CurtBlog : Food

Food and me - a short history (part 4 or the "Hide the beer the pastor's here" edition)

skills0 — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:50:00 GMT

As I mentioned in the first post, alcohol was certainly not part of my upbringing and I didn't really know anyone who drank, other than some relatives. When alcohol was mentioned, it was typically in a very negative fashion. This was not just because of the Mennonite stance on drinking, but also because of alcoholism in my mom's family (her dad and brothers). This family history has certainly made me a bit more cautious about alcohol, but on the other hand between Germans on one side and Irish on the other, it would be a bit odd not to have a bit of a taste for it.

One of my first memories of being around beer was at the State Fair. We would go up to watch the fireworks, but always outside the fairgrounds due to the fair being a "worldly amusement". One night a few other people were around our usual spot watching the fireworks as well and someone offered my dad a beer, which he declined. In retrospect, this was probably wise on my dad's part as the beer they were drinking was almost certainly some cheap swill, although I'm sure that's not the reason he said no.

My mom would also tell a lot of stories about her upbringing in the quarries outside Charlottesville VA. Her dad would make potato liquor, like many Appalachian folks. My mom told me the cops used to follow my dad home to the end of the state maintained road, but would never pull him over. I asked why and she said no matter how drunk he was, he could always walk a straight line anyway and pass the sobriety test.

After my parents split up right after I graduated from high school, my mom's attitudes toward alcohol moderated a bit and she would occasionally have some wine or even keep a bit in the house. Because of working in restaurants, I was increasingly around alcohol, particularly in the steak houses I worked in (Ruth's Chris and Outback). And as typical in many restaurants, there were many nights spent going out for drinks after getting out late at night. I was in school full-time and working full-time, so probably good I didn't do too much of that. But people would eventually find out my background and try to get me to try things. I had a few bartenders that tried their darndest to find a drink I would like. That's when I first tried some red wine and some cocktails I probably wouldn't even drink now, but it was a start. A lot of people say you have to develop a taste for alcohol, but that was never the case for me as long as something was quality. Must be the many generations of German and Irish ancestors.

Other than a few tastes here and there of nasty cheap beer, the first real beer I tried was on the Steve Taylor tour I was on in '94 the year I graduated from college. Sorry to sell you out Steve, although in his defense he probably didn't even know about it. My first beer was a Guinness, which most people think is a very odd way to start out. Actually Guinness is a very easy drinking stout, particularly on draft, but I think a lot of people look at the color and think it's going to be very strong. I can't say I completely loved it from the start, but I liked it enough to start trying to develop a taste for better beers.

It was probably around this time that I also had some buddies who were big into cigars and pipes, so I started out slowly with a pipe and graduated to cigars at some point. Don't remember exactly when. I tend towards being high stress (some would say uptight) and I found (and still find) that smoking a pipe can be very relaxing and a great way to slow down. It also makes you look smart, which is always a plus. A good dark or Belgian beer can be very good with a cigar, but scotch and cognac is better and so pipes and cigars were kind of my gateway to those drinks. That's what Mennonites (and other conservatives) call a slippery slope. I call it a a good pairing.

It actually took me quite awhile to get over my upbringing and not feel weird or bad about buying beer or liquor. It was certainly foreign at first, but I really couldn't find a good reason from the Bible why alcohol in and of itself was bad. The Bible basically talks about both the good and bad side of alcohol and warns against excess, just like it warns against excess in other areas. Anyway, this is really meant to be a theological treatise, just how my appreciation of alcohol evolved along with my food journey.

In more recent years, my wife and I have been homebrewing fairly regularly. I am fortunate enough to be married to a woman who loves beer, even enough to make it. We started homebrewing in January of 2007, a few months before our marriage in May of the same year. Since then we've been brewing fairly consistently, probably averaging a batch every 2 months or so. We've had a few really amazing batches, some failures and a lot of very good drinkable beers. We've stuck mainly to dark beers and some Belgian styles, using extract kits from Northern Brewer and Midwest Supplies for the most part. We recently tried a recipe online that is a clone of a Founder's breakfast stout, where we had to buy all the ingredients piece by piece. It turned out pretty good, although more coffee than chocolate much to my wife's chagrin.

It seems that whenever we go on trips, it's a fairly common occurrence for part of the trip to include trips to small craft breweries or local brewpubs. We recently did a weekend trip to Michigan with some friends and hit 4 breweries as well as The Hop Cat in Grand Rapids, one of the best beer bars in the country. If you like beer and get a chance, it's worth a visit. It's a pretty great way to spend a weekend. We also live near what is considered one of the best Belgian beer bars in the country, Hopleaf, although to be honest it's so crowded nobody goes there anymore, to paraphrase Yogi Berra.

From time to time I've been into wine as well, but honestly I keep coming back to beer. There is so much cool stuff going on in the beer world right now and more and more people are learning that there is a huge range of possibilities within the simple pint. Plus beer goes great with food and doesn't break the bank in the way wine often can.

