Farming Portland - Local Food, Portland Sources

Smoked Chili Powder to Warm Up Winter

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 18:08:00 +0000

Winter is cold. But there are some things that can help make it better. Winter sports warm up your body. A nice fireplace warms your home. A cozy blanket for watching movies in the evening is very nice.

One of my favorite new things to warm up winter is smoked chili powder. It's easy to make and adds an interesting and delicious flavor layer to food. The chilies add heat; the smokiness reminds of summertime BBQ in shorts and t-shirts. A great way to warm your mind up this winter.

Smoked vs. Dried

Dried chili power is really good, but smoked is better. Not only is the flavor more interesting, but the color is richer too.

Smoked pepper powder has a richer color and flavor than simply dried. Clockwise from top: Dried cayenne, dried jalapeno, smoked cayenne, smoked jalapeno.

Some Helpful Hints On Smoking Chili Peppers

It's pretty straight forward, as you might have guessed. You smoke the chilies in a smoker until they are completely dried out. Here are a couple things to keep in mind.

Wear disposable latex gloves and don't touch anything once you start with working with the peppers. The oils are extremely spicy and will burn your eyes and nose. When you're done, just take the gloves off and put them directly into the garbage. If you decide to use your bare hands, you'll need to wash your hands several times to get all the oils off, and even that is not enough most times. It's just easier to use disposable gloves.
Cut the chilies up. Slice them cross wise. Your going to be grinding them anyway so maintaining their shape doesn't matter. Also, opening them up helps them dry faster and prevents moisture from getting trapped under the skin.
Grind them with a grinder that you don't use for anything else. Unless you want everything else to taste like chilies.
Grind them outside. When you open the grinder there will most likely be a little puff of chili dust. This stuff is strong. One time my family has had to evacuate the house coughing and gagging when a cloud of chili dust drifted through the living room from the kitchen. That was fun.
Use a dehydrator If you want to finish the chilies off or are looking for a less robust smoke flavor. Dehydrators are slower, but they can be handy.

Thai chilies coming out of the smoker.

What To Do With Chili Powder

There are really just three ways to use chili powder.

As an ingredient. The fresh smokiness and heat is much better than any store bought cayenne or chili powder.

As a topping. This is especially true if you make quick hot sauce with the chili powder. You can spoon some over anything. Especially tacos. It's outstanding and features the unique flavors much more prominently.

As a gift. Extra can be nice to share with friends.

Recipe for Quick Hot Sauce

Hot sauce is super easy to make. Search for Dried Chili Hot Sauce and you'll find tons of options. Here is how I've been doing it lately. I like a bit more herb flavors in mine. For a quicker and more rustic texture, I skip the extra blending and straining a lot of recipes call for.

Because we're dealing with chili powder, this will make a very small jar of thin sauce that you can keep on the counter. The longer it sits, the better it gets.

1 glass jar with a lid

2 tbsp. garlic powder

2 tbsp. smoked chili powder
2 tsp. salt

1 tsp dried oregano

Try to get the grind of all the ingredients the same to get the best consistency.

Add enough hot water to make a loose paste. This is really just re-hydrating the spices. Let it sit for about 10 minutes or so to get fully re-hydrated and warmed up.

1/4 cup white vinegar. More or less. The more you add the thinner the sauce, so add to your liking.

Cap and shake to mix. Use right away or let it sit for a few days on your counter. The flavors will meld over time and improve. Does not need to be refrigerated if you plan on using within a week.

Some fun options

Try using different vinegar. Cider vinegar brings some sweetness to the heat.

Add more herbs for a more complex flavor. Just try to keep the size of the particles similar.
Use a variety of chilies to get more flavors.

Use a mix of smoked and dried chili powder to cut back on the smokiness.

Add onion powder for a touch of earthiness.

Add sun dried tomato powder to add some body and fruitiness.

Dried Corne de Chevre chilies. These are very mild and sweet. They are great for mixing with hotter peppers to add complexity.

9 Surprise Ducks

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 23:50:00 +0000

Nine surprise ducks showed up on my porch last night. A neighbor went hunting and dropped them off unexpectedly. Wow was my wife surprised when she got home!

Well, when 9 ducks generously appear on your doorstep, there is nothing you can do but be thankful and get to pluckin. In case you find yourself in this situation, here is how I processed them.

One thing to note. I'd been told by a friend that it is best to let any game birds sit overnight in a cool/cold place. This allows the feathers to loosen up and makes the plucking easier. So, I left the ducks in the unheated garage overnight. Then I got up at the crack of dawn to get these guys done before work.

Supplies Needed:

A table outside
A sharp, thin knife
A brown paper bag for feathers
A bucket or something for waste parts
A bowl or something for keeping parts
A hand towel

Boneless Duck Breasts

Step 1: Get your bird on a table outside because it gets a little messy.

Step 2: The easiest way to process them is to do boneless breasts. There is not much other meat on a duck, besides the legs, but you can take those off afterward. To do breasts, just pull out all the feathers on the chest area. Grip it with your hand and pull. There's not much else to it. Try to get as much as you can. Be careful where the shot holes are. If you pull to hard you'll tear the skin in ways that make your job more difficult.

Step 3: Use very sharp knife to make a gentle incision in the skin along the breast bone. The weight of the blade should be enough. The skin is very thin and you don't want to cut into the meat by accident. Then, using two hands, wiggle your fingers under the skin and pull it apart to reveal the breast meat. Pull the skin apart until you can see the outside edge of the meat along the side of the rib cage.

Step 4: Using a very sharp and thin knife (I use a boning knife but a fillet knife will work well too), cut straight down along the breast bone. Then carefully trim the meat away from the rib cage. Trim the connective membrane at the edges to release the meat. If you've ever done boneless chicken breasts, then you'll see it's exactly the same process.

Optional Step 5: If you want the legs too, just pluck further down the body to expose the legs. After you remove the breast meat, then cut through the skin to the hip. Turn the carcass over and pull the leg gently back to dislocate the hip joint. Use your thin sharp knife to cut between the hip and thigh bone to separate the leg from the body.

