Augieland

Do you think this is a good idea?

There are many things out there that I am not an authority on, and corn subsidies are one of them. I have friends who are authorities and I enjoy trying to learn from them. Here is my lay understanding of the situation.

Because the government started subsidizing grain production some time long ago, farmers that wanted to be sure they would have money at the end of the growing season (not always guaranteed in the honest version of farming) could grow corn, wheat, soy and cotton and, if there was no market, our taxes would keep them flush on the supply side of market with no demand. As a result, the government became the biggest buyer of corn around, so they started looking for places that these grains could be unloaded. They subsidized research on alternative uses and learned things like that you can feed it to cows (as long as you pump them full of antibiotics because it will make them very sick.) With subsidies for corn an incentive for easy money, the market was flooded with this unwanted product. But the subsidized research resulted in the discovery of plenty of uses for the surplus (think high fructose corn syrup, and look at the ingredients of any food in a bag) with often disastrous consequences to the health and waistlines (though deceptively, not the wallets) of our nation.

It is a logic best illustrated by the actions of Catch 22's character Milo Minderbinder, who dips cotton balls in chocolate because too much of it has been purchased and the soldiers have to eat it, since it's already been paid for after all.

There is an article in the Wall Street Journal today explaining that big auto, Ford and GM, are making a big push to make vehicles that work on Ethanol, which is one of the many ways to use all the extra corn. Now whether Ethanol is a viable fuel source depends on which side you are on. The corn guys love it, the ecologists hate it, and this government thinks it's a viable alternative.

No one disagrees, though, that it costs way more to make corn into fuel, if you count in your dollars paid from our taxes to subsidize corn. That, even with the corn subsidies, it would cost the consumer more to run his/her car on ethanol and that, if the horrible system of subsidies finally ended, it would cost at least three times what oil currently does.

Last week GM ran its first national advertising campaign promoting one of its so-called flex-fuel vehicles, the Chevy Tahoe. Ford last month began selling flex-fuel versions of its popular F-150 pickup. Vehicles that are designated flex-fuel are capable of running on gasoline but can use the alternative E85, a fuel mix that is 85% ethanol and 15% gas. WSJ 1/10/05

Ford and GM combined plan to produce 650,000 vehicles this year that can use E85, which currently costs about $2 a gallon. Vehicles that run on ethanol -- which is distilled from corn and grain -- are less fuel efficient than gasoline, in the order of 25%, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The average cost to operate a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, for example, using E85 is $1,578 compared with $1,344 on gasoline alone, according to the Energy Department's fueleconomy.gov. The gasoline version emits an estimated 7.6 tons of greenhouse gas per year compared with 5.6 tons for E85. WSJ 1/10/05

Auto executives note that ethanol is never going to be a complete replacement for gasoline because ethanol production isn't sustainable on a mass level. But if some fraction of gasoline could be replaced by ethanol, even 10%, that could have a significant impact on foreign-oil dependence. Critics are concerned about the economic equation. Ethanol is heavily subsidized, from federal dollars given to farmers to the 51 cents a gallon given to companies blending the fuel. But corn is just one way to create ethanol, and research continues that will allow it in the future to be made from anything that was once green, including sawgrass, rice straw, tree bark or sugarcane waste, to name a few examples. WSJ 1/10/05

Toyota officials said they haven't produced ethanol-capable vehicles here because they haven't needed the credits for government fuel-economy requirements. Toyota doesn't believe that corn-based ethanol is an environmentally friendly or sustainable solution, said Bill Reinert, national manager of advanced technology for Toyota's U.S. operation, but the company's opinion could change if ethanol is successfully made from other materials. WSJ 1/10/05

Some studies, particularly a recent one by Cornell University, have suggested that producing ethanol from corn costs more energy than it creates, when the diesel fuel used by tractors and the production of fertilizer and other factors are considered. NYT 1/07/06

At this point, I think we are all aware that Ford and GM are in an enormous amount of trouble in their own businesses, and I like to take the view that that is because they are bad at their business. Having lived through Iococa, I also believe the government helped them become bad. Either way, they are failing. By the way, Toyota is hugely successful.

I totally understand GM and Ford thinking this is a way forward. Ethanol is easy for two reasons: most cars already work on it (and, if not, the modification is easy) and the idea of making fuel from corn is a marketing dream. Sadly, it will take government involvement to make it accessible, and subsidies to keep it cheap, as inefficient as it is. It is a horrible idea. Buy a Prius and, if the American automakers don't start making sound, smart, forward-looking (the model T ran on ethanol, this is not new technology born of a concern for fossil fuel dependence) business decisions, let them fail. Please, let's not be fooled again.

mercury, bycatch, and canned tuna. oh my

One of my all time favorite days in history was when Seabright showed up to a cookout that Woodsie was having with about a 4-pound section of a bluefin tuna he had caught that morning. Real North Atlantic bluefin, never frozen, the kind of thing you just accept you will never taste.