We also appreciate good cocktails and love to try new recipes from various cocktail books, magazines and other spots. I'm sure someone could look in our liquor cabinet(s) and get the wrong idea, but there is a huge range of ingredients necessary to make the wide variety of cocktails people have come up with over the years, even just the classics. We love to try new stuff, but I would say the cocktails we keep coming back to include the following: the Manhattan, the Gin Martini, the Sidecar, the Mojito, the Loch Lomond and the Vesper. Pretty basic list, but easy to try with different brands, garnishes or bitters.

Anyway, learning to appreciate alcohol has certainly been an important part of my food journey. I think the only way to close this post is to quote something attributed to the great Ben Franklin: "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.". A quick Google search indicates Ben Franklin never actually said this or if he did he was talking about wine, but oh well. I still agree with the sentiment.

Food and me - a short history (part 3)

skills0 — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:04:03 GMT

While at University of Delaware main campus for a year, I worked a bit in a couple of the campus food areas. One was really just a glorified cafeteria, but the other was probably the most interesting place to get food on campus, a small grill. The biggest specialty was cheese steaks, which would start out as a huge frozen ball of beef that had to be chopped up and cooked ahead of the shift. We also did a lot of grill sandwiches, pita sandwiches and that sort of thing on the hot grill. Can't say I learned a lot there, but it was nice to use my cooking skills to make a bit of money. In retrospect, I probably should've tried to get a job in one of the restaurants in town and could've made a bit more money.

In the fall of '91, I moved to Nashville to attend Belmont University. For some dumb reason in desperately trying to find enough money to pay for school, I indicated I would do work-study. I know now this is a dumb thing to do because it takes away from your eligibility for other financial aid, plus it only paid minimum wage. By the spring semester I figured out I could make way more going back to the restaurants. I interviewed at a few places nearby and ended up getting a job at Ruth's Chris steakhouse.

Ruth's Chris was an interesting place, both in the food and in the people that worked there. It was a mix of college students, lifetime waiters and lower income cooks of various ethnicity. Often I was the only white guy in the kitchen, which was actually a great experience for me in retrospect. There had not been a lot of diversity in my life in a lot of ways and it was good for me to work with people who were nothing like me in background or experience. The steaks were quite excellent, but a lot of the rest of the food was overpriced and uninspired. People came for the steaks and sometimes the wine list, but that's about it. It was your typical potatoes au gratin, microwaved peas and that sort of thing for sides. Bread pudding for dessert. Your basic steakhouse fare.

For some of the steaks, we had a butcher come in a couple times a week and cut the steaks to order from a full loin or rib or whatever. Other steaks came vacuum packed and ready to use, like the huge porterhouses. The best thing about the butcher is that he would leave the "scraps" tucked away somewhere in the cooler and there was always a scavenger hunt at the beginning of the night to see if there was anything available. We could saute them up with some onions and peppers or just throw the pieces on the grill and it was delicious. The only problem was I got completely sick of red meat after about a year of that and ended up not eating hardly any red meat at all for over a year.

I also got a bit of a sense of some of the management tasks. I would do the end of night meat inventory for the assistant manager, check in the produce order, that sort of thing. I think they were interested in me moving up to management, but at that point I didn't want a restaurant career and I really enjoyed the cooking part the most.

Eventually, I grew tired of the management and how slow they were to give raises, even for good performance and I started looking elsewhere. An Outback steakhouse was opening up down in Brentwood south of Nashville, so I went down to interview there. I got hired for slightly more than what I was currently making and I was ready for a change, so I took the job. At that point since I was in school and working for an hourly wage, the money was probably the most important consideration.

While Outback is obviously much more laid-back than Ruth's Chris and the menu is at a cheaper price point, to be honest I still like their steaks pretty well, particularly the top sirloin. The seasoning mix they use is pretty good. I will still eat at Outback occasionally today. Since I had steak experience, I immediately was assigned to the grill station and didn't really cross-train a whole lot. Outback cooks most steaks on a large flat grill and the steaks are then covered with an iron weight that locks in heat and helps the steak cook faster. You would expect this would dry out the steak and it could on some cuts or if you pressed on the steak, but otherwise it worked pretty well. The interesting part was on a busy night, you would have the whole grill full and covered with the iron weights, so you really had to get a feel for the speed things were cooking and judging meat by time and feel rather than appearance. Outback was still fairly new at that point and due to our store's proximity to a large mall and lots of the southern outlying counties around Nashville, it quickly become very popular. For the first few years, a wait of at least an hour and a half on Saturday night would be considered slow. A few times we briefly went on 3 hour waits. I would literally cook close to thousand steaks some nights and I was one of the few guys who could hang with the rush, sometimes by myself. Typically on a weekend night they would assign 2 people to the grill just to keep up, but I generally worked better doing everything myself until things got really nuts. At Outback, when you got "in the weeds", you were really in the weeds. 20-30 tickets sitting in the inbox waiting just to be put on the grill. It was pretty crazy at times. Still, some nights everything would be clicking at all stations and we would just be flying food out of the kitchen, in a zone, working smart but not frantically. There is nothing quite like that feeling. I still have dreams occasionally about being back in a restaurant and being completely in the weeds, usually during times in my life when I'm really stressed.