That's how you get breasts and legs from a whole duck. It's pretty easy. The plucking takes the longest time. It's true that you don't get the two duck delicacies--the liver and the fatty skin. But it is quick and it gets 90% of the edible parts of the duck.

A Whole Duck

When you do boneless breasts it seems like there is a lot of the bird that goes to waste. So, if you want to a whole bird carcass, here is how I did it.

Step 1: Setup your bird. You're going to have a lot of feathers, so make sure you have your feather bag ready.

Step 2: Pluck the entire body of the bird. Do a better job than I did. Don't worry about the neck and head unless you really want to keep them for some reason.

Step 3: Remove the neck and head with a strong knife, kitchen scissors, or a cleaver. Then using your sharp, thin knife, gently cut open the abdominal cavity just below the rib cage. You DO NOT want to puncture the intestines, so don't go deep. When the cavity is open, slide one hand in along the inside of the rib cage. Gently loosen the guts with your fingers, then scoop everything out. If you want the liver, watch out for it. The heart will probably need to be pulled out separately. It is normally pretty high up in the body cavity and firmly attached.

When everything is done, just wash the parts you want to keep under cold water and vacuum seal them up. Make sure to wash away and very dark blood clots that might be left over. Your vacuum sealed duck can keep in the freezer for a long time.

That is how you process 9 ducks before work on a Tuesday!

Bucket 'o Ducks!

Wood-Fired Ham Stuffed with Apples and Herbs

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 15:00:00 +0000

One of the wonderful things about pigs is their legs. The back legs are especially wonderful. When you get a whole pig you get two wonderful hind legs that will be divided into either one or two wonderful hams each. The pig we got from A Little Hope Farm had two of these wonder hams for each leg. Contrary to what you may think, these hams are not all the same size. For whatever reason, the butcher decided to cut one side a bit shorter than the other, which is fine with me because sometimes it's wonderful to have a bigger ham and sometimes a smaller ham.

There are two basic kinds of ham. Cured ham is what you normally find at the store in the deli. It looks pink and slices very nicely for sandwiches and omelets. Curing hams is not hard to do, it just takes time, but it is not what I want to talk about today.

Fresh ham is exactly the same as a cured ham, but not cured. Like a beef roast you can do almost anything you want with a fresh ham. For my purposes, I needed a big chunk of meat that could feed up to ten adults for a dinner party. The largest ham I had in the freezer was an 8.5 lbs. with the bone in. After thinking about it for a while, I turned to Jane Gigson's classic, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. She has a whole chapter on fresh ham recipes. Actually, in true French style, there are very few recipes but a lot of variations. Page 221 has a fresh ham variation for pork Normandy that involves apple cider glaze. This was inspirational.

To begin, bone the leg and butterfly the ham. Because hams taper from the hip to the knee you have to butterfly the leg in such a way that the leg opens up and becomes a more rectangular shape. This will make it easier to roll the roast back together.

Butterfly the leg and fill it with diced granny smith apples, fresh sage, salt, pepper, thyme, and some bay leaves.

Roll the whole thing and tied it. This makes for a very nice pork roast.

However, I wasn't done.

I knew that I'd be roasting this thing over a wood fire in the smoker. My intention was not to do a smoked ham, but smoke would be involved and I didn't what the whole thing to turn black. So I took some of the skin that the butcher had packaged and wrapped the ham in its own skin.

The skin is irregularly shaped and very thick with fat. If you try this technique, you may need to square the piece then shave down the fat until you have about a quarter inch remaining on the skin. If you do this, try to keep the extra fat in nice thin sheets that you can freeze and reuse for other things (like draping it over lean beef roasts to keep them moist while they cook).

Having the ham wrapped in a layer of fatty skin did two things. First it protected the outside of the ham from becoming black with smoke. The skin did shrink a little bit, but I had it tied on pretty good so it stayed almost completely in place throughout the whole cooking. I was surprised to see that the skin also became a kind of hard shell around the roast. This was good as it protected the meat from flare-ups and over smoking. The second big benefit was that the fat basted the meat the entire time it was cooking. This prevented the meat from drying out while it was cooking and it also reinforced the nice porky flavor of the meat.

My original plan was to remove the skin for the last 30 minutes of cooking to allow the meat to brown a bit, but that was not possible because the skin had hardened around the roast like a protective case. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures when it was done.

To go alongside the roast, I wanted something other than a sauce. In keeping with my island flavors theme for the dinner, I made an apple-pomegranate chutney. Together this made for a delicious, local and seasonal main course.

So if you find yourself with a whole pig and are wondering what to do, try doing a fresh ham roast with apples and herbs. If you wrap it in the skin and cook it over a wood fire, even better.

Terrine of Pork with Blueberries and Hazelnuts

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 17:00:00 +0000

When you get a whole pig sometimes there are parts that you might not have chosen to buy otherwise. The head is one of these. So are the kidneys and the other bits of offal. Usually we don't get the guts an animal when we shop at the store. With the pig we just bought, I got the liver and the heart. Normally I would not buy these at the store, but figuring out what to do with them was not too hard. Because if you have liver, then make pate!

Technically I'm not sure if what I'm going to show you is a "pate" or a "terrine". The dish you use to cook it in is definitely called a terrine, but the thing I'm including a recipe for might be either. When I use the word pate people seem to know better what I'm talking about, although I have a feeling that technically it is a not a "pate".

Nonetheless, if you have never made a pate, it is actually really simple. In the same way that a hamburger is just a flat meatball and a meatball is just a small meatloaf, a pate is just another kind of meatloaf. It’s the "Cinderella meatloaf" as Michael Ruhlman calls it in Charcuterie. If you understand that then the formula is pretty simple: grind up your meats add some flavors put them in a loaf pan and bake it long and slow. Slice and eat.

Of course, being a French food, most pates have a couple extra steps (unless you make a "country style" terrine, then it is really just the same as a meatloaf).

For this recipe I wanted to do something a little bit fancier than "country style". It was for our annual Solstice dinner which is a formal sit down dinner party, and I wanted to put some extra effort into it. In order to learn about the subject I turned to my favorite cook book, Glorious French Food by James Peterson. I found chapter 5 on country style pork pate to be super helpful. There is not a recipe for a fine pork pate in this chapter, but if you use the info from the introductory essay, then take into consideration the cooking instructions from the country style recipe and the mixing instructions from the duck pate recipe, you can create your own recipe for pork pate.

