food museum blog

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?

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?

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....

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)

Road Food--The Good, the Bad and the Unmentionable

Yesterday lunch was the gustatory highpoint of our trip to St Pete thus far. We are currently trying to digest the rubber scrambled egg, decent but oily biscuit, and tasteless pancake served up by the roadside joint I always call Country Kitchen. ( To their credit, they offer real butter, and actual Canadian maple syrup. Too bad the food that lies under such ingredients is so flabby.)

But Shaggy's, a seafood and drop dead marina-views-place perched on pilings--the restaurant moves, gently--on the Gulf at Pass Christian, Mississippi, was a treat. It is one of the only establishments serving up anything on this coast flattened by Katrina. I mean flattened--a few new places across the coast road from the water have risen up, and a couple more clearly have been rebuilt--but there are dozens of foundations sporting For Sale signs along that route between Bay St Louis and Gulfport.

I ate a first, for me---crawfish spicy mashed potatoes, on which was perched a huge crab cake. The combo was girdled with a perfect roux. Oh yes.

The unmentionable?   ---------------------------------------------

Consider Nevada ?

Apparently the Culinary Workers Union of Nevada estimates that by 2020 Nevada will need 250,000 trained food workers, including chefs, sous chefs, waitrons, busboys, et al. So if you are into vast new housing tracts, sand, water issues, and pretty purple mountains, head there. As 58% of the union's members were not born in the US, if you are fluent in both chopping and English, you should make a rapid rise.

Tavee's Thai Cuisine

  Sometimes the best is right in one's own backyard--my personal Thai buffet lunch place, for example. It's on Albuquerque's west side, in a long stringbean of a shopping center, next to a competent vacuum cleaner store.   The Thai Cuisine and Teriyaki Queen started out ten years ago as a tiny take out joint with maybe 5 tables. ( That name is its only flaw....) Its denizens were often Thai-aware--ex Peace Corps people, ex military, ex government types. They sniffed out the aromas--NO MSG!-- and knew they had unearthed a jewel.

Yes, some of us fretted when the co-owner and prime mover, the uber efficient and crisp Tavee Yaparwong, decided the time had come to expand into the space next door. But all was well--the food remained perfect, hot enough but not too hot--the spring rolls fresh and tasty, thank you, filled with colorful and flavorful veggies only.  I quickly learned to show up only on a Tuesday or a Thursday because those were the days of  my favorite and sublime coconut soup, and, usually, red curry or green curry. Along with pad thai, of course, and tofu with carrot, and so on. Tapioca pudding--not the gummy variety--recently joined the watermelon chunks and green papaya salad in the buffet line.

In the past two years Tavee and her husband Sagol have further pushed the envelope--they now own the Thai Cafe in Santa Fe as well. An accountant who decidedly does handle the books, Tavee is also now a restauranteuse----but she laughs and rolls her eyes as she explains the whole thing was her husband's dream, running a Thai restaurant, not hers.

" So all this is actually your own personal nightmare ? "  I ask, gesturing broadly with my camera. Tavee laughs harder and bustles over to the cash register, attentive to yet another satisfied customer.

No Deep-Fried Twinkies, No Funnel Cake, Just Pie!

The New Mexico State Fair opened on Friday and much to my astonishment I was there first thing in the morning, with a 30-something curmudgeoness pal who detests crowds, particularly crowds featuring the piercing voices of young school children being herded by their keepers.

It was the mellowest walk through the Fair ever--only a handful of seniors drifting quietly through the Fine Arts Building, known to our family as the European-American Arts Building to differentiate it from the Hispanic Arts, and Native American Arts Buildings, as well as the newish African-American Pavilion. All mount art exhibitions that have always been among our favorite Fair fare.

The rule is this: Pie ( the Holy Grail of NM Fair fare) can be purchased and eaten ONLY after the arts viewing segment of the day is over. ( Conveniently, the pie venue pops up just past the last arts building. )

And so it was. We strolled into the tiny alley that abuts the Asbury Cafe and marched directly to the  pie board that lets customers know what's available and what's sold out--at 11 am on Day One, all buttons are lighted and EVERYTHING is available, from apple to strawberry rhubarb, from oatmeal chocolate chip to spicy walnut raisin. You can also buy burgers, drinks,  and the usual coffee shop items but pie remains the traditional best seller. At the window we ordered strawberry rhubarb pie and the vivacious vol enticed  us to get one "a la mode." ( Vanilla, naturally.)