During my senior year, most weeks I was working full-time (40 hours or more) plus taking a full load of classes. In retrospect it wasn't ideal and I missed out on a lot of the college experience, but it did allow me to leave school with a degree and less than $15K of debt. If I ever have kids in college, I wouldn't want them to have quite the same expectation or experience, but I do think working while in college is beneficial and it certainly makes you take it more seriously when you are plopping down hard-earned money.

That was pretty much the last full-time restaurant job I had. I graduated from college and moved on to other things. But I actually look back on my times in restaurants with mostly fondness and at one point a few years back I seriously looked into culinary school as an option for a change in career. I think I would've needed to stay in the restaurant world and work my way up to better restaurants while I was younger. It takes quite awhile to get to the point where being a chef actually makes even any money at all and sometimes people never get there. But there are certainly aspects of that that still fascinate me.

Food and me - a short history (part 2)

skills0 — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:11:43 GMT

For some reason, one of the first jobs I got outside the home was in a small restaurant. Not really even sure why now, but it probably impacted the rest of my life in some ways. My first job was at a little cafe in our little town of Greenwood called “The Lettuce Bowl”. Simple little place, mostly salads, sandwiches, pastries, baked goods and soups. I washed dishes in the back, mostly for the baking and sometimes at lunch I would help make sandwiches. So that particularly job wasn’t anything special, but I did like the environment.

When I was in 11th grade right after Christmas, a new Bonanza restaurant opened in Milford, the closest town to us with real grocery stores, shopping centers and that sort of thing. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Bonanza, it’s one of those places with the gigantic food bars where you can get not only salad, but also everything from pasta to chicken livers to soup to soft serve ice cream. They also served a lot of hot food. One thing that was particularly popular was the steak plus all the shrimp you could eat specials on the weekends. The steak was really pretty crappy, but you could get either fried or steamed shrimp with it, as much as you wanted. We went through bags and bags of the stuff on a Friday or Saturday night.

They were starting from scratch and needed lots of employees and so I started at the fine wage of $3.65/hr., just slightly above the then minimum wage of $3.35 if I recall correctly. I still remember one of the first orientation nights where the manager had us all give the kitchen a good clean. I can still remember his battle cry – “I don’t want to see anything but elbows and a$$holes”. I was like, yeah, I’m not in my little sheltered community any more. I don’t think I had even heard the f word before.

I started off working the fryers, which was a busy, but easy job. Lots of french fries, along with the aforementioned shrimp plus the occasional fried fish or clam strips. The oil got into everything, you could never get the clothes clean. Exactly what the adolescent pores needed. I also learned the flat grill, which consistently mainly of the rather popular sirloin tips with peppers and onions and “prime rib” that was soaked in a big pan of au jus long enough to get warm.

From there I moved to the gas grill where all the steaks were made, as well as chicken, burgers, that sort of thing. It was at this point where I first took on a role I typically had at other restaurants thereafter, one of the few people who could hang with the rush on a busy night. I think it was a combination of growing up not fearing hard work, plus I have a very logical mind and could keep more stuff straight than some of the other cooks. I didn’t get flustered that easily until it got really bad.

I was kind of the odd man there because I had been so sheltered and most of the other employees were kids from the local high school. So sometimes I didn’t fit in, but I still made a lot of friends (including my first real girlfriend) and really liked the camaraderie of the kitchen.

Like I said, in retrospect most of the food was pretty terrible by my standards now, but it did teach me how to hang with the rush, start to learn how to cook meat and that sort of thing. I stayed there through high school and part of the year after, but then I needed to make a bit more money for college and decided to go down and work in Rehoboth Beach. I had a friend of mine from Bonanza who was working at a bed and breakfast down there called The Corner Cupboard Inn. He said they needed cooks and it paid a bit better, so I decided to give it a shot. I got hired and this became what I consider my first introduction to more serious food. It was super gourmet, but everything was cooked from scratch, with fresh seafood and vegetables every day. So it was a great place to learn.

The place was run by Mrs. Hooper, a cranky and rather stern lady who was a very particular, but fair employer. She ran the place with a bit of an iron fist, but was also very complimentary when you did a good job. The funny thing is that every year it seemed she would try to bring in some young chef either in or just out of culinary school and they never seemed to make it more than a month. So we would go back to our normal routine, which was her ragtag band of cooks who had been around for several years and knew how to make the kitchen run. It usually worked out just fine and we put out some tasty food.

It was a cool gig because we worked a split shift. I would get up early (still living with my mom) and go down for breakfast from about 8-12 or so, depending on the guests and how full the place was. Then I would have the afternoon free to lay on the beach, eat pizza, play pinball or see friends until about 5:30PM, when we would start prep for the evening dinner. We would get done around 9:30 or 10, clean up and go home to start again the next day. Or at least I went home, most of the wait staff would go out drinking and come in for the breakfast shift hungover. A great restaurant tradition. It’s a good thing I didn’t start drinking until later.