I was assigned the duty of preparing it for the crowd. Chopes, Wife and I ate it raw, while everyone else watched and waited for me to figure out how to cook it. Ultimately, I went the easy way: I sliced it into four steaks, threw it on the grill long enough to barely color it (so people could convince themselves it had been cooked) and splashed a little Kikoman soy on it.

It was amazing, fantastic; it was buttery and wonderful. Experiences like this keep me sidelined on fish issues. Yes, bluefin is being ridiculously over-fished, their average weight is down by something like 50%, and there are 90% less than there were in the '70s. I must also consider that long line fishing reeks havoc on all kinds of other sea life, and it is also easy to follow the reasoning that if bigger carnivorous fish contain the most mercury this is the fish most likely to make you stupid. I accept it is likely that, because of over-fishing, there will probably be no bluefin left pretty soon. As a result of knowing all this, I don't go out of my way looking for bluefin tuna.

The truth is, most of the fish I see on a day-to-day basis is a gassed, sub-par form of bluefin that should never have been killed anyway, so I find it as easy to walk on by as I do a Florida Tomato. I mean crap is crap. However, real, great bluefin tuna is magic, and I eat it when I get the chance. I reassure my self that by not eating the crap served in cheap sushi joints, or "grilled rare and put on top of our house ceaser salad," I am not supporting the market, and hopefully people will stop taking young tuna from the sea.

Over-fishing is a real concern for me; I hate the idea that, in order to catch fish we want, we kill an enormous amount of fish by happenstance, bycatch, and as a result I try to base my fish choices on some eco-friendly guidelines.

There is also the consideration that I disagree with some fish farming practices, Salmon, for example (if you need to dye it, it can't be good), and agree with others, mussels (they clean the water, and seldom compete with natural species).

Then there is the fact that the mercury residue of our industrial revolution has made most fish poisonous, to some degree or other.

Eating seafood is a conundrum I haven't fully wrapped my head around at this time. The way things are going the quality of fish is less good, less plentiful, and significantly less healthy, but Masa's toro is sublime. So whenever I see public discussion on these topics, I try to follow it. At the moment, the Chicago Tribune has brought mercury concerns of canned tuna to the forefront. Here is some of what I am reading:

"When the Food and Drug Administration updated its mercury warning last year, it arbitrarily classified canned light tuna as low in mercury to "keep market share at a reasonable level," one agency official told an FDA advisory panel, according to transcripts of the meeting."

"But theNational Academy of Sciences, the nation's leading scientific body, concluded in 2000 that a larger body of evidence shows mercury does cause harm and that exposure limits should be based on that research.
Tuna industry officials remain unconvinced, stressing that their product is one of the healthiest foods children and pregnant women can eat."

"The drafts were tested on consumer focus groups, and during one session the parent of a 15-month-old child asked about the risks of canned tuna. Alan Levy, chief of the FDA's consumer studies branch, answered: "It would be, you know, prudent to cut back if he's eating more than a can-and-a-half a week," according to transcripts of the meeting.
Addressing another focus group, Levy acknowledged that the agency's mercury limit in fish--since relaxed from 0.5 to 1 part per million--was not low enough to protect fetuses" Chicago Tribune Dec 13 '05

"That decision had implications far beyond tuna. Once the FDA defined canned light tuna as low, all other kinds of seafood with comparable levels of mercury, such as cod, also had to be listed as low.
When asked in an interview why officials arbitrarily chose the low mercury level instead of employing scientific calculations, Acheson said: "It was a perfectly appropriate scientific decision to choose that value compared to any other value. You could certainly move it up, you could move it down, and you might get a different result."

Industry officials are fighting the suit, and they have an unlikely ally: the FDA. The agency said the federal warning issued last year--the same one that misleads consumers about the levels of mercury in fish--is the best way to advise the public Chicago Tribune Dec 13 '05

The fact that one tuna species--yellowfin--may contain slightly higher amounts of mercury than some other species is a meaningless fact, especially since the fish intended for tuna steaks is not used in canned tuna and the yellowfin used in our products was confirmed by the Chicago Tribune's own tests to contain very low levels of mercury Chicago Tribune Dec 22 '05

In recent years the tuna industry, fearing class-action lawsuits and a drop in sales, has opposed government efforts to warn consumers about mercury in tuna, federal records show. The industry is especially concerned about warnings regarding canned light tuna, which accounts for 65 percent of all cans of tuna sold. Albacore makes up 35 percent.
Since the Tribune series was published, the Tuna Foundation has defended the use of yellowfin in light tuna.
In an interview, Burney, the foundation director, said gourmet canned tuna is not light tuna but rather "a completely different product."
But gourmet cans prominently say "light tuna" on the labels Chicago Tribune Dec 31 '05

The Tribune series reported that about 180 million cans of light tuna are made with yellowfin each year. Half of those cans are marketed as a gourmet product. StarKist calls its product "Gourmet's Choice," Chicken of the Sea markets a "Tonno" product under the Genova label and Bumble Bee offers a "Tonno in olive oil" variety. Of those, only Genova identifies its product as yellowfin Chicago Tribune Dec 31 '05

Make of these what you will, I just hate feeling like the only guy that knows this is going on.

