food museum blog

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.

SSF Mainiacs Visit Fabled Indian Farm

The Summit Springs Farm-ers, ( you may recall their ongoing effort to erect a large greenhouse on their spread,) recently have returned to Maine after an incredible 5-week trip to India, and their spokesperson on all things ag, John Sayles, sent us this report:

" One of the most rewarding experiences of the trip was a visit to Navdanya, an organic research farm and seed bank about 10 kilometers outside the city of Dehra Dun in the Indian state of Uttranchal. The 20-acre site was founded in the 1980’s by Dr. Vandana Shiva, a scientist, environmentalist, and activist, “to support local farmers, rescue and conserve crops and plants that are being pushed to extinction and make them available through direct marketing.” The Navdanya website also notes that the farm is “actively involved in the rejuvenation of indigenous knowledge and culture. [Navdanya] has created awareness on the hazards of genetic engineering,  ( and)defended people's knowledge from biopiracy and food rights in the face of globalization.”

After looking through the small bookstore and administrative center, we walked around this unique farm with a guide. In small plots, different combinations of crops are grown together to see how they do. One plot may have carrots and onions together; another may have carrots, onions, and coriander (cilantro). Crop density is also studied. One plot of wheat has been intensively planted, and another less so, and another even less, but perhaps also interspersed with another grain or even another variety of wheat. Dozens and dozens of these plots cover the farm’s open spaces. Nearby is an orchard, and in the opposite direction is the seed bank.

We took a short walk down a tree-lined lane with bright green parrots flitting about overhead, to reach the seed bank, a modest rectangular building with an adobe appearance. We all took off our shoes and filed in. Over 300 varieties of rice are kept here in metal boxes, plus about 70 varieties of wheat, numerous other grains, and vegetable and fruit seeds. It is probably the most extensive private seed bank of its kind in all of India. The building itself, though, was much smaller than expected, quite modest, and decorated with lively paintings of flora and fauna on the walls. Outside, the spirit of experimentation and variety continued with the compost area. We saw four or five different composting methods being tried, everything from pit composting to compost bins with removable sides to elaborate composting trenches designed to make the worms happy.

  Our friend and traveling companion, Nicole, is an amateur herbalist and was thrilled to spend some time with the farm’s herbal guru. He showed us around his modest plots of medicinal and cooking herbs and also allowed us a peek into his rooms where he dries and prepares the herbs. All of this was followed by an excellent buffet-style lunch in the farm’s mess hall. We took a brief look around the farm’s library and bookstore and purchased a few books, including an Indian cookbook, before thanking our new friends and hitting the road for the drive back to our ashram in Laksman Jhula. The Navdanya experience was moving, inspiring, and thought-provoking. I would love to return for a longer stay and perhaps do some volunteer work there as a way to help this noble effort. "

For more information on the remarkable visionary Dr. Vandana Shiva, a physicist trained at the University of Western Ontario, click here.

(Pix by shaggy, baggy Farmer John who can be seen just above on the right.)

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?   ---------------------------------------------

Musings On Food for Dogs And Dogs As Food

Yesterday I treked through Costo with a membership-holding friend, the first time I had been there in over a year.  In the olden days before Trader Joe's arrived in town, I might have picked up maple syrup, smoked salmon, Cabot cheddar cheese in big blocks, giant bags of salad, maybe some red snapper, but this time, I walked out with kitchen trash bags and a large box of organic chicken doggie treats-"No wheat, no corn, no by-products!"--from Castor & Pollux, Lincoln, Nebraska.  ( The dawg approved.)

Later that night I read an excerpt in The Week from a piece by Steven Rinella in Outside magazine about his quest to eat dog, in Hanoi.  He eats grilled strips of sesame crusted dog, dog feet ( I blogged once about the dog feet platter that whipped past those of us at the vegetarian table at a banquet in China), even plain old boiled dog leg. And he is not happy, though he knows much of the world does eat dog. ( Apparently native people of the Americas once were hound chow hounds, if you will.  )

On his final day of eating dog---you can read the entire story here---he reports:

"I'm trying to will myself into a nonchalant attitude—just a guy in a restaurant eating his meal. I can't do it. I'm forcing it down, and it is not enjoyable. At this point, I've answered for myself the question I wanted answered: If your culture and your culinary curiosities go head to head, culture's going to win. It'll win even if you're rooting against it."