One of my first days there I was taught how to flip a fried egg without the use of any utensils. We would have contests to see how many eggs we could do. I could generally do 3-4 without a problem. We put out so many eggs you had to do it that way, in a little skillet greased up with rendered bacon fat. We also did scrambled, poached (just in a pan of boiling water with vinegar), boiled and even broached in hot oil. Kidney stew was a standard menu item, as well as sweet breads. I never learned to like either. Also kippers on Sundays, along with waffles which we would make by the Hobart (floor-stand mixer) full as a Sunday tradition. Pancakes the rest of the week. Plus a full range of breakfast meats. Yummy.

Dinners had a selection of standard items, plus different daily specials which might be London Broil, Duck a l’Orange, broiled lobster, various other seafood, scallops and so on. Veggies would be sauteed beans almondine or carrots, corn on the cob (cooked with milk and sugar), usually new red potatoes, stuff like that. All prepped and made from scratch. I learned a ton, including basics like how to cut meat, how to use a knife properly, how to prep all kinds of seafood. I still use a lot of those skills today.

Well, this is already getting long and I’m only partway through my restaurant experiences, so I’ll continue this later.

Food and me - a short history (part 1)

skills0 — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:04:55 GMT

Introduction

If you've known me for any length of time, you probably know I'm really into food and cooking. Heck, at least half my blog posts mention food in some fashion. I thought it might be interesting to chronicle my relationship with food throughout my life. There are a lot of different experiences I've had that have shaped the way I view food. So I'm going to start a series of blog posts about this whole topic. It will be a bit free-form and I'm not sure when I'll be finished, but hopefully it will be at least somewhat interesting.

Childhood memories

As many of you know, I was raised in a conservative rural Mennonite community. Mennonites weren't the only members of the community, but there were a bunch of us. Mennonites have had a love affair with food (both eating it and producing it) for a long time. The primary focus of most family gatherings was around food, almost all of it homemade and often with ingredients that were personally raised and/or slaughtered. My grandfather was a farmer and many in the family before him. When I was a young child, my dad drove a refrigerator/freezer truck for Burris Foods, but by the time I was in early elementary school he had gone into business as a chicken farmer, hatching eggs to be precise. My uncle was a hog farmer. These were both what I would know call "factory farm" operations, part of the vast supply chain where America gets most of their food. My grandfather, uncle and father also raised typical row crops, like corn and soybeans. My grandfather sold Growers fertilizer to various farmers, not sure if they are still around or not.

As far as food in our house, we always had a big garden every year and grew just about everything. I grew up both loving and hating it, spending many hours weeding, hoeing, picking and processing food. In retrospect I wish I would've paid more attention. My mom was a food canner and freezer, like most Mennonite women. Even during the winter, we would have a decent amount of food that we had grown ourselves. We would also go blueberry picking for a day every summer, bringing home enough blueberries to put in the freezer for much of the rest of the year. We would also pick peaches to be canned in light syrup for the winter. Most summers my grandparents would go pick up a trailer full of bushels of apples and the whole extended family would spend the day making applesauce, apple butter, cider and whatever else they could think of.

We knew where a good portion of our food came from. We would go pull milk out of a stainless steel cooling tank from a local farm. It was fairly normal for us to occasionally get a side of beef from my grandfather and later my uncle. Venison was plentiful, I was the weird boy who didn't like hunting. I did like venison though. We would even have squirrel on occasion.

Once my dad got the chicken house, gathering eggs was a daily chore. Thousands of them. A few times over 5000 eggs in a single day. These were hatching eggs, so there were roosters jumping on hens all the time when they weren't trying to pick a fight with us. If you went out to the chicken house at night most of the birds would be up on the slats roosting and sooner or later some big old rooster would come tearing down the floor of the chicken house attempting to spur your legs. Double yolk eggs were nothing special, we would get triple yolks fairly often as well. Some eggs wouldn't have a shell develop and would come out feeling almost like a rubber ball. Occasionally I would have an egg laid right in my hand as I reached into a nest. The big problem with that many chickens though is that the ammonia was terrible; it was dusty and hard to breathe.

My mom was really into nutrition, so I learned about stuff like wheat germ, carob and sprouts. She would make yogurt and granola, which is probably why it is somewhat comforting that my wife now does the same thing. We also had to eat practically every vegetable known to man (it's only recently I've been able to eat brussel sprouts again), except spinach because my mom hated it. I love it and it was one of those foods that I started eating after leaving home. We started helping out in the kitchen at a fairly young age and probably started baking cookies by ourselves around 10 or 12 years old.

Not that it mattered much as a kid, but there was never any alcohol in the house and almost none of the adults I knew drank. Most of our social engagements were with other Mennonites and we rarely went out to eat. Alcohol was considered a sin of course, so it took me awhile to even get to the point where I could go into a liquor store and not feel guilty. More on that later. My mother's Scotch-Irish background was eventually going to overrule my Mennonite/German father's ways.

In Part 2, I'm going to talk a bit about how I got started working in restaurants and some of my experiences there.