Terrine of Pork with Blueberries and Hazelnuts

There are 3 parts to this recipe--the fine forcemeat, the coarse forcemeat, and the garniture.

The Fine Forcemeat
The fine forcemeat is the paste that holds the whole thing together. It is also the bulk of the pate itself. If you've ever eaten Liverwurst, that is 100% fine forcemeat. I didn't want mine to taste like Liverwurst, but you get the idea for what the texture is like. After adjustments, the recipe I was using as guide called for about 8 oz. of liver meat. I had a full 2 lbs. liver so I ended up making 2.5 batches which was way more pate than I was planning on because, honestly, you can only eat so much pate before you start vomiting at the thought of one more smushy bite of it.

The heart and liver of a pig. These make for great pate.

To begin I trimmed and pureed the liver in the Cuisinart. I wanted to keep it simple so I only used fresh crushed pepper and clove. Upon retrospect, a little nutmeg would have been good too. Also, I though the liver would be saltier than it was, so some salt might have been a good idea too. Two eggs and some chunks of back fat went in also. All of this I pureed in the Cuisinart. Then the recipe called for a little bit of milk-soaked bread to be folded in to lighten the paste.

The Coarse Forcemeat
When you slice into a terrine and see the cross section, many times you see large chunks of meat and other things. The largest of these is called the "garniture" but the middle sized stuff is the "coarse forcemeat". The coarse forcemeat is there to add texture and flavor. Usually it's some kind of related meat that may have been marinated to add some depth and complexity.

For the coarse forcemeat in my pate, I used the heart and some strips of shoulder meat. You may be asking why I didn't just include the heart in the fine forcemeat and be done with that slimy old thing. Well, the heart meat is chewier and leaner than most meats so I knew it would work well for texture. The thing I didn't want was big chunks of rubbery grossness in there so I carefully minced it very fine then marinated it in sherry overnight. I also minced some strips of shoulder meat and marinated them in Madeira overnight. I then added these in layers into the pate as I filled the terrine.

The Garniture
Garniture is the fun part of the pate. Its like the ornaments on the Christmas tree. It is the crunchy parts and the sweet parts and the eye-catching bits that make the pate seem exotic. The garniture plays a couple different roles--it not only has to taste good but it really is what makes the pate look good also. Without it, the thing would just be a big block of pureed meat. With it, the pate becomes colorful and intriguing.

For my garniture I shelled, chopped and roasted some hazelnuts. In one loaf I added dried blueberries and in the other I added dried cherries. The hazelnuts and blueberries (especially) were important flavors for me because I was trying to feature flavors from Sauvie Island. Every summer we come here to pick berries with the kids and buy groceries at the farms, including local nuts. Hazelnuts and blueberries both grow on the island (although I'm not certain about cherries). The garniture gets coarsely chopped and layered in with the course forcemeat.

Putting it together

The terrine wrapped in bacon and ready for the oven.

The goal is to have eye catching colors and a variety of sumptuous flavors throughout the pate, so it looks good and each bite has its own distinction. This is done by putting in some of one ingredient then layering more of another on top of that, then adding more of the other on top of that and repeating to process until all the terrine is full. There are two ways to wrap the terrine--either with leaf fat or with bacon. I don't know enough about leaf fat, so I used bacon. When it's ready, it goes in a 320 oven, covered in tinfoil and sitting in a bain-marie for a few hours until it's cooked through. Although the country style terrine recipe called for an internal temperature of 145, I cooked it to 165 because I kept getting red juices when I poked it. 170 is medium for pork, according to the Professional Chef.

In the end it turned out to be a pretty good pate. I don't do pates often so I'm sure there are ways I can refine this. But If you find yourself with a whole pig and all the liver that comes with it, pate is a great way to go.

Terrine of Pork with Dried Cherries and Hazelnuts

Another Whole Pig (in 52 pieces)

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 17:10:00 +0000

Image from http://upperstatestreet.org/visit/?p=657

We gotz a whole pig. This is our third pig and the second one we've bought from A Little Hope Farm.

When I tell people that we got a pig a lot of times they will look at me like I'm crazy. When we talk about it, they often will say that they could never get a whole pig because they wouldn't know what to do with it! But I think that if they understood that a whole pig is not really that hard to manage and there are plenty of easy things you can do with it, then maybe they would be more willing to give it a try.

As my new blog project, I'm going to blog about all the great things you can do with a whole pig. The recipes and mysteries of using a whole animal will be what I write about.

Four Requirements to Pig

Let's start with what is required for getting and storing a whole pig.

First, you must have a freezer large enough to hold all of it. Our pig takes up almost all the space in an upright freezer. That's about 13 cubic feet of space. If you have a chest freezer, make sure it's big enough, otherwise you'll be overflowing into your refrigerator and cooking up some big meals right away!

Second, you also must have some willingness to explore the magical world of pork cookery. If you don't have the time or the interest, then getting a whole animal probably isn't for you. There will definitely be some parts that you need to figure out what to do with.

Third, you'll need about a year's worth of time. It takes our family about a year to eat a whole pig. We don't eat pork every week and some of the larger cuts sit for a long time waiting for an occasion to use them.

The fourth requirement is the willingness to spend the money. By the time the pig arrives at your freezer, it could cost anywhere between $500 and $900, depending on the size. Remember, you're buying a big supply of meat. Usually these we'd spend just as much throughout the year, but in smaller chunks as we buy little pieces one at a time. Not so with a large animal.You pay for it all up front. But, hopefully, our monthly food bill will be that much less going forward.

For most people a good place to start is with a half an animal. Half gives you all the variety of cuts but with less cost and time and space required. Then, when you've cooked the last chop of your side of pork, you'll be ready to go on to the whole beast.

Beyond the requirements, I like getting a whole animal because it gives me a lot to work with. I like to cook, so 235 lbs of pork is a freezer full of fun for me. Also, it keeps money in the local economy, we get a better quality product, have more insight and input on my food supply, support entrepreneurship, appreciate variety, and generally be a little more intentional about what my family eats. Also getting a locally grown whole animal is a great way to NOT support industrialized meat. Those are my reasons, at least.

