freedom and rebellion?  ( Will research further. Miami Cuban bread is loaded with lard, apparently.)

Anyway, when I asked about the grouper, and was it REALLY grouper ??, Nelson said that he had been among the whistle-blowers on the Chinese catfish-sold-as-Florida grouper story of recent months. "So this fish I ate today was real grouper you caught? " "Not exactly," said he.  While he has negotiated with a distributor to buy only verifiable grouper, that fish family is large and widespread and, in fact, the fish I had just eaten was South American.

So what about the whole sustainable fish thing? Nelson shrugged: "My customers want and expect grouper." But neither they nor I check piscatory passports, most likely.

(The non-Cuban waitress not only tried to sell us the false fresh-caught by Nelson fish story, she also misinformed us about the beans--the black ones, as we figured,  never have meat.)

( Photo by Bob Croslin of roast pork plate appeared in the St Pete Times review of this cafe, probably before Nelson took over...http://www.sptimes.com/2005/05/05/Weekend/Home_cooking__Cuban_s.shtml)

Toiling Under the Spreading Avocado Tree

In response to a Post from fellow Blogger Kathy F. at

http://whatdoiknow.typepad.com/what_do_i_know/ , I wrote the following.

"Usually I am not blogging from a small cafe table outdoors under an enormous avocado tree. Yet since I am in St Petersburg, Florida, for several weeks, working on a food history book, this site seems appropriate to a Blog dedicated to all things eclectically food. ( My usual workplace is a messy home office in New Mexico.)
My new workspace is not always tranquil. Acorns from surrounding live oaks hammer down on adjacent sheds and squirrels natter loudly.
If only my new digital camera worked with this traveling laptop, I would enclose a pic. Maybe later, after a huge avocado and grapefruit salad. The adjacent yard has numerous gfruits and friendly neighbors..."

This reminded me that eons ago, in our parlor floor apartment on the Lower Eastside of New York, just off the Bowery, we had a lovingly nurtured scrawny avocado tree in a pot, grown from an actual seed, as urban pioneers did in those days.  It did have extravagent arms, as I recall, and it became woefully dusty, but it gave a shot of rich, ripe greenery to a windows-at-each-end, none-at-the-sides little pad. It may have gone to a friend when we moved to Brussels, or perhaps it was the plant my mother found a home for at a car dealership in the 'burbs.

In any event, its cousin, the exuberant tree under which I toil, connects me with the Florida of old--the lush acres of trees and citrus groves planted by Hamilton Disston's people in this very neighborhood that later sprouted 1950's bungalows. Initially, Disston bought 4 million acres of FL land for 25 cents an acre back in 1881 and proceeded to create agricultural land. He is perhaps best known for his tireless effort to drain" the worthless swamp you people call the Everglades."

A complex fellow with vast influence over Florida, Disston's dealing went sour in the late 1890's and he died in 1896, either from a heart attack, or, as one report has it, by a single shot to the head. He was found in his bathtub.

Disston Heights, the small neighborhood where I am staying, is the one area in the entire county that does not require flood insurance. It's a dizzying 40-60 feet above sea level, thank you, and its inhabitants need not evacuate in times of hurricanes.

But if the hurricanes doen't get them, the squirrels will--the avocados, that is. We are vigilant each morning, ready to pick up the heavy fruit that have tumbled to the ground during the night. Most of them have tiny toothmarks by dawn.