Beer in Harrisburg

skills0 — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:29:03 GMT

So by about the Saturday after Christmas, we were getting a bit stir crazy at my wife's parents and decided to mosey over to Harrisburg to check out a couple of local craft breweries. We usually go over to Yuengling for their tour, but we've been there the last couple years and wanted to check some new stuff out.

Fighting through some bad fog and traffic on what should have been only about an hour drive, we (Kristin, Kristin's sister Becky and I) finally got to the Troegs after missing the turn the first time and seeing more of scenic downtown Harrisburg than we wanted to. Harrisburg is not a pretty town by any means. Maybe even a little scary. But they are making some good brew there.

So yes, the first stop was Troegs, a relative young brewery started by two brothers Chris and John in 1996. They don't have a brew pub or restaurant, but they have a very nice tasting room. We wanted to go on the tour, but it was already full and probably would've have seen anything much different than we've seen before. The place was absolutely packed, which was nice to see. They had about 20 tables and they were all full. We got a sampler of 7 of their beers and asked to share the corner of a table with some other folks. Being beer lovers and therefore cool, they had no problem with that. I was very impressed with pretty much everything they were making, it was all really good. Much better than I was hoping. I think the favorite for all of us was their Mad Elf, which was a very drinkable 11% stunner. Seemed to be most similar to a Barley Wine, but quite distinctive with some cherries, honey and chocolate malt adding up to a very cohesive, yet layered palette of flavors. We ended up buying a growler of it to bring back and shared it with friends for New Year's Eve.

We then headed over to Appalachian Brewing Company for some food and more beer. They had some really good beers as well, but not as consistently good across the board as Troegs. Still, some very nice darker beers including a very good porter, a Weizenbock style which I haven't seen many people do and Pennsylvania's first certified organic beer, a brown ale. Their homemade pretzels were excellent as well and they also made a really delicious root beer with honey.

So in spite of PA's crazy beer and liquor laws, you can find some good beer there for sure. We're hoping to keep visiting some other craft brewers on other trips, there are a few over near State College we have our eye on as well.

Omnivore's 100

skills0 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:04:37 GMT

The Very Good Taste blog has a very interesting idea, put up a list of 100 diverse foods that they think every omnivore should try and have people indicate what they have actually tried. If you want to try this, go to the blog and they have a link to the Wikipedia entry for each food as well if you need a definition or further explanation.

Here are the instructions they are giving. I'm going to do it slightly differently so Kristin can be involved. Anything we've both eaten will be in bold, anything only I've tried will be in italics and anything only Kristin has tried will be underlined. I don't think we've done too badly.

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (Curtis has had alligator)
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (do gnats on bike rides count?)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin (might have had this as sushi, can't remember)
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer (we've even made our own)
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (can you believe Kristin has never had one)
56. Spaetzle (Kristin makes a mean rendition)
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV (all the good ones are)
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads (used to make sweetbread stew for the B&B)
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill (my dad hit a deer with a tractor trailer and brought it home, does that count?)
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Some quick catch-up stuff about farms and gardening

skills0 — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:24:09 GMT

There has been a ton of stuff going on this summer related to our research into farming and trying to learn new things. I'm getting behind on blogging about it, so here are a few highlights.

Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited our friends James and Esther our in Boulder Colorado. They work as one of the "live on the farm" couples for Haystack Mountain goat dairy. Haystack Mountain is a pretty well established cheese producer, having products in Whole Foods and other national stores. They make all of their fresh cheese at their main cheese factory and they buy much of the goat milk for that from various sources. James and Esther work on the farm where the artisan cheeses are made from goat milk produced right there on the farm. These include raw milk cheeses that are aged anywhere from 2 - 6 months or more. We got to help out with a fairly large cheese make on Memorial Day, Kristin and I were up to our shoulders in the curds and whey for awhile. We helped out with making the Red Cloud and Queso de Mano. You can see all the cheeses here.

We also got to visit a restaurant we've seen featured in some cooking magazines called The Kitchen. They are one of the most eco-friendly restaurants in the country, reusing or recycle almost 100% of their various types of garbage and sourcing about 80% of their food locally. They have a community night where you sit around a long table and eat family-style with about 60 strangers for only $35/person. It's pretty amazing and we got to meet some cool folks. We also visited the Boulder farmer's market, which has some pretty amazing people producing some cool food.

At home, we had the opportunity this year to dig up the backyard of our friends and neighbors Keith and Joni and create a small garden. While it could use more sun for best results, we finally have a small plot of ground to grow some veggies and herbs. We prepped the ground, some of which was under an old sidewalk that we had to break up, using a deep bed concept. We put some composted cow manure and mushroom soil, along with some blood meal and organic fertilizer in the soil as we prepared it. It seems to be working pretty well for the most part. We also added a bunch of our worm compost a week or so ago and noticed a big growth spurt in a lot of the plants, particularly the tomatoes and squashes. We also have several varieties of peppers, several types of basil, a lettuce mix, a mesclun mix, beets, chard, oregano, rosemary, thyme, leeks, beans, sunflowers and some other flowers to attract beneficial insects. I'm probably missing a few things. All in all, quite a nice mix for a small urban garden. So far the only thing we've harvested is some salad greens. We got a bit of a late start and also started a lot from seed, so we're still waiting for some things to really get started. This is mainly an experimental year, so we are learning a lot about how much sun things need, starting plants inside, fertilizer needs and so on.