Best quality of life improvement '05: fresh direct

I know not everyone has access to Fresh Direct, but I wish you did. Fresh Direct is not only genius because it is so convenient. It is not simply that you can search foodtv.com or epicurious.com, pick a recipe, switch active windows to the Fresh Direct website, and order exactly what you want/need. And it is not only that they are very fairly, and often better, priced when compared to their competition (competition that eats hours of your day as you walk around tombs of fluorescent light, gathering the products you will lug back from the place). It is their responsiveness to customer requests.

Fresh Direct's webpage set-up is simple. It is divided into grocery sections, meat, deli, heat n eat, and so on. There is also a search tool, so you can enter things like "horseradish root" or "spicy pickled beans" (I put them both in Bloody Marys). If you search the virtual aisles and don't find what you are looking for, you simply send an email and, in my experience, they work to start offering the requested product.

De Cecco whole-wheat pasta is what we like to cook when we are using hard spaghetti (cook it exactly 2 minutes less then the package advises and you will get a great al dente noodle with a subtle nuttiness). When we first started ordering Fresh Direct, they carried 2 shapes, fusilli and linguine. Around our third order, Wife sent an email asking them to bolster their whole wheat pasta offerings and they immediately added spaghetti and De Boles penne. That's service.

Kefir was another story. Kefir is a drinkable low fat milk culture, like yogurt, that people from former Soviet countries swear will keep you young and free from disease, well into your two hundredth year. Really, it is a tasty and tangy way to get lower fat calcium into your diet without committing to the horrible low fat milk offerings that exist out there today (FDA-bashing, raw milk plug here). It took four whole weeks and two emails for them to find it and start carrying an organic variety that now just shows up to our house once a week. Try getting Food Emporium or Gristede's or even Whole Foods to do that.

The sections Wife and I do our most shopping on are Local Products and Organic Products. Obviously we prefer to keep our money as close to our community as possible, but honestly food just tastes better grown on or near the soil I live on, and watered with the water I drink. Fresh Direct makes that very easy, being a local business supporting local farmers. When what we are after is not available locally (ah the glory of northeastern season change) we shop in the organic section. Fresh Direct has been constantly adding to the list of choices that are locally grown, and organic. The best part is if you click on broccoli there in front of you are both farm fresh and organic, and it is easy to see that for $.50 more you can have the better tasting organic version.

There is a caveat to having ready access to actually fresh food that hasn't been treated for shipping and shelf life: you need to use it rather quickly, within a week really. This gives rise to some of my favorite Sunday night meals. Figuring out how to bring the remains of the week's produce into one big meal for the 3-5 friends that usually drop by on Sunday, with enough left over for wife and her office to consume at lunch, keeps me sharp, makes room in the fridge for the next delivery, and best of all keeps better tasting food in our lives. As far as quality of life goes, I would say Fresh Direct was the best part of '05.

"Dark everything scooped with tuna"

It can be, and has been, argued that New York has the best bagels in the world. So if you can find the best bagel in New York, you will have found the best bagel ever. Who doesn't want to try the best anything ever?

I'm not exactly sure why -- it may be efficiency, it may be integrity of product -- but the front-runners for best bagel in NYC (Murray's, Essa, and H&H) will not toast their bagels, much to the chagrin of some of my friends newer to the bagel experience. I contest at this level; there is no need for toasting.

In my opinion, Murray's Bagels on 6^th Ave has hands down the greatest bagel in New York. Theirs has the great toothsome crust and amazingly dense chew of a real bagel. There are plenty of toppings on both sides of their seeded bagels and, if you get there when they are freshly out of the oven, they are so wonderful as to not require any further adornment at all, although butter does go very well.

As I mentioned, Murray's does not toast their bagels. There is, however, a trick to getting the effect of toasting. In the process of cooking, some bagels obviously cook a little more then others, depending on where they are in the oven. If you order a "dark" bagel you will get one with more carmelization on the outside, which is the real benefit of toasting, anyway (if you toast the inside, all you are doing is drying out the dense crumb, thereby detracting from the harmony of the package). So if you prefer toasted and they don't toast, order your bagel "dark."

Another trick for NYC's bagel shops is to order yours "scooped." There are a lot of things that taste fantastic in bagels that are squeezed out as a result of the firmness of the bagel's interior. Where bread or a roll is far more pliable and will squish to accommodate chicken salad or egg salad, a sliced bagel shoots them right out the back and onto that white paper with the slice through the middle it was just wrapped in. "Scooping" the bagel, on the other hand, creates a small cavity that holds these bagel accoutrements. Plus a good balance is struck between the crumb that remains, the crust, and whatever you have stuffed in there.