So---Even extreme eaters like Rinella cannot easily block memories of furry family pets while trying to reconsider them as food. 

And then there are feathered pets---I first gave up eating chicken when our zany, alert pet hen, Harold, wandered into my kitchen in Belgium one evening. Chicken breasts about to go in the oven for dinner were on the table. I picked her up for a cuddle, in the manner she liked, and realized ( duh!) that her scrawny little chest was an unsettling reminder of the breasts I had just dredged in flour.

Since that time over 30 years ago, I have indeed eaten some occasional chicken--the rosemary-infused organic roast chicken perfected by my pal on the Hudson River, for example--and the inadvertent hen that I try to skirt in one dish at my local Thai buffet, and, of course, I feed chicken to my pet.

If you get to know most any animal at all well--a dog, a pig, a lamb, a hen--then it's so...

"I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens."  Issac Bashevis Singer

( Dog pictured was the recipient of the organic chicken cookies, not a meal.)

In Case You Missed Cinnamon Roll Day...

We raised him right! Son of Foodie reported in from Goteborg, Sweden, that yesterday, October 4, was Cinnamon Roll Day. Apparently Kanelbulle Dag was dreamed up by the baking industry in 1999 and Swedes have been suffering through the day once a year ever since.

Said SOF of the kanelbulle: " It was so huge and good." With Swedish coffee, no doubt.

The kanelbulle pictured is also large enough to shield babies from the elements.

Fishless Florida and No Albanian Specialties

As has happened to me before in Florida, I was standing dully in front of the fish section at a typical supermarket noting the lack of anything from Florida, fishwise.  Farmed salmon from Chile, tilapia, Idaho trout....Rita the fish  person then regaled me with the entire Florida fish saga--(there isn't any in supermarkets--but that just goes along with the fact that frequently there isn't any Florida produce there, either--) and suggested I had two options--Florida Gulf shrimp or Cedar Key oysters, and she was out of the latter.

I took the shrimp.  I will do it up with fresh linguini, garlic, a tad of NM red chile, some basil,white wine--you get the idea.

Then I stopped at a fruit/veggie stand run by an Albanian guy. This time I found a few bearably priced items, including, amusingly, very inexpensive Macintosh apples, presumably because they are NOT ICKY SWEET. ( Pardon me.)

He also carries feta from France, Greece, the US and Bulgaria but not Albania. In fact when pressed about Albanian food specialties by your intrepid reporter, after a long pause he said flatly, " We eat like Greek. Exactly like Greek."

( BTW Note to Self--Follow Up---Wikipedia reports there's a huge fan base forAlbanian cuisine ( whatever that may be) in Liverpool, England.)

The only Albanian product he sells is bottled water....I went off into a dreamlike state, recalling once years ago gazing across from southern Italy at unvisitable More Communist Than Thou Albania, shrouded in fog...

How many Albanian Leks does the bottler make on each bottle shipped to Florida? Why are we  Amurricans dumb enough or snobby enough to purchase water from distant parts of the world, Fiji, for example?

I bought some Bulgarian feta in order to reach the $5 mark and use my debit card.

( Thanks to http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/al.html for this image of the robust Albanian flag.)

Munching on Mazzaro's', With A Visit to Come

I haven't even stepped foot in Mazzaro's Market yet, the legendary Italian deli in St. Petersburg, FL, and already I am swooning--because--last night Foodie Spouse, whom I am visiting in St Pete--( he's on a job)- surprised me with delectable calamari salad, breaded grouper with horseradish, eggplant involtini, and bread---a traditional yeasty wreath bread--along with a mighty fine Pinot Grigio, as crisp as the supper required.