We are also participating in a CSA this year with Scotch Hill Farms. We picked them partly because they also do goats and grow a number of herbs as well. It's been a bit of a rough start to the season with all the rain (they are just south of Madison), but we've been getting some good stuff and eating a lot more vegetables which is always good. They drop off at the Southport Green Market which is just south of us. They are a fairly new market and still a bit sparse to be honest, but it's great they are trying to do something in that community. A few weeks ago I got to meet Bob and Jenny from Harvest Moon Farms, another couple who are professionals from Chicago who just started farming a few years ago. So they are kind of a few years ahead of where we might like to be. They grow a lot of organic vegetables, including 15 kinds of garlic and plan to start doing pastured beef soon. They also represent a number of other farmers in the Madison area, so their stand at Southport has items from other farms like cheese, maple syrup, whole organic chickens and so on. We are planning to go up to visit them and help out on our way to a college reunion weekend with a bunch of Kristin's Wheaton friends in July. That should be a wonderful trip as we'll get to visit a couple farms and see a bunch of our favorite people.

Urbana farm trip - Prairie Fruits

skills0 — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:56:09 GMT

So I've gotten really behind on my blogging, my current project schedule isn't very conducive to blogging. I often blog on my lunch break, but I've only been taking a half hour lunch lately so I can leave work early enough to beat most of the evening traffic rush.

Anyway, the second farm we visited on our Urbana trip was Prairie Fruits. We were super excited to see their operation as they were the first farmstead goat Grade A certified goat dairy in Illinois. They sell their cheese at the Green City Market and also some Chicago cheese shops and restaurants. We got to hear a lot of stories about the travails of getting a small dairy certified, the current USDA system is just not built to really address the smaller sustainable farming operation. This is something that is ultimately going to need to be fixed if this country is ever to move away from the factory farm system.

Here's a prime example. Typically you have your large factory farm dairy operation with hundreds of cows. The milk is supposed to be tested for antibiotic residue, but due to the volume it really doesn't happen. They just do samples. And yet an operation like Prairie Fruits has to test every batch of milk they do and they don't really use antibiotics in the first place. They ended up getting their own license and certification as a lab so they can do their own testing because it's such a hassle for a small producer otherwise. Another bit of weirdness, you have to have a license to transport milk. So normally, a milk tanker truck pulls up to the farm and carries it off to wherever, sometimes a cheese factory. Since they do everything in the same location, they need the same license to move the milk from the milking parlor to the cheese make room and the two rooms can't share a wall. It's just ridiculous. That's Illinois, who has little experience with farmstead cheese making. Not sure if it's quite that bad in other states.

Visiting this farm was a pretty big deal for us, with a lot of firsts. First time to milk a goat for both of us. First time Kristin got to bottle feed baby goats. First time to use an automatic milking system. We also learned about small batch pasteurizers and some of the other necessary equipment. It gets pretty expensive. So I think we figured out a couple of things on this trip. One, we do really like dairy goats and a lot of the work involved with raising goats. Two, it's a huge time and money investment to get a real artisan farmstead cheese operation off the ground. So we need to do a lot more thinking about that. I've told a couple of people I feel like we learned more from that one day than from reading a book. There are a lot of practical things you really just have to see, like how goats are fed and housed, how long things take to do for a particular herd size, that sort of thing.

Beautiful eggs

skills0 — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:29:30 GMT

One of my favorite cookbook authors, Suvir Saran, waxes philosophical on the wonder of home grown eggs. They have some of the South American Araucana hens, which produce eggs in wonderful shades of blue and green. The deep brown ones are quite lovely as well. Who needs Easter Egg dye when nature creates such a wonderful spectrum of design and color naturally?

Technorati Tags: eggs, Araucana, hens, sustainability

Thoughts on "The New Organic Grower"

skills0 — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:14:24 GMT

Over this past winter I've been reading a lot of books related to sustainable/organic farming and animal husbandry. One recent book I can highly recommend is The New Organic Grower by Eliot Coleman.

The book is chock full of dense, useable information, much of it applicable for even the backyard gardener with a small plot. Coleman focuses on the amount of land that can be readily maintained by a couple or small family, usually 5 acres or less. He is also a big proponent of using good hand tools and small garden tractors rather than buying a lot of specialized equipment that must be depreciated and cost capitalized before the farmer is making money off the equipment. In this sense, he would probably share a lot of views with Joel Salatin.

There are too many ideas to mention, so I'll just throw out a few highlights that really stuck with me.