Don't believe me? Go to Murray's today and order a dark everything bagel scooped with tuna.

Just trust me.

The Parker Palate and the Roland Recipe

The Parker/Roland dilemma is one of my favorite things about wine. The argument goes that these two are making the whole wine world move in a boring direction. I think this is absolutely true, but I think it is our fault, not theirs. We are the consumers. We drive the market. And we are the fools encouraging their two philosophies to destroy nuance and poetry in the wine world.

Robert Parker was raised on Coca-Cola and sees wine as a beverage rather than a component of a meal. I love when people discuss his exceptional palate. In my view, and I may be wrong, an exceptional palate would be one very skilled at seeking out variety and subtlety in myriad things. Parker doesn't do this. Parker has never pretended to do this. Parker simply declares, "this is the kind of thing I like," and "I like it a little," "I like it a little more," or "I like it a lot." Long gone are the days when Bob didn't like a wine.

Parker likes the wines a kid raised on Coca-cola would love. There is no subtlety in a Parker wine. His wines are in your face, they are huge, they are fruit bombs, with alcohol and lazy tannins filling your mouth. They vary very little. In Bob's world, the difference between a Cabernet Sauvignon from France and one from California should not be much more than the difference between a Pepsi and a Coke (definitely a little different and one definitely goes better with pizza, while the other pairs better with cheeseburgers, but both are constant and dependable). That's all. That is definitely a type of wine, it's the one Parker likes, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Michael Roland has figured out how to make all wines taste pleasing to Parker. Roland knows that if you let the fruit ripen longer, the tannins will soften and the sugar will concentrate, and if you expose the resulting juice to an enormous amount of oxygen, very quickly, and then slam it into new oak, any edges will be rounded, hastening the results that used to require patience, and foresight, and perfect weather. In Michael Roland's world there are no bad vintages and there is no need to wait. Pull the pop tab on your wine and drink up, there will be more exactly like it next year.

Consequently, when someone hires Michael to consult on his or her wine and make it a huge powerhouse of boozy extraction, Robert Parker loves it and gives it a very high rating. This makes total sense to me. The problems occur following this process. Once Parker rates it, the price runs up because people demand wines of his considered caliber.

At this point, there are a lot of people in the world who were raised on Coca-Cola. Add to this that learning wine is a slow, life-long process that many people find threatening and awkward, that the biggest conspicuous consumers in our culture are too young to have had the experience necessary to develop a personal view of wine perfection, and that Parker's system of elementary grading is user-friendly and easy to follow, and it's no wonder his influence is so great. Also remember, sometimes Coke just tastes good. As a matter of fact, when drinking wine as a cocktail, which many consumers do, these wines are very good at standing alone. The result is that people the world over now lean on Parker to pick their wines for them.

The problem is the market, and that we seem to expect a wine Parker has given a great score to cost a ridiculous amount of money. Why? When Parker started, there were only a handful of wines pleasing to the Parker Palate, and they were some of the most expensive wines in the world.  Somehow, as wines without the pedigree and proven tradition of these higher-caliber wines started tasting somewhat like them we started paying up for them, without realizing that they needn't cost as much. More wines of a type equals more supply, more supply should mean lower prices.

There is now a larger supply of wines in the world that follow Parker's preferences. Granted, winemakers play down this fact by labeling the same wine as different, but we as wine lovers should be savvy enough to see through this. Accepting that all Parker-style wines are similar to one another, just buy the cheapest 96 pointer every time if that's what you want and don't pay up, then all the other 96s will have to come into a sensible line.

Winemakers are doing exactly what they should do; the disenfranchised wine lovers aren't. Winemakers are simply charging as much as the market will afford for their product. It is simple supply and demand, and it makes perfect sense. People in business should be doing all they can to make money. However, the market can resist the Parker Effect by simply not letting makers skew their prices just because he has given their wine a good rating. Make them first prove over hundreds of years that this style of wine has longevity and will appreciate in both value and profile. We can also push the market away from Parker's influence by seeking out a variety of wines and rewarding uniqueness.

In my lifetime, I have been lucky enough to try some of the great Bordeaux. I can actually tell you that, having tasted the '45 Mouton out of both jeroboam and magnum this year, the jeroboam is fantastic and drinking perfectly and that the magnum, although interesting, has lost some of its depth and is primarily showing a very interesting note of spearmint. As a result, I suspect the bottles have started their decline and that if you own some you should drink them now (if you do, and want company, shoot me an email.)  I have also tasted about 20 vintages of Latour this year and I can definitely tell you that the ones made from the early 90's on taste like a genius representation of generic, big, hedonistic wine and not distinctly like Latour anymore.