Here is my pig, happily eating dirt with her sisters. A Little Hope Farm hand mixes the grains and meals that the pigs eat, ensuring a healthy, hormone free diet.

The Pig in My Freezer

There is a 235 lbs. (hanging weight) Berkshire-cross sow in my freezer. It’s not a full carcass. It's cut and ground and wrapped into 52 neat packages. It's waiting for the pot and the grill and the oven and the smoker and the plate. It's got almost all the parts--the chops and the roasts and the sides and the skin and the heart and the liver and the hams and the trotters. It's missing some pieces that I didn't want to use again--no head and no offal (except the heart and liver). I tried the head before. Once was enough.

A half a pig with most of the pieces in their places. Two hams and the sides kept whole are like the English style.

This pig will have some challenges. Things are little different than pigs in the past. Mostly it’s the cuts that have changed. Normally I like the American style cuts. They lend themselves to pig pieces that go long and slow on the smoker. But this time we've got something closer to an English style cut, which means things will be a little bit different. The big shoulder roasts are cut into "country style ribs". The spareribs are not separated from the belly. We got four smaller hams rather than 2 big ones. I didn't talk directly to the butcher this time, so some of the cuts were different than I expected. That's okay. I'll figure it out and it will still be delicious.

Some Notes on Buying a Whole Animal

If you are thinking about buying a whole animal, here are some extra notes.

English cuts (top),
American cuts (middle)
and French cuts (bottom).
From Larousse Gastronomique

Buying a whole animal certainly has some parts that require a little more thought than others. But most of these are pretty easy to solve. For instance, most people have no idea how to make bacon out of the belly. Really bacon is actually pretty simple to do. However, if you're just not into it, most butchers offer to make the bacon for you. Same with hams and other smoked or cured meats.

If you get a whole animal from a farm, it's a good idea to take a few minutes to learn the basics about the cuts. They’re not complicated and it will help you understand better what you are getting. All butchers have a "standard" family style cut, but each one does it a bit different. So if you want something specific, its best to tell the butcher directly.

"Hanging weight" is the total weight of the animal after it has been slaughtered but before it is processed. This is the whole carcass without the guts. Imaging sides hanging in a meat locker. The price of the meat after it has been chopped up into parts (like at the store) is called the "cut weight".

When you buy whole animals from a farm, they normally charge you based on the hanging weight. Normally a pig carcass hangs for just a few days. Beef hangs longer, and the longer it hangs the more expensive it becomes. This is what "naturally aged" or "dry aged" means. Aging the meat is good because it allows some of the water to evaporate out of the meat and condenses the flavor. Also, some of the edges will be trimmed off in the butchering process. So the actual pounds of meat you take home will be less than the hanging weight which makes your effective price per pound higher.

The cost that is a shocker is usually the "cut and wrap" fee. This is the fee the butcher charges to actually cut up and wrap the meat. It can be expensive ($0.50 per pound) , but its necessary and well wrapped meat will last a long time in the freezer.

Grilled Elk to Start the Season

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:19:00 +0000

There's no better way to kick off the grilling season than with a nice piece of elk.

A co-worker of mine regularly gets stocked up with game meat from family in Montana. Knowing that I'd never eaten elk, he generously gave me a big chunk.

If you are going to eat red meat, elk is better for you than beef. It is much leaner, has more minerals, and less calories. Also, the elk meat I got was wild caught and butchered by hand so it did not participate in the industrial food system at all.

Going into it, I had no idea what would come out the other side. I'd never eaten elk before. I anticipated something like venison. The guy at the wine shop said it was something like lamb. My co-worker warned me to be careful cooking it because it was very very lean. My wife was fearful that it would be too gamey. My only consolation was that there's a pizza shop right around the corner from my house.

To prepare the mystery elk I went for very simple, preferring simple true flavors over elaborate layers. I wanted to do as much as possible on the grill as possible. I focused on using seasonal vegetables from the farmer's market. I went with a mesquite wood fire because it seemed to fit the ingredients. Elk is a wild animal, it deserves a real wood fire.

Recipe
Elk meat

Purple and yellow heirloom carrots

New onions

Asparagus

Olive Oil, fresh thyme, sea salt, black pepper.

1. Coarsely crack the black pepper with a mortar and pestle.

2. Season the meat with fresh sea salt and the cracked black pepper.

3. Grill the meat over a mesquite wood fire to medium.

4. Rub with olive oil, then grill the onions and asparagus.

5. Roast the carrots in the oven with some olive oil and fresh thyme.

Maybe it was the combination of salt, pepper and smoke, but the meat had none of the gamey flavor that some people had warned me about. It also wasn't lamb-y either. In fact, it wasn't like any type of meat I could think of. It tasted sort of like what I imagine brined beef would taste like. In any case, it was delicious and we'll definitely be eating more elk in the future.

Is Lab Meat Local?

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:41:00 +0000

This is a little bit different than what I normally write about, but I thought I'd stretch out.

I found this article a while ago and it got me thinking.

In Vitro Meat: Will 'Frankenfood' Save The Planet Or Just Gross Out Consumers?

There are lots of reasons not to eat meat. Some people object to the inhumane treatment of the animals. Some people want to avoid the higher cancer rates associated with red meat intake. Some people don't want to support the environmentally taxing production methods.

But what if all that was taken away? What if no animals were killed, the meat was actually filled with beneficial nutrients, and the environmental impact was basically eliminated? Sounds too good to be true? Well, not if you are willing to buy your meat from a meat lab.

How many vegetarians would open up to a nice lab-burger?

In some ways this reminds me of things like veggie-sausage and soy nuggets. All those vegetarian products designed to look and taste like meat products. They never really do taste like the real thing, but people still eat them because they contain almost none of the negative associations that so many people object to. This could be a whole new category of food. Cruelty-free meat. Almost like cubic zirconium--the cruelty free diamond. You could choose from veggie-dogs, lab-dogs, and hot dogs. Restaurants could have a "No Kill" option on their menu, similar to the vegetarian options sometimes given. Or they might call it something more positive like "Heart Healthy Meats"--the marketing departments will find a good name for it. Or it will just slip in as a supporting ingredient and we'll never even realize it.