Apparently Saturday is the not-to-be-missed day, when people gather from all over town to have coffee, and begin leisurely breakfasts that meander into lunchtime, along with wine tastings.

Mazzaro's started out as a coffee roasting operation in a warehouse section of town....did I mention the fresh pasta offerings?

The Scent of Green Chiles.....

Friends and acquaintances who have either lived in New Mexico or visited a few times, wherever they may live now, in the fall think they begin to smell roasting chiles, possibly even from as far away as Chillicothe, Ohio.  And then they phone me and I buy bushels of chiles at my local farm stand. ( A Shawnee word that has nothing remotely to do with "chiles," Chillicothe was a nice little place back in the day when a college friend lived on a farm there. )

I am the woman in line at the post office juggling the boxes filled with little holes punched in the sides, as if I were airmailing live iguanas somewhere. ( To Ohio, for example.)

Once upon a time I  bought the chiles roasted, put them in plastic baggies, and then a styrofoam box, with dry ice, and then worried for 2 days until they arrived in San Francisco---the recipients were not at home...........the contents became most unpleasant and oozing. Never again!

Until now--those same chile heads in CA now want me to try again to send them roasted chiles. Hmmm.

To save friendships, I am suggesting two companies based here in NM to all who are lured by the call of the roasting chiles: New Mexican Connection and New Mexico Chili ( though they spell chili the non-New Mexican way. )

( Thanks to http://www.nmcchile.com/ for chile pic.)

"Agriturismi" Keeps Italian Small Farmers Afloat

Bucolia appeals to many of us and Italian farmers have relied on this to keep money flowing to their land--tourists are drawn to small farms equipped to house and feed and provide country sights and walks to people weary of city life.

According to Reuters,     "Agritourism began in Italy as an effort to stop an exodus from impoverished villages after the Second World War, especially in the south, as the country was breaking away from its rural past.

Years on, it is still vital for Italy's agriculture, which used to be the main driver for the country's economy and now accounts for just 2 percent of gross domestic product."

In addition to providing comfortable guest quarters and a spa, one farm relies on its talented cow to please visitors.

"... Miss, a winner of a cow beauty contest in Alto Adige in 2006 for her good looks and record milk yields, is milked -- to classical or popular music."

Pleasingly Persian

Umpteen years ago,  Foodie Spouse and I were married in a garden in Tehran, Iran, after finishing up a stint with the Peace Corps teaching English.  So it seemed appropriate to have an anniversary meal the other day at Pars Restaurant here in Albuquerque.

Fesenjoon with rice, roasted eggplant, yogurt with cucumber----all those years ago, mind you, we were eating chicken and lamb--this time, amazingly, we were able to have fesenjoon--a sublime sauce that combines pomegranate juice with orange juice, onions, and ground walnuts--just as a vegetarian dish. ( We do sample organic critters some, especially after our book-researching trip to France, but rarely.)

The Persian owner of Pars left Iran in 1976---I asked the waiter if we could speak with him and he came out from the kitchen, a weary-looking man, who indicated that he must tread warily when talking about Iran.  Many diners love the food but have no clue about Iran---Persians are not Arabs, for example--or Iraq for that matter. ( Iran/Iraq, same thing. Kind of like Iowa and Idaho. )  I joked, lamely, that we figured we might have taught English to some of the young Iranians who held hostage the Americans during the Carter administration.

The combination of the anniversary and the increasingly bellicose language in the media  towards Iran pushed me to seek out this man, a PhD-holding teacher, and to acknowledge his country's ancient culture, tasty food, the positive interest of its well-educated young people in America, and so on.

Despite all, however, even with geography no longer taught in schools, increasingly I think  Americans who travel and sample differing cuisines are appreciative of  the colorful cultural histories of places and  people.

An excellent book on Persian cookery is this one by Najmieh Batmanglij, an Iranian we knew in Washington, DC.

BTW Has anyone else noted that in recent years  the term "Mediterranean Cuisine" is often used instead of Persian Cuisine in restaurant signs?