My fear is that, by forcing oxygen exposure in order to make wines drink better in the short run, their death will be hastened and the arc of their prime will be curtailed. Is Michael Roland being shortsighted in his recommendations, as I suspect?  Only time will tell. If so, the '00 Moutons will have been a huge waste of money in the $500 dollar range, as soon as 2015. People being born now will be paying ridiculous prices for the more traditional wines being produced today by people more concerned with actual terroir representation then  pleasing the Pepsi Generation, and everyone will have rushed through this generation of wine realizing that, without significant acid and tannin structure to balance the extracted fruit and alcohol, all these wines do over time is flatten.

Lets face it: Bob and Michael have nothing to lose. They both turn 60 in '07 so why would they want wine to only hit its perfect stride in sixty years? They very much benefit from winemakers ignoring tradition and forcing wines to cut their noses off to spite their faces, playing up immediacy at the cost of promise.

The reality is wine is a market, and only people paying for authenticity will stem this tide. So, if you hate they way things are going, stop bemoaning the lemming-like tendencies of Parker-ites and go seek out real wine and buy it. Stop bitching about Bob and Mike -- in this shortsighted, immediate gratification world only a very few people would turn their backs on an opportunity to make the whole world taste like they think it should. Be honest, would you be one of them?

Subway: neither Sub nor Way, discuss amongst yourselves

I grew up in NJ. There are many things people that grew up in NJ take way too seriously (Camaros, cologne, and matching gold jewelry to patterned sweaters for example), however one of the things Jersey just gets right is the submarine sandwich.

A real sub (hoagie, grinder, torpedo, hero) is made either at a deli or a pizza shop. The meats and cheeses for a real sub are sliced when you order it. A real sub has more meat then bread and, even though the roll is of respectable size, it is offered in ½ or whole, not inches. The roll for a real sub is made locally at a small Italian bread shop, and is delivered by truck every morning. Into these otherwise inconsequential loaves of bread are stuffed cold cuts. Sub shops have at least 10 versions of an Italian sub, usually identified by number. My favorite Italian at my favorite shop is the #33: capicola, salami, and provolone. I like mine with lettuce, tomato, onions, oregano, oil, and extra vinegar. If you say "everything" you get all that with mayo. Mustard and hot peppers, although part of "everything," are usually a separate request.

Why am I on about subs? Well another unfathomable event has taken place here on the island I believe holds people who take food too seriously to support the banal, destructive, food of chain restaurants. Directly across the street from my office a Subway brand sandwich shop has opened up. Much as with the Domino's that opened three doors from Otto, and the Olive Garden that opened two avenues from Beppe, the fact that I have ever seen anyone inside completely baffles me.

The argument I hear is that it is familiar and is different than other sandwich shops. Now I will grant that NY delis are not as committed to sub excellence as their brethren across the Hudson, but this Subway sits between two delis, both of which make a far better sub then Subway. The other argument is cost, which just shows too little self-respect to discuss now.

Subway makes horrible subs. The frozen, half-cooked bread they reheat to doneness on-site is terrible, and they cut it open the wrong way. The ratio of bread to meat is absurdly disproportionate. I promise that their cold cuts which have been pre-cut and portioned at a factory somewhere are not as good as brands like Boar's head, not to mention the ones available at places that roast their own beef and turkey. The tomatoes Subway uses here in NY, in August, are crunchy and pink. It is a detestable thing.

Simply put, Subway does not make subs, Domino's does not make pizza, and most of all Olive Garden does not make Italian food. Giving them your money takes away from local people working to make an authentic product. I promise it will lead to heartbreak; independent, authentic sub shops don't have the backing of huge conglomerates and the drop-off in revenue that can occur from people grabbing a Subway "every now and then" can crush them.  You will lament the absence of the real sub shops when Subway is all that is left. Just drive an interstate and you will get a taste of the devastating sameness in store. It is bad enough that we can't find decent coffee any more thanks to Charbucks. Keep your money in your community, supporting the local ventures that make it unique and keep it a place to have pride in. But, most importantly, skip Subway because it sucks.

Foie Gras

Have you ever seen a cattle feedlot?

The Foie Gras debate is rearing its ugly head again because the city of Chicago is talking about banning Foie from being served within the city limits. I can't figure out what upsets me more -- people arguing about torturing animals while Cheney argues to torture humans, the anthropomorphizing of yet another animal based on zero actual biological fact, or Charlie Trotter being the poster boy for this cause.

The reason people have fattened ducks livers for the last 5000 years is that, at some point 5000 years ago, some genius realized that the livers of ducks and geese killed in late fall tasted much better then they did the rest of the year. With hindsight and current biological understanding, we know that this is because the fowl themselves would fatten their livers in preparation for their long migratory flights.

Once fowl were domesticated, people realized that if you overfed them, much as they overfeed themselves in autumn, you could always produce this fatter, better tasting liver. Since these birds evolved with no gag reflex (so that they could engorge themselves when the time was right), and the lining of their throats is more comparable to a fingernail than a soft palate, it meant you would do no damage by putting a tube past their esophagus and overfeeding them (a practive called gavages).