Asbury started out in 1960 as a fund-raising idea for the United Methodist Church building fund. Volunteers set up shop  in the Goat Barn, selling homemade pie by the slice. They quickly raised the money they needed but decided to keep going in order to raise money for community charities. Last year Asbury generated $50,000, all given away.

They called her name, the C. obtained the slices, plopped them down and we stared. They looked like hunks of black olive pie, an item not usually on the menu. No! Chocolate chip! A ghastly error, of course, but one quickly rectified. ( Over the many years of our Asbury experiences we have come across a few extraordinarily wifty vols manning the window, but, oh well, so what.)

The pie was perfection, the crust light, the rhubarb and berries actual.

Fully charged, we then sought out the bunnies and hens, the quilts and coin collections, oddball wood carvings and lego creations.  There was no action at the cookery competition stage. A creative salesman in what I call the Vegematic Hall sparkled up my rings with some pink stuff,  and the C.  made swift work of a bratwurst.

The Fair offered more, of course, --we had not even located the giant zucchini area nor waddled over to the sheepdog trials-- but my pal was surfeited and ready to go back to work.

No matter. Asbury had once again delivered its pie and all was well.

( Pie pictured above is from a Kansas bakery called Our Daily Bread---and that slice looks very much like the Asbury version. You can buy a whole pie for about $21. http://ourdailybread.gourmetfoodmall.com/ProductDetail.php?product=8436)

Report From The Road --Eats

The Blue Bell banana ice cream at the pharmacy in Claude, Texas, led to the still-warm glazed donuts served up with a fervent God Bless You somewhere farther down the pike, and then, just before closing time to the warm embrace of the weary people at Savoie's Cajun joint in Shreveport.

Blackened snapper, fresh onion rings to weep over, slaw, and crawfish etouffee for Foodie Spouse. Oh yes--a few miles off the highway but hey, when in Luziana one must pursue food.

Saturday evening in Mobile, we sat outside at the Blue Gill on the causeway to fully enjoy the ongoing Humidity Festival, along with deep fried soft shell crab, slaw, and a cool Land Shark brew. A live band that was fine but decibled for a stadium seating 100,000 entertained us. ( Not having lost my hearing in the 60's, I applied impromptu earplugs.)  And the crowning event, other than jumping fish, was the approach and then takeoff of an airboat seaplane, right into the blushing pink sunset.

Into the homestretch towards St Petersburg, Florida,---  ( In August?? Yes!  If you've lived in DC for years, in what was once a low lying marsh, you have already survived multiple Humidity Festivals of gargantuan proportions, )---we exited in Gainesville and fell into the aromatic arms of the buffet at Chutnees's.  The cuisine is from Hyberabad---you could taste each spice distinctly and yet the blend in the bharta and the dal and all the rest was smooth---many tiny red chiles sparked the veggie dishes, too. The owner told us that they are totally low fat in their cooking style as well, though there was no hint of deprivation...oh my no. Though we have eaten at many fine Indian veggie buffets, this one has shot to the top of the list.

( Crawfish etouffee pic from a California website ( !!) with thanks--http://www.rotarycajun.com/food.shtml)

Indiana Team Creates 100 Pound Pierogi In Vain Attempt to Set World's Record

Apparently, Whiting, Indiana has a Pierogi Fest. At this year's event this past Saturday, Tim King, inspired by a dream message from his dead uncle, and Eric Mansfield, a former chef, created a 100 pound pierogi.

The AP story reported thusly: "  Mansfield said it took 25 pounds of flour, 2½ dozen eggs, a gallon of water, 40 potatoes, two pounds of butter and months of planning to make the 48-by-35-inch, 100-pound pierogi.

A custom-made pot was used to cook it. Mansfield and his assistants then slathered it with buttery onions as it cooled. After a round of picture taking, they cut it up and served it."

And it tasted.....how?  I'm guessing gummy.

The Guinness Book of Records people have thus far ignored pleas that this was the world's most enormous pierogi ever. Perhaps because, according to this very Blog, it wasn't! The largest was 150 pounds, and it was made in Cherkasy in the Ukraine.   That town has the world's biggest and, dare I say, only statue of a pierogi.

I am certain the Whiting pierogi was the grandest ever in Indiana, and most likely, the entire American midwest, though.

Looking around the Web at pierogi, I came across a restaurant writeup about a place in Raleigh, NC called J. Betskis Restaurant whose chef, Todd Whitney, evidently takes the comfort food pierogi to a rare and heavenly level. 

( Photo, not of the 100 pound Indiana pierogi, but rather of Chef Whitney's creation, is from http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/PrintFriendly?oid=oid%3A156239)