an open cupboard

One of the lovely folks I met in Sweden recently pointed me to some great Swedish music. There’s a lively electronic music scene over there, which he’s into, and naturally the music that he recommends tends to lean in that direction.

I got a big kick out of this song in particular. Does it sound familiar? Here’s a Youtube video to refresh your memory.

Here’s another Swedish electronic song I’ve been listening to non-stop.
Links:

• Sci-Fi SKANE
• The Knife

Enjoy!

What’s a meyer lemon and how does it differ from an ordinary lemon? That’s what Sophie asked in the comments of my meyer lemon fettuccine post (Hi Sophie!).

The meyer lemon is a cross between an ordinary lemon and a mandarin orange, originating in China and imported to the United States by a guy named Frank Meyer. The meyer is a smallish, thin-skinned lemon that’s sweeter than than other lemons. The zest is more aromatic and easier to work with than an ordinary lemon, as the pith is quite thin. Meyer lemons are thus good for pickling, canning, and candying. Their thin, supple skins also make them easier to squeeze for juice. Given a choice between the thick-skinned lemons off the tree in the back yard and store bought meyers, I’ll take the meyers.

Ever go bobbing for apples in a huge plastic crate? How about filtering out bad oranges, revving up your pitching arm to toss them into a giant composting container? Last Saturday, thirty-odd foodbloggers got together at the San Francisco Food Bank to do just that. The San Francisco Food Bank is an enormous clearing house for food that is distributed to charitable organizations throughout San Francisco and the Bay Area. Huge amounts of food come through the food bank every day, all of which needs to be sorted and packaged into cardboard boxes. These boxes are then stacked on a flat, wrapped in plastic to keep them in place, and finally loaded onto trucks for distribution. The whole operation is run by a combination of employees, part-time volunteers, and sporadic volunteers. It’s remarkable to see such a dedicated, hard-working staff process and sort all those massive crates of food.

Our task last Saturday was to sort and package green apples, oranges, and frozen corn cobs. This involved putting together and taping the boxes, sorting the good fruit from the bad, packaging the fruit, taping the boxes shut, and stacking the boxes neatly on a wodden flat.

We foodbloggers spread around the crates of fruit and went straight to work. Some people taped boxes, others lifted and arranged the boxes. Some were especially adept at picking out the bad fruit and throwing them dodgeball-style into the composting crate—I nearly got nailed three times. Our efficient work paid off: the kind folks at the Food Bank said we managed our task much faster than they had expected.

Afterwards, we headed off to Yield Wine Bar for some great nibbles and wine served by Sam—barmaid for a day—looking cool in her officer’s cap. Organizers Amy and Sam provided delicious cheeses and baguette slices, the Fatted Calf gave fed us thin-sliced ham, and Poco Dolce brought us their little sweet/salty wafers of chocolate. (As both Fatted Calf and Poco Dolce are right down the road from Yield, this was micro-local cuisine, as someone pointed out.)

But the stars of the show were the sunny chutneys and spicy Spanish chorizo courtesy of Alison McQuade and Ore Dagan of Fra’Mani Salumi, respectively. I’m not usually a great fan of chutneys as I tend to find them too sweet. But McQuade’s Celtic chutneys are something else entirely. These are complex chutneys brimming with taste and texture. You can’t pick out any one individual flavor–there’s the zing of vinegar, a ginger kick, and a warm, brown sugar sweetness. But there’s so much more, and damned if you can figure out exactly what else is in that chutney. All you know is it tastes fresh and alive, and goes very well with cheese and bread.

The Spanish chorizo was brought to us from Fra’Mani salumi, by way of Ore Dagan, chef and Responsabile Produzione. I could not get enough of it, but sadly, this particular salumi is not yet available in stores. I’ll wager that a small popular movement will soon begin protesting the absence of this chorizo from local shops. Slogans like “Chorizo now!” and “Fra’Mani, not war!” will become ubiquitous. So please, Ore, bring on the chorizo before you have an angry mob of hungry foodbloggers bearing poultry forks and carving knives.

You can find McQuade’s chutneys at the Cowgirl Creamery retail shop in San Francisco, and other fine shops (how about some East Bay locations, Alison? Market Hall, perhaps?). Fra’Mani salumi is sold at the Berkeley Bowl and the Pasta Shop in the East Bay.

Many, many thanks to Amy Sherman and Sam Breach for having organized this wonderful event. It was great fun getting together with other foodbloggers, particularly for a worthy cause.

Next time you buy a pound of chuck at the supermarket, think about where it comes from. If the FDA approves the sale of cloned meat and milk, you won’t know whether that roast was cut from a cloned cow. Similarly to GMO foods, the FDA has decided it will not label foods as products of cloned animals if cloned meat and milk is approved for sale to the public. But you may have already bought milk from a cloned animal. Despite the FDA’s request not to sell cloned animal products until they are officially approved as safe, milk from cloned cows has already been on the market for some time.

The research on the safety of consuming cloned animals does not appear particularly extensive, at least according to this article. The Center for Food Safety raises other concerns, such as the health of cloned animals and the ethical treatment of animals that are cloned.

I wonder what will happen when the clones are cloned? And the cloned clones are cloned? How will cloning only the most popular breeds affect biodiversity?

Once again, it looks like we’re jumping head first into a powerful, large scale experiment whose ramifications we don’t entirely understand.

Check out the full text of the FDA’s draft proposal, and submit your comments before April 2, 2007.