Now I have heard stories of geese buried up to their necks in sand and force-fed to the point of bursting, but this makes no sense in today's reality. Feeders are penalized for feeding to the point where a duck dies simply because it's bad business, leaving one less duck for sale at market. The reality is that Hudson Valley Foie Gras loses 3.5% of its ducks a year, which is right in line with the 3% Tyson claims annually in chickens, and the ducks get the privilege of keeping their bills and not having the duck that lives in the cage directly above them shitting on them all day. All of the duck is used, at least at Hudson Valley, the feathers for down, the breasts served in restaurants, etc. At the moment Del Posto is planning a pasta dish that will have duck testicles as a main component. 

I have no comprehension of how we can live in a world where, in the interest of national security, we have a VP arguing for the torture of humans, and people dehydrating on rooftops while bureaucrats preen in emails, yet Foie Gras is such a subject of public policy.

What is happening to our world is that we are legislating good, small, successful businesses out of work, in response to critics who have not bothered to look into the science of the practices beyond the childish argument that "if I was a duck I would hate it." Dr. Elliot M. Katz, the president and founder of In Defense of Animals, likes to show pictures of mishandled ducks in France to people on their way into restaurants, as if he were scaring a thirteen-year-old girl on her way to an abortion clinic out of what he considers to be a bad choice. That is his right, and I say power to him and his group. If those tactics can work on someone who believes a picture is worth a thousand words, and can shame them out of a dining choice with little more than uninformed claims, so be it.  To paraphrase Paula Wolfert, I would rather be one of [Hudson Valley Foie Gras'] Michael Ginor's ducks then a Tyson chicken, or even a Simplot potato.

I see this as the political cause version of the rather-than-fail courses in college. Who is going to come out in defense of overfeeding animals in an America currently dealing with how much it overfeeds itself?  Alderman Joseph More is saying things like ''our laws are a reflection of our culture, and in our culture it's not acceptable to torture small animals." The fact is we torture all kinds of creatures and support far more detestable practices then gavages. If you look at these farms, compared to every other level of acceptable farming practice -- milk cows, Perdue chickens, fur farms - American Foie farmers are models of what people should aspire to to help free us from the holes we have dug ourselves with mass agriculture today. These councilmen are picking on the little guy (the amount of ducks fatted in America every day is infinitesimal -- Hudson Valley Foie Gras raises 250,000 ducks a year and that is 60% of the market) because it is easy. If these people really want to do some good and change food in America for the better, they should write letters to their elected officials about the ridiculous raw milk policies.

Back in '94, when I was just out of school and saving money for a six-month European backpacking expedition, I was working as a waiter in one of New Jersey's many "Bistros" (think un-franchised Fridays that dotted the country back then). In the kitchen was a recent graduate of the CIA, so when I was headed to Chicago for a weekend to visit Bestfriend, I asked him where we should go. He told us "there is this guy out there named Charlie Trotter everyone is talking about," so off we went to Trotter's. This was my first real exposure to fine dining and started me down the path that leads me to rant on and on about cuisine on this very blog. I went on to make periodic, pretty much yearly visits to Trotter's every time I could get the money together, for about eight years. I remember his stab at a red wine menu and have gone out and attended cooking classes Charlie hosted. I am what you could call a fan. That all ended in '03 when I finally brought Wife, (then GF).

The first time I happened into Trotter's I had no idea what to expect, along with no idea of what fine dining could cost. When I explained to the waiter that we may have bitten off more then we could chew, and wanted to enjoy the experience as much as possible while keeping it on the cheaper side of what I expected they were used to, the amazingly talented server went on to sell a glass of wine from a bottle she expected would pair up with our first four courses to a regular at another table and sold the remainder to us for a deep discount since she figured it would not sell again, not being on the list of glass offerings. We got off cheap and they earned our 10-year allegiance. That's good business.

On another visit, I remarked to my waiter that I noticed Sister had three slices of antelope tenderloin on her plate while Bestfriend had four and I had six. She explained that the waitstaff report to the kitchen on how dinner is progressing and the portions are adjusted so that everyone will be able to see their way to the end of the twelve courses. I have many stories like this and, in addition to the food, was continually wowed by Charlie's innovative and original solutions (such as having his servers wear  double-sided tape on their shoes to pick up grey lint on the dark carpets without distracting diners during service). I was always very impressed.

That all ended one night when I finally brought Wife (then GF), to Trotter's, and the service some how seemed off the whole evening. Our waiter was much more proud of his association with the respected greatness of Trotter's than in possession of the passion for fine food that had seemed to pervade every inch of the place on past visits.

The whole problem can be summed up in the exchange over our Triple Seared Beef. When I asked what type of beef it was the server went on to explain, "you have heard of Kobe??? Well this is from a smaller Japanese island. The cow lives its whole life confined to a very small area, never being allowed to walk, being constantly massaged by young women and fed nothing but rice and beer in order to fatten it nicely." Which put Wife right off it, and consequently the whole meal. What is so frustrating is the meat was red, so obviously at some point it had been fed something containing chlorophyll and not just his described diet.