There is still a lot of innovation in small organic farming techniques in certain parts of Europe, where small farms still account for much of the local food supply. Coleman has visited a lot of farms in Europe and in the rest of the world and has lots of tidbits learned from those farmers. In addition, he points out a lot of resources anyone can use to keep up with the latest techniques from these farmers. Also, farming is still considered a high art here and the farmer is considered a professional, a technician, a highly educated person who takes his job seriously and really has to be good at a lot of things to succeed. Contrast that with many modern North American farmers, where government interference, the incompetence of the USDA, the encroachment of chemical companies hawking fertilizers and pesticides as best practice and the loss of a relationship between grower and consumer has left them downtrodden, lacking passion and vision and barely scraping by.
Crop rotation is your friend. Coleman talks a lot about crop rotation and provides a lot of practical examples and schemes, lots of hints on what plants best follow other plants, the soil impact of various plants and so forth. This used to be standard operating procedure back in the day, but now on today's giant mono-crop farms this idea has been thrown away along with much other practical knowledge. Instead, the soil is treated as nothing more than a growing medium with no value of its own while a vicious cycle of pesticides and herbicides are required for growth. This leaves the soil more and more destitute of nutrients, while impacting the surrounding land and wildlife as well. Not to mention the food just isn't good for you. Instead, Coleman encourages the grower to think of the soil as the most valuable asset you have, one you need to nurture with plenty of organic material and educated care.
Weak plants attract pests. This was a very interesting concept to me. Coleman says that once you get healthy soil with the right balance of pH, organic matter, minerals, etc. and your plants are healthy, pests tend to be less of a problem. Pests typically attack plants that are already on an unhealthy trend. I'm curious to see if experience bears this out some day. It makes sense though, as much of the rest of nature works that way as well. Coleman doesn't say this will completely end the pest problem, but it goes a long way. Part of the reason as well is due to healthy soil with all the good organisms, as well as a micro-culture in the way you grow that attracts birds and other natural predators to help you keep pests under control. One thing I'm still not clear on, what do you do while you get to this state with your soil and environment. Typically you don't start with the best soil (unless you buy a working organic farm potentially) and it takes at least several years to get to where you want to be.

All in all, I quite liked this book and it gave me a lot of food for thought. It will be one I'm sure I'll return to when the time comes that I actually can put some of these principles into practice. In the meantime, I'm going to try some of the suggestions in our small back porch growing area. One thing we noticed last year is we bought some "cured" manure and it made a huge difference in our plants. This year we also hope to use some of our worm compost and "worm tea", as well as experimenting with some soil amendments if we get a chance.

Technorati Tags: gardening, organics, soil, sustainability

Roadkill you want to eat

skills0 — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:26:05 GMT

Here's what happens when crazily inventive Moto chef Homaro Cantu get "aholt of" some raccoon meat. I grew up in the country and even I've never tried raccoon, although I have had pan-fried squirrel a number of times. Hope that grosses you out.

The Hazards of Homebrewing

skills0 — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:22:00 GMT

I had quite the accident just before Christmas while cleaning up after bottling 10 gallons of beer. If I had been aware of what could happen, I might have been more cautious, so I wanted to post my story just in case it helps another homebrewer.

We had just bottled 2 batches of homebrew and I was cleaning everything up. We have 2 carboys, one is a plastic Better Bottle type and one is the standard tempered glass style. I was cleaning out the glass one, basically just doing some final rinsing. Put some water in, swirl, dump and repeat.

I was in mid-swirl when suddenly I felt the carboy breaking apart in my two hands and blood and glass went everywhere. These glass carboys are about 1/8-1/4 inch thick and they don't break so much as explode. They certainly aren't safety glass. I still don't know what happened. I assume I slightly tagged the granite countertop on the edge of the sink. Either that or my wedding band happened to catch the side of it just right.

At this point it gets kinda gross, so stop reading if you have a light stomach. I looked down and my hands were covered in blood, so I washed them off so I could tell how bad things were. I had a number of small oozing cuts, but one rather deep gash in my left ring finger right under the first knuckle. Kristin immediately said, "That's bad, let's get to the emergency room." I wrapped it up in a kitchen towel and applied as much pressure as I could while holding my hand over my head. At this point we realize I can't drive and Kristin still isn't comfortable with a manual transmission. Plus it was snowing and the streets weren't completely clear, so she ran upstairs where fortunately our neighbor was home. He ran us over to the emergency room in his car.

At this point I still don't know exactly how bad things are and I'm entertaining bad scenerios of my bass-playing days coming to an end and my computer career which involves a lot of typing not looking so hot either. My adrenalin is pumping and I feel light-headed in the emergency room, still holding my hand over my head. Eventually a nurse notices my sitting there and calls me back to check after about 20 minutes. At this point we can see the extent of the damage and realize that fortunately, I didn't hit my tendon. But I did hit the main nerve bundle. She attempts to wrap all my fingers with gauze, which doesn't work as the blood just soaks through. So she then wraps just the cut finger and that seems to do the trick. After this, we wait about another 30-40 minutes and I'm finally able to see a doctor. While we are waiting we talk to a very nice nun who is there with a friend who slipped and fell in the snow. She has led a very interesting life and it does help to take my mind off everything at least a bit.

Turns out I need 5 stitches to close it up, so they proceed to irrigate the wound (which was the thing that hurt the most in the whole process). Then they numb up the finger with a bunch of those annoying little pin *** shots around the whole finger, wait 15 minutes and sew me up.

I honestly expected there to be a lot more pain, but I guess because I hit some nerves it minimized it a bit. It did throb a bit here and there, but really nothing that ibuprofen couldn't handle. Fast forward to just about 3 weeks later and it is healing up pretty nicely, the stitches are out and I'm typing with it and using it a bit. Still have to be careful as it is still pretty tender if it gets bumped. Also, I still have numbness in spots on my finger. The ER doc said it would take about 6 weeks to know for sure how much, if any, nerve damage I would have. It's still hard to say. I could live with what I have now, but I'm hoping it keeps improving over the next couple of weeks.

So I feel very thankful that God was watching over me as it could have been much worse. We read stories later of people cutting tendons in multiple fingers, 20 stitches in an arm, that sort of thing. So in spite of everything, I think I got off better than I could have. This is not going to put a damper on our homebrewing, but we quickly decided that we are not going to use anything but Better Bottle plastic carboys from here on out. It's just not worth the risk. There are too many stories similar to mine and why work with an unnecessary risk. The plastic bottles do scratch eventually, but they only cost about $20 so it's not that big a deal. Glass has a few advantages, but not enough to be worth this type of ordeal.

Technorati Tags: homebrewing, stitches

Happy Holiday news for Grant Achatz

skills0 — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:47:06 GMT

http://mmx-chicago.weblogs.vmixcore.com/vmix_hosted_apps/62/post/1434/

Good news for the Alinea chef, his cancer is now in remission. Hope it stays that way because I still want to some day be able to experience his cooking for myself.

Of your great grandpa's turkey, New Zealand goats and miscanthus gigantus

skills0 — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:59:00 GMT

Last year Kristin and I were having a big Thanksgiving dinner shindig at our place and wanted to do something different for the turkey. After looking at several options, we decided to purchase a heritage Bourbon Red turkey from Caveny Farms and picked it up at the Green City Winter Market. Simply slow roasted with a few herbs and butter, it was like no turkey I'd ever had. The turkey's
white meat actually had flavor and the dark meat was even more flavorful and juicy than usual. It actually tasted like meat compared to a traditional Butterball.

So we were excited a month or so ago to get an invitation to attend a picnic at Caveny Farm put on by the local Slow Food society near Champaign IL. In typical food geek fashion, we like nothing better than getting closer to the source of our food, plus with our interest in farming and sustainability it seemed worth the drive. So we went down yesterday for a visit.

We got there just in time for the tour with John Caveny and learned about how they raise the turkeys and got to see them up close. They were not enjoying the heat wave, being only about a month from slaughter size. Some of you may not know that birds pant to release heat, which I was used to from my days working in my dad's chicken house. These birds were getting a bit warm, but still wanted to flock together. Nobody ever said turkeys were the smartest bird on the planet.

Caveny Farms also does rotational grazing on grass, using the turkeys to graze down the fields and in turn supply it with natural fertilizer (bird sh*t to you). The manure will help the pasture grow for about 3 years before they need to rotate the birds onto it again, which seems like a pretty good return on investment. They are also growing test plots of miscanthus gigantus, a tall sawgrass from Asia that ends up being one of our best hopes for non-corn based ethanol as well as pellet fuel and natural gas substitute. Stephen Long at University of Illinois Champaign has been taking a look at this for awhile now. Very intriguing. It's a rhizome, so it needs to be propagated from root structures and it is taking a bit to get supplies up to the level where it is commercially feasible. They are also still doing research on the best method to convert it to ethanol, but this plant holds a lot of promise. Great yield, low carbon footprint and doesn't need a lot of water or fertilizer. I've been hearing a lot about switchgrass for some reason, but this plant is even better. And once it is producing, it's a better money-maker for farmers as well.

We also got to meet Andrew and Jennifer Miller from Rush Creek Farms who grow Kiko meat goats, a breed from New Zealand. Kristin and I are very interested in the idea of dairy goats, so it was great to talk goats with some real goat farmers. We discovered our research is apparently being fruitful, as they were surprised at some of the things we had already figured out and read about. So I guess that is encouraging. We are hoping to go down again to visit their farm and also to visit one of the large dairy goat and cheese operations that is only about 20 minutes from them. They used to live in the city as well, but decided about 5 years ago they wanted a change of pace. Kristin and I have been thinking a lot about how we can turn our love of food into a second career/early retirement, although that is still a lot of research, prayer and savings away. It's exciting to start looking at various types of homestead farming though and hopefully over the next several years we will start to understand if this is really something we are interested in pursuing. I'll have some pictures before too long.

Technorati Tags: turkey, goat, biofuel, ethanol, sustainability, heritage breeds, Kiko, Bourbon Red, Slow Food

A trip to Over Easy

skills0 — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 23:16:00 GMT

Last night Kristin and I went to see DJ Tiesto live at the Congress Theater. That experience is probably better for another post, but we got in very late and didn't get up until noon today. So we decided to finally trek over to Over Easy on Damen. This...(read more)