It takes only one holiday full of cooking, eating, overeating, and endless cleanup to smash a twenty two day NaBloPoMo streak. By the time the last dish was in the dishwasher and the kitchen counter was white again, I was thirty minutes past the daily deadline and several minutes away from collapsing into bed. But I’ve continued taking photos of all my meals, although, strangely, I only have a few photos of some of the numerous dishes served at the Thanksgiving meal.

breakfast

Welcome to breakfast on Thursday, November 23rd. This is my attempt at photographing the usual shake from a different angle.

snack

For my mid-morning snack, I ate a slice of sourdough bread dredged in a little bacon grease and spread with a bit of butter. I had just prepared the dressing for the turkey. The herbed bacon grease that coated the otherwise empty cast-iron skillet smelled so delicious, I had to taste it.

lunch

Lunch was a brief, hurried affair, consisting of a slice of buttered sourdough bread and the remaining tofu cilantro salad.

thanksgiving dinner!

The heritage turkey was gorgeous and delicious. I slipped herb-infused butter under its skin and stuffed the cavity with a quartered lemon, half an onion, some unpeeled garlic cloves, a carrot, a celery rib, and some sprigs of fresh thyme. The turkey baked for about an hour or so at 450° F (232° C). I baked it breast-side down, then turned it breast-side up about halfway through baking. The turkey was evenly browned all over, and had wonderfully crisp skin and succulent meat.

Vegetarian cornbread stuffing, made with Anson Mills cornmeal (great stuff!). I combined a few recipes to make this stuffing. It features pomegranate seeds, leeks, and celery. Tasty, but a bit crumbly. It might’ve needed more vegetable stock, or perhaps some MEAT to make it stick together.

These are chocolate birthday cake, flourless chocolate birthday torte, and pecan-crust pumpkin pie, all prepared by my brother d, all delicious. The chocolate cake is based on a very caramelly Callebaut, whereas the flourless torte includes a smokey Valrhona.

Stay tuned for more reports on Thanksgiving dinner…

Pies are all about the crust, which is to say they’re all about the dough. Well, not really. At least half the fun is eating the gooey sweet fruit that fills the buttery cavern of your pie. But the best filling in the world won’t save a poor crust, turning an otherwise tasty pie into an abject failure. Knowing this, and with Thanksgiving just around the corner, I signed up for Shuna’s pie dough class in Berkeley. Let me tell you, having been to that class, I now recognize all the horrible errors I had previously thought were standard pie-making protocol.

For example:

• Fancy, high-fat, European style butter isn’t necessarily better. If you do use fancy butter, cut back a bit on the amount you use (six ounces rather than eight is a rule of thumb).
• Processing the dough until it forms a ball is a very bad idea. If your dough has formed a ball, your crust will be be tough.
• Roll your dough from the middle outwards, not from the edge.
• Once a crack, always a crack. If your dough starts cracking as you begin to roll, the cracks will stay and grow. To fix the crack, gently mush together the cracked dough back together with the blade of your hand.
• Rotate pie dough frequently when rolling so as to avoid it sticking to the work surface.
• Lightly rolled dough produces a light crust. A large, fairly heavy rolling pin is preferable, and easier to use. It requires less physical effort on your part, resulting in a flakier crust.
• Use a whole lotta beans. When baking blind, fill the entire shell with beans.

These are just a few salient points. By touching the dough at various stages of processing, listening to it (a dough that makes lip-smacking noises is not only rude, it’s way too wet), tasting it blind-baked and non-blind baked, I began to see pie dough as its own unique creature. A professional pastry chef is a dough psychologist, gently coaxing the dough to wellbeing while working through its potential for multi-faceted neuroses. Warm pie dough is insecure, resulting in a melted, self-conscious crust. Over-working the dough results in an aggressive, tough pastry. A dough might look perfectly well-adjusted in the mixing bowl, but do anti-social bits of flour and butter lurk at the bottom?

The ingredients themselves have their own unique personalities. Flour must be aerated and weighed. Butter must be kept as cold as possible and chopped coarsely. Water must be absolutely ice cold. Understanding the behavior of each ingredient—and why it behaves the way it does—is just as important as understanding the whole. A pastry chef is both scientist and artist.

After all you learn about pie-making, Shuna’s pie is magic. How can flour, butter, sugar, and water produce such ethereal flakiness? And how do crunchy apples become sweet, buttery velvet in your mouth? To me it’s alchemy.

Some photos from my recent trip to New York City. Can you guess what they are and where they were taken?

Here are some links to some food-related stories and content I’ve been looking at recently:

• Short films on food from the Media that Matters Film Festival (by way of Slow Food)
• 10 restaurants around the world worth the cost of the plane ticket, by the late R.W. Apple (by way of Rebecca’s Pocket)
• The dilution of organic standards by agribusiness (not quite news, but a good reminder nonetheless: by way of mercola.com)
• A list of sustainable agriculture links (by way of mercola.com)

Upcoming events in the San Francisco Bay Area:

• Litquake Lit Crawl: Writers on Food and Wine, Saturday October 14, 8:30pm-9:30pm. The San Francisco literary festival includes a lineup of foodwriters at Laszlo Bar, MCed by Shuna of Eggbeater (by way of Eggbeater)
• Food for Thought: Filmmakers Lilach Dekel and Rod Bachar travel 15,000 miles over 5 months to document where exactly their food comes from (sponsored by commonwealth.org, to be screened in San Jose on November 8)

From savetheinternet.com:

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But Internet providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are spending millions of dollars lobbying Congress to gut Net Neutrality. If Congress doesn’t take action now to implement meaningful network neutrality provisions, the future of the Internet is at risk.”

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