Wife has had a tour of Hudson Valley Foie Gras Farms and sees nothing wrong with their treatment of the birds, so it is not like she is against processes that make food taste better. The irony is that Charlie Trotter, the guy now calling Foie "grisly" had an employee of his flagship restaurant erroneously touting the torture of Japanese cows because he thought it would add to our dining experience.

In all of the meals mentioned, Foie played a role in Charlie's Grand Menu. The guy is a genius, no one doubts that, and he may have moved on from Foie because he no longer sees a need for it on his menu. But that is because he has done everything he can imagine to do with it, not because he has had some epiphany. I think the chef likes being a "benevolent" authority now, in spite of the fact that when he was making the gamble to open a two menu, all or nothing, restaurant in the middle of the "brat" town, he leaned on Foie for its role in fine dining and used it for all it was worth.

If I lived in Chicago right now, rather then choosing topics easy to debate because no one bothers to understand the reality of the processes involved, I'd be calling a re-vote of the entire council for wasting time on such a silly, inconsequential subject, and tell the next set to pay attention to things that actually effect people every day, like the city's exorbitant sales tax. Maybe they could be at 9.5% if they weren't wasting time debating things settled 5000 years ago.

What Happened to Food TV?

I have spent the last two days home very sick with a stomach flu. I find it hard to believe that it has been so long since I spent two straight days entirely confined to the couch watching TV, but I guess it has. Eighteen odd hours of sofa living and TV watching leave me with one question. What happened to the Food Network?

I used to be able to sit home and watch a couple of hours of some very talented chefs sharing insights on how to greatly increase the quality of my culinary life. I can’t tell you how much I learned from Emeril, Mario, Ming, and Sarah Mouton in a couple of simple hours in front of the TV. Back then, it was a bummer if Bobby came on and turned the focus on cuteness rather than cuisine. Yesterday and today the shows were uniformly embarrassing, the only saving grace being Mario whipping up a cardoon dish one day and a ravioli dish the other.

All of a sudden there is some woman named Rachel Ray who, as best I can tell, is reinventing ways to make casseroles easy by adding soup to frozen vegetables. Isn’t that exactly where the whole world went wrong in the fifties? Wasn’t America’s belief in these quick, timesaving steps exactly what led us to a world where a tomato is a crunchy fruit from Florida that’s always available in the same size and shade of what can only be called off red?

Then there is some really hot woman named DeLaurentis sharing her vast insights on ways to chop garlic and add vinegar to salad dressings, and some Paula lady overcooking vegetables from some nameless supermarket and calling it home cooking.

 

My hope has been that, with Americans realizing their food has been so manipulated to fit packaging that there are hardly any nutrients left in it, and that we are getting fatter from not cooking for ourselves, Food TV would help. The Food channel was a place that pointed out there was still one butcher left in most areas and that introducing yourself and making friends with him would amazingly improve the quality of all of your dishes involving meat.

Food TV started with group of very talented chefs showing us that it was not too hard to make the wonderful dishes of the better restaurants of America at home, we just needed to learn some simple techniques and improve the produce we were getting. Mario would tell us of the wonders of guanciale and explain that pancetta or even good quality bacon could play the role. All of a sudden we were looking past the Oscar Meyer packages and noticing that some places actually had bacon in their fridges. These places were doing better business on better product, and a simple solution was rolling in. The stage was set for Whole Foods and all the others to sweep in because now at least those of us that would listen were looking for more authentic product.

Now there is some very nice-seeming, cheery woman touting the genius of canned beets. Can anything be more antithetical to moving away from the dilemma of the American diet then encouraging the use of canned beets?

Some would say, “it is a step in the right direction that people are cooking at home at all.” I have to disagree. If what you are learning is to simply combine prepackaged ingredients to mimic a chicken tetrazzini by Stouffer’s, with nothing more then a recipe that is “a snap to do in under 30 minutes,” you still have to clean, and what you are making is not uniquely better then its prepackaged counterpart.

Simple diets that show us “by slightly modifying our lives away from processed carbs and flour our quality of health will improve” fail because, in reality, we stray from their simplicity for the more simple alternative when time runs short, we are too lazy, or worst of all a “Domino’s craving” strikes (I swear I have been told these exist). For people to want to cook at home it doesn’t need to be easy it needs be good. We need to realize that life gets better when what we are cooking at home with a modicum of effort and time is exceedingly better than what we can get at the local chain restaurant, or from the freezers in the middle of the store. When we see that, for the cost of two adults and two children to sit down to an all-you-can-eat pasta and salad at the Olive Garden, you can make a better version yourself and even pay up for better ingredients at the market. Best of all, the dish won’t be a glop of glue flown in from Ohio and “authentically” reheated in your town.