Think of all the beer you've drank lately. All the brewer's yeast required for that beer was grown in a lab. And the hops were probably designed in a lab too. Same with yeast and flour that was used to make the bread for the sandwich you might be eating for lunch today. Laboratory created.

What if you had a bowl of lentil soup and the chicken stock used as the broth for the soup was made from laboratory chicken meat? Could you tell the difference? Probably not. Would you care? Would you prefer it?

Either way, it doesn't surprise me that this is coming along. I have no doubt it will make it onto the shelves in the US (with no labels required) sooner or later. We already eat so many things that are dependent on laboratory creations.

Would laboratory meat be the antithesis of local food? What if it was meat cultivated in a local lab from indigenous species? It would certainly be a betrayal of the aesthetics of the local food movement, but possibly it could meet the principals of the local food movement better than most small farms today growing imported breeds of cows.

Oregon Sea Salt Batch 4

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:09:00 +0000

I get home from work to find a snotty nosed toddler and a tired wife. This on-again, off-again cold season just won't quit. It's wearing us out. For a while the baby is fine, then green snakes of snot start to make their way out of his nose. Sick toddlers are whiny toddlers, all day. Kim needs a break.

We decide to get out of the house for a hour and get dinner. Take a breath. Have a drink. Change the scenery. We go to a small place down the street with an easy kids menu and good appetizers. After corralling the kid for fifteen minutes, they bring the food. It's good, but just a little bland. I grab for the salt shaker and sprinkle. What I get is the sharp tang of something that tastes mechanically-separated. At least the change of scenery is nice.

The next day some friends invite us over for dinner. It's been a long week and we're glad to see them. The kids play. The adults have a glass of wine. We're talking about the curiosities of our kids and the confusions of parenthood. We're talking about new music coming into town. We're talking about living our lives. We're sharing a table together. We're enjoying the evening. The meal is responsible. The produce is as local as you can get this time of year. Even the wine comes from a local vineyard. The table salt, however, comes from anywhere but here and it has the tangy, mechanically-separated, iodine enriched taste. It's salt designed to meet strict standards for crystal size and a consistent pour. It's industrialize salt. It's the standard on tables across the country. It's something I only notice because I've become preoccupied with salt. But these are not the thing to talk about at dinner. We're were not invited over to talk critically about the table salt. We are there to enjoy the evening, with our families, and share a table. So, that's what we do.

"Table fellowship" is what Michael Pollan calls it. Our time with friends, our connections around the table, the bonds we make eating together are more important that the moral hazards we create for ourselves through our judgments about the world. When given a choice, take the responsible route. When there isn't a choice that meets your standards, enjoy the time you have and the connection of a shared meal with the people you are enjoying it with. In this line of thinking, a shared meal has deep roots and is part of our common human inheritance. The importance of maintaining these ties and participating in the ritual, regardless of the food selection, is the stronger moral imperative.

It's late fall and we are spending a weekend at the beach with friends. The weather is typical Oregon coast weather--raining, windy, cold. The house we rented holds several families. Everyone has kids. The plan for the weekend is to get away from the city, to enjoy each others' company, to let the kids run wild (the couch is destroyed and converted into a pillow pit), and to cook meals together.

In the back of my car is the empty blue jug. We're out of salt again which means I need to go to the ocean. I bring this up and one brave volunteer comes along. We drive the 200 yards to the beach simply to save the work of carrying the full jug back.

Standing on the beach, the scene could hardly be worse. The ocean is rough and gray. The rain is coming down sideways. We're standing in the cold sand, pants rolled up, staring at the water. This sucks, we joke. Let's get it over with. I strip down to t-shirt and pants and wade out. The water is painfully cold. My feet go numb within an minute. The waves roll in and splash up my body while I try to keep the jug submerged so it can fill. My hands are turning blue. My hair is dripping with rain. When the jug is full, I tighten the cap and carry it back to the beach.

The weight is magnified by the awkward shape of the jug so we take turns carrying it back over the sand dune and down the path to the car. We laugh about how one 60 lbs jug of water takes both of us to carry. We complain about the wind and rain. We hurry as fast as we can back to the car.

Is this it? my friend asks. Yes, I say, now I just have to get it home and boil it down. I thought there would be more to it, he says, it's actually pretty cool--thanks for letting me come a long. Thanks for helping, I say.

We get back to the house. The wood burning stove is hot and the whole house is warm. Did you get what you needed? my wife asks. Yeah, i did, I say. The water is in the back of the car.

The warmth of the house is wonderful. I'm wet and salty and feel completely refreshed. I'll take this little scoop of the ocean home and reduce it down. It will make our food better. It will provide the sodium our cells need, from the most primal of sources. When it is gone, I will go back to the ocean to fill my jug again.

"A cloudy morning, I took 5 men and set out to the Sea to find the nearest place & make a way to prevent our men getting lost and find a place to make salt" wrote William Clark on December 8, 1805 when he set up a salt works on the Oregon coast at the place we now call Seaside. Clark knew the importance of salt. It not only seasoned their food, but also allowed them to preserve the meat for their long expedition across the country. Without salt cured meats, their long trip would not have been possible. In the end, Clark's salt works on the beach made 28 gallons of salt. That salt made it possible for them to make the long journey home. The salt was "excellent, fine, strong & white", said Clark.

We travel down to my mom's house and the problem comes up again. The little shaker is on the table. I want to enjoy the meal and not think about how many miles that little vial of salt has traveled. How much processing went into it. How metallic the taste will be. So I try not to. The meal is good. And the company is nice. But awareness brings its own conflicts.

The next day we are eating at home. My toddler son is eating noodles and occasionally feeding the dog noodles. My daughter is looking sideways at the strips of porterhouse steak on her plate and mostly eating everything else. We laugh about how much she used to like t-bone steak, when it was the only kind of meat she could name. This night we're having steak from cows raised on Mt. Hood and bought from a friend who had two cows slaughtered. My wife has made a recipe out of Mark Bitterman's Salted. It's Porterhouse au Sel et Proivre. We have roasted beets, edamame, and rice on the side. A glass of wine too. The black pepper is freshly crushed. The salt is excellent.

Provider Profile: Jacobsen's Oregon Sea Salt

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:13:00 +0000

Some men reach a point in their life when they realize happiness is something you have to make for yourself. It doesn't come in a box. It isn't something milled and standardized. It's about making every bite something to remember. It's about throwing away the little glass bottles and using your hands to grab what you need. It's about sharing sustenance with friends and loved ones. It's about pulling rock from the ocean because that is what you love to do. It makes your life better. It makes your loved ones' lives better. In fact, everyone who is touched by it is better off.

Benjamin Jacobsen was certainly not an unhappy man. Like almost everyone else in the modern world, he thought life was just fine. That little shaker on the table was good enough. Silver topped. Iodine enriched. A smooth and consistent pour. Maybe his wife did not know the passion she would unleash that fateful night when she finally got Benjamin Jacobsen to try Sel Gris with his dinner. Preposterous! thought Benjamin Jacobsen. $7 for a tiny thing of salt. Ridiculous! Then he took one bite.

"It's so easily overlooked, but it makes all the difference in the world."

The difference between table salt and Sel Gris is important and recognizable. That night became a turning point in his life. It sparked a passion that would eventually become more than just an interest or a curiosity; it would become his work.

At first, he would seek out the fine salts. Handmade salts. Delicious exotic crystals. The passion was started. He started carrying a little jar of salt in his suitcase on business trips. He started bringing his own salt to restaurants.

Then he began making his own salt.

Soon he was taking the ocean with him. Canoeing with friends he'd grab a gallon of water to bring home. A beautiful day at the beach with his wife, and a gallon to bring home. At a wedding party in La Paz, Mexico, and Benjamin Jacobsen is carrying a slice of the Sea of Cortez into the kitchen.

"It was amazing," says Benjamin of the salt he made in La Paz. "It really does have a different taste. It's so much better than what you get normally."

Mexico
The San Juan Islands
10 locations on the Washington coast.
25 locations on the Oregon Coast.
it goes on...

Today, Benjamin Jacobsen is pulling rocks from the ocean. He is sharing with friends. He is making every bite better. 1000 gallons a week.

"I want to make the best salts in North America, and we're well on our way to doing that."

Don't let the little bag fool you. This is a salt you grab with your hands. Crunch it in your mouth. Taste a slice of the ocean, direct from Oregon and Jacobsen Salt.

Available in the spices area at New Seasons, among other places around Portland.

Survey Results: Local Food In Your Life

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:20:00 +0000

PLEASE NOTE: If you'd like to be a part of the next Farming Portland food survey, sign up! Even if I emailed you last time, I will need you to submit your email so I can have a valid list.

A couple weeks ago I published a local food survey. I was curious to find out how much people spend, where they shop, and what their impressions are. There were 124 responses from people all over the country. The survey even went international with one response from Holland!

A big Thank You to everyone who completed the survey. The results are interesting and have a couple surprises too.

Some General Observations
Labeling needs to be clear and understandable. Sustainable food especially has to address this. Most people have little idea where their food comes from and how it was produced. When we think of the problems with over-fishing, this should be a top priority for food manufacturers.

Price is a problem. I've often remarked that it is a mistake to position "local" food as a premium product because it limits the growth of the local food economy. The survey results seem to support that. Price is a strong factor when people shop. People are only willing and able to spend so much (around $150 per week). If the prices at the store are too high for local, sustainable, and/or organic food, then most people choose not to buy those things. If local is going to be everyday, it has to have everyday prices. Same with organic and sustainable foods.

Shopping
Food spending at $100-$150 per week remains consistent regardless of the type of store people shop at. What does change is the number of people involved. 2 person households skew toward premium grocery stores while 4 person households skew toward standard grocery stores. To me, this means cost is a stronger factor.

Cooking

2 person and 4 person households in the survey ranked pretty similar when it came to their cooking styles. 78% of two person and 74% of 4 person households were likely to cook from scratch several times a week or practically every day. This is interesting because it shows that the business of family life--kids, school, etc.--does not seem to be a hindrance to cooking from scratch.

72% of 2 person households reported that they enjoyed cooking while 39% also indicated that they had busy lives. While 4 person households also reported that they enjoy cooking (62%), the same percentage were also more likely to point out that their lives are busy and they need quick and easy meals.

Shopping Habits

What do people look for when they are shopping?

81% local

79% organic

69% seasonal

64% fresh

63% ripeness

56% sustainable

37% low sugar

9% fat free

Where do people shop for their food?

Big Box Stores -- 63% never, 17% only for something special, 6% regarded it as standard

Discount Grocery -- 67% never, 6% standard

Normal Grocery Stores -- 51% standard, 12% never

Premium Grocery -- 40% standard, 27% when they can, 23% for special items only

Specialty Stores -- 42% for special items, 24% never, 19% when they can, 6% said this was their standard

Farmers' Markets -- 61% when they can, 15% standard, 8% never

Clubs/CSA - 57% never, 13% standard, 12% not available

Stands and Carts -- 43% never, 37% when they can, 4% standard

Organic Food

Most people appreciate organic food, but price and people's understanding of what organic really means are obstacles for this group.

71% had a positive disposition toward organic food.

50% were concerned about price.

7% expressed confusion or concern about what "organic" means and the certification process.

Organic food gets a bigger backlash than I had predicted. 7% were either confused about what "organic" means or openly complained about the certification process.

"I think the certification process is a sham."

"the lowered organic standards now in effect concern me".

"The term can be misleading. Many uncertified farms are offering better quality food than organic stuff you can get in a huge store. Practices are what counts."

"I don't think the certification is the last, or only word though."

"It is good but labeling can be misleading; organic is not always best"

"tough to know exactly what "organic" means - but it's better than processed"

"I'd like to know what food is truly organic and what just passes the checklist and can label it 'organic'."

Also, organic got the biggest ding for being overpriced. 50% of respondents remarked that the price of organic food as an issue. Are producers price gouging for items labeled "organic"? It's possible and people are noticing.

"I would eat more if it wasn't so expensive."

"The cost of organic stands in my way. I am the only income, so I have to be careful with my budget. If I could afford it, I would everything organic."

"Expensive at times"

"We eat it all the time, but it bothers me that it costs so much more. We still pay though."

"it's expensive but worth it."

Sustainably Produced Food

This food label seems important, but not well understood or identified.

72% had a positive dispostion toward sustainable food

27% expressed concern about the price of sustainably produced food

12% expressed confusion over sustainable food, especially identification and labeling.

Surprisingly, 1% more people had a positive disposition toward sustainable food than organic food. However, 12% also had trouble understanding and/or identifying sustainable food at the grocery store.

"Right now it feels like just a trendy catch phrase."

"unsure how to know/find"

"It's hard to find"

"Many products don't easily show on their packaging how they are produced. If it were easier to tell that thing were sustainably produced, I'd be more likely to buy that product."

"Without set standards it is hard to verify it's truly sustainability"

"I don't know what to look for."

"Don't know if the food is sustainable."

"I may already buy sustainably produced food, but I am not sure. I wish there was a label for that."

"not quite sure how to know it since I shop at Fred Meyer"

"no label info that I know of."

"Another thing I just don't know how to find the information on and would love to know more."

Local Food

Variety and availability were an issue for local food eaters. Like "sustainable" food, price was an issue for some, but not to the same extent as organic food.

85% had a positive disposition toward local food.

25% expressed difficulties finding local food.

27% said price was an issue.

15% said there was not enough variety

"Very short growing season"
"I'm really big on bananas, avocados and mangos...hard "
"Not always easy to achieve "
"I would love to eat local but I don't know where to get it"
"seasonal issues....in winter"
"no convient locations"
"I would like to try to eat more locally, but I tend to eat foods that are in season year round, and I want what I want."
"Not all nutritional needs can be filled local year round, thus seasonal."
"I would not limit myself to only local due to food preferences (eg. oranges, bananas, etc.)"
"Life just wouldn't be the same without lemons, mangoes and bananas."
"I'd get it if I they had local farmers markets (that are open year round) by my home or if I could easily go to Sauvie's Island more."
"We've had fresh, local food delivered to our house two different times. Once was great, and once they shut down and kept all of our money. I'm leery of doing that again."
"Accessibility is an issue. I need it in my store or at my door."

Demographics

75% of respondents were from Oregon.

7% were from California.

The remaining 18% were from 11 other states and Holland (one response).

13% of responses were from households with only one person.

29% were from two person households.

23% were from three person households.

27% were from four person households.

5% were from five person households.

3% were from households with six or more people.

25% spend less than $100 per week on food.

42% spend $100 to $150 per week.

17% spend $150 to $200 per week.

12% spend $200 to $250 per week.

4% spend $250 or more on food every week.

68% of respondents said they enjoy cooking.

50% of respondents said their life was busy and they needed quick and easy meals.

9% said someone else cooks for them

9% of respondents said they don't like to cook.

46% cook from scratch practically everyday

28% cook from scratch a few times a week

19% cook from scratch when they have time on the weekend

2% said they cook from scratch only for special occasions.

5% said they could not remember the last time they cooked from scratch.

16% use coupons all the time. 57% rarely. 27% never.

85% had never participated in a food challenge.

78% of respondents look online for cooking ideas

61% of respondents collect cookbooks

48% of respondents talk to their friends about cooking ideas.

23% of respondents have a cooking app for ideas

3% of respondents belong to a cooking club

The Cheese Steak: Eating Local in Philadelphia

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:44:00 +0000

Don't forget to take the Local Food in Your Life survey. Results posted at the end of the month.

Last week I spent 24 hours in Philadelphia. I've been unsure what to say about this experience. On one hand, you have all the historical things. Philadelphia is truly the birth place of our country. The First Continental Congress. The Declaration of Independence. The home town of Benjamin Franklin. George Washington had a house here. In 1776, Philadelphia became the birth place of freedom and the American revolution.

Independence Hall

Not only is it the birth place of freedom, it is also the birth place of the maximum security prison. In 1829--just 53 years after the cause of freedom and liberty was struck--construction was started on Eastern State Penitentiary. This building would become the model for more than 300 subsequent penitentiaries around the world. Ironically, the architect of the prison conceived of his vision for the prison while having dinner at Benjamin Franklin's house.

Guard tower outside cell block one.

Cell Block One. Originally there were no doors.

The accommodations

There really is a statue of Rocky, and the "Rocky Steps" leading up to Philadelphia Art Museum are a tourist attraction unto themselves. The statue of Rocky seemed silly to me at first, but after spending a day in Philly, it started to have a meaning. I get the sense that this is a city that needed a modern hero. There are so many statues of dead people who did amazing things in Philly a long time ago. It is a city living in the shadow of itself. It's an interesting juxtaposition to think of the modern hero Rocky in comparison to historical heavy weights Franklin and Washington. One city--how times have changed.

The cheese steak is as much the local food as Rocky is the local hero.

This is the train-wreck of a cheese steak I got at the airport.

I ate four cheese steaks in my time in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, none of them were from Geno's or Pat's. Jim's on South street had a line around the block in the rain, so I decided to pass. The cheese steak I got from George's in Reading Terminal was undoubtedly the best of the ones I did get. But, they were all generally the same:

French roll
Shaved beef
Melted Cheese (either american, provolone or "sauce")
Onions and peppers are always optional

If you like a little gastronomy with your history, there is one place definitely worth checking out. The City Tavern is the tavern that the founding fathers hung out in. Now restored, they offer a colonial style menu, but more importantly they have Ales of the Revolution (from Yards Brewing who makes a mighty good IPA). You can drink the beers that founded this country!

George Washington's Tavern Porter. Based on a recipe on file in the Rare Manuscripts Room of the NY Public Library. Although it's labeled a Porter, seemed more like a CDA.

Thomas Jefferson's 1774 Tavern Ale. Jefferson's original recipe. Apparently he was a home brewer. This one seemed more like a smooth american style amber. A bit of hops, some spruce flavors, with a clean finish.

Poor Richard's Tavern Spruce. Franklin's recipe actually written when he was in Paris. Very smooth, almost like a cream ale. No hoppiness at all. Vanilla and a hit of molasses.

Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Ale. A light ale that I assume has some connection to Hamilton. Very light in color but hoppy--almost like a fresh hop ale. I thought there was a hit of walnut flavors in there somehow.

If you have 24 hours in Philadelphia, here are some things to do:

View 24 Hours in Philly in a larger map

6 Ways to Make Valentine's Day Local

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:59:00 +0000

Don't forget to take the Local Food in Your Life survey. Results posted at the end of the month.

Photo by Box Me Up and Ship Me Out

It starts off as a cliche: I'm standing in the aisle at the grocery store, looking at a wall of imported foods. I'm leaning over the case at the jewelry store, gazing at sparkly things from around the world. I'm walking between the rows of flowers harvested thousands of miles away and flown in.

Everywhere we look, we're surrounded by wonderful things collected from around the world and transported directly into our neighborhoods. Sometimes we don't even think about how many things and ingredients and components from other lands are included in our everyday life. This valentine's day, I'm taking a moment to think about my buying choices, and trying to find a way to support my local economy by buying local. Here are six ways you can make a difference and substitute a local item for something imported.

1. Fruity Drinks
Eating out is maybe the most common way of celebrating Valentine's day with the one we love. Those cocktails are filled with tropical fruits and liquors brought in from far away places.

Fruity Drink photo by Miss Peach

Local alternative: Rogue beer. The Chateau Rogue label of Rogue Brewery is 100% local ingredients and a perfect substitute for imported mixed fruity drinks. Rogue pub in the Pearl has a good supply.

2. Flowers
Everyone gives flowers on Valentine's day. Their bright colors light up any room. It's too bad they are cut by impoverished child workers, flown around the hemisphere in a day, and trucked across the land to get to the store in time.

Local alternative. Red Kale. This colorful and hearty winter green is not only beautiful but edible. Available wherever local veggies are sold.

3. Chocolates
These sweet morsels are the classic gift to give to your sweety. Unfortunately there is nothing local about the cacao and sugar needed to make these.

Local alternative: Six cleaned trout. Locally and sustainably caught trout can be a great alternative to foreign mass-produced candy. Ask Flying Fish Company what they have in stock.

Photo by Cobalt_grrl

4. Jewelry
Although it is very common to make your partner's eyes shine with precious gems, jewelry is nearly always trucked in from somewhere far away where it was probably extracted from the ravaged ground of a destroyed ecosystem.

Local alternative: Raw oysters. These little gems always say "I love you" and their legendary aphrodisiac qualities can give a little boost to the second half of your Valentine's day. Yeowzers! Check Eat to find great oysters in Portland.

Photo by mindync

Photo by Dyste's Grocery

5. Perfume
Many people like giving and getting perfume on Valentine's day. Sometimes there is nothing better than dressing up and smelling good. Unfortunately, these little bottles of scented chemicals are filled with unpronounceable tinctures from the corners of the earth.

Local alternative: 5 lbs. chuck roast. What would be better than the down home aroma of a hearty stew simmering on the stove. 5 lbs. slab of locally raised red meat is just the thing you need.

6. Lingerie

Although this is usually a gift for yourself rather than the other person, lingerie is something many people buy on Valentines' day for the loved one. However, almost all lingerie is made from synthetic materials derived from petroleum products making this outfit not only imported, but a sure way to increase your carbon butt-print.

Local alternative: A block of butter. Just because it tastes better than polyester. And it's spreadable. Available from any of the local dairies, like Noris Dairy.

Hopefully this has been helpful. Take a few minutes this year to find ways to make your Valentine's Day more local. Happy Valentine's Day!

The Farming Portland Survey and Favorite Sources Tab

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:52:00 +0000

The Farming Portland Food Survey
There are so many reasons not to eat local and sustainable. I know that in my house, we've tried and failed many times to eat more local, to support our local food economy, and to eat less industrial food. But the demands of work and life make the convenience of grocery stores undeniable.

How does your family handle these challenges? What resources do you rely on to feed your family? Please take a couple minutes to fill out this 100% anonymous survey. I'd love to learn more about how your family handles these challenges. I'll post the results at the end of the month.

100% anonymous.
This survey should take less than 2 minutes of your time.
Check back later in the month to see the results..

>>>Take the Survey<<<

Also, this week I am launching the:

The Farming Portland Favorite Oregon Sources Tab

This is something I've been thinking of creating for a long time. There are so many really good sources for sustainable food here in the Portland area, but not everyone knows about them. Because I've been asked many times what sources I like for this or that, a local resource page seemed like a good idea. This won't be everything, just the things that I like. I'll work on updating it as more things cross my path.

Links to responsible local sources
I'll be updating this over time with more information
Great vendors you might not have known about

Tuna Balls

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0000

I'm standing on the beach at Nehalem Bay State Park. The ocean is dark grey and the wind coming over the water is cold. The clouds are heavy and low; rain could come at any time. This is what the Oregon coast is like most of the year. It is not a soft, warm place for beach towels, bikinis, palm trees and coconut scented sunscreen. It is a hard cold place where ancient volcanic flows meet icy currents from northern places. The ocean is always dark and never warm.

Beach grass at Nehalem Bay State Park, looking toward Nehalem Bay.

We leave the beach and are heading back to Portland. After spending a weekend renting a house with some friends, I appreciated the break from routing but are looking forward to getting back to that routine with the baby. The weeks upcoming responsibilities have already started pulling our thoughts back to home. My wife and I are discussing the logistics for the next five days. Our minds have left the beach, and it's time for our bodies to follow.

But the ocean is there, next to us, undeniable. And I know that under the impenetrable surface lives a bounty of creatures. These creatures are my connection to this place. The water is too cold to swim in. The cliffs are too steep to climb. But the seafood is there to be savored.

We stop in Cannon Beach to get lunch on the way home. The town is cedar shingles and narrow streets. Now is the off-season and the day is rainy. There are no lines; parking is easy. Surprisingly, good seafood restaurants are hard to find on the Oregon coast. A generally slow economy combined with heavy dependence on