What this channel used to offer was a glimpse into the method of thinking of good chefs. By watching them work and listening to their thought processes you were learning to think like the chefs rather then mimic them. When you worked in your own kitchen, what you had picked up was a technique rather then a recipe. Not only has all this been lost, they have gone backwards; they now have food talking-heads with no comprehension of process looking for an easy way out of the chore of cooking.

I can’t wait till next time I am sick, maybe by then I will watch some pundit arguing from behind some set made to look like a news show that “cooking in pans is for dilettantes,” “real Americans cook in microwaves,” and “all the fat-cat foodocrats have to put their ears to the pulse of the heartland and give the people what they want,” all while some crawl goes along the bottom about how 75 more cases of mad cow have been discovered in chickens at the Tyson packaging plant.

best dish ever

Sister went to law school in Camden, New Jersey. On the day my dad and I helped her move out, we had lunch at The Fountain restaurant in the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia. To this day, the single greatest plate of food I have ever been served was the crab cakes at this lunch. Although I had already had my first meal at Trotter’s and was well on my way to pursuing fine dining wherever it was to be found, at this point it hadn’t occurred to me that I could be in for such a dish, in the middle of the afternoon in Philly.

 I am sure that surprise added to the memory but, whenever I am asked for my “all-time bests,” the crab cakes at The Fountain always top the list. Up to that point, all the crab cakes I had had were a made with a cracker-mayo combo, and ended up tasting more like fried crab salad. This one was just a showcase for crab meat; it was bound with the fish mousse and served in a lobster jus. The chef sautéed the cakes in clarified butter, crisping up the edges without too much browning and the entire dish was just about the sweetness of the lump meat from blue-claw crabs.

 Before then, I had pretty much given up on crab cakes. As it often goes, once I had had such a great example of the dish I was reinvigorated and started trying it all over the world again. Sadly, I was disappointed. Only twice since that day in Philly have I found chefs that are making this style cake as opposed to the mayo-cracker one, and both times I was let down. Crofton-on-Wells, in Chicago, has a crab cake bound in a shrimp mousse but there is too much yolk and, ultimately, it ends up tasting like a crab meat omelet.  The other one was served to me at Papillon in Denver. It was very close but was over-browned and dried out from its time in the sauté pan.

 

You never know what you will find when you aren’t looking. When in Philly, try the crab cakes. Who knew?

 

A Martini is a gin drink.

Screaming Orgasm, Sex On The Beach, Side Car, Sazerac, Salty Dog, Singapore Sling, Slippery Nipple, Stinger, Shirley Temple, Slow Comfortable Screw, Snakebite, Sombrero, Surfer on Acid, and Screwdriver. All of these are cocktails I can think of that start with the letter S. If I walk into a bar and order them by name I know what I will get. How did we get saddled with the Chocolate Martini?

In the old days, it was a bartender’s job to come up with the recipe and name it. Needless to say, we got some awesome cocktails with imaginative names. Recently, every time I walk into a bar I hear people ordering Apple, Chocolate, or a Raspberry-tinis. The original Martini was such a simple, classic drink that it became a Gibson if you put onions in it instead of olives or a twist. There was dry, in and out, rocks or up.

I am told the messing up of the fine tradition of naming a cocktail, and the pathetic use of Martini to describe any drink in an up glass, can be traced to and blamed on Hollywood. This may just be because I love a good advertising-screwing-up-America anecdote, but here is the urban legend I like best. In the original James Bond books, Bond drank a 50-50 gin and vodka Martini, somehow showing his British, Russian duality. However when the first film was to be released, Smirnoff, the American vodka company, paid United Artists to have Bond’s drink of choice change to the now-famous “vodka Martini,” shaken, not stirred.  As they’d hoped it would, the drink took off and every American gave up on the sanctity of tradition and, in order to sound cool, starting ordering vodka Martinis. Eventually, people began ordering Martinis and expecting them to be vodka drinks. From there it was an easy step to all up drinks being labeled Martinis because they came in a “Martini glass.”  Bars and restaurants started publishing “Martini menus” which included drinks like the Manhattan (which, being mainly a whiskey drink, probably predates the Martini by years, because gin only truly came into vogue during prohibition because of how easy it was to make in a bathtub).

Demand more from your bartenders. When they create a drink, encourage them to give it an original name, learn how they make it, and when you are at your next bar tell the bartender you want one. When he asks how it is made, tell him. Now he will know, and you may be encouraging the next Cosmo, or Kamikaze, or Rob Roy.

The Martini is a classic drink and a rite of passage. It is gin, some small part dry vermouth and, if you have enough tradition, maybe you’ll wash the ice with either bitters or Cointreau. Stir it in a tall metal canister with a long spoon, never shake, serve in a chilled up glass with a speared olive or twist, and love the creativity it inspires.

Be warned: all of my friends and family get belligerent when I drink gin, which I feel just ads to the fun, but your circle may not enjoy debate as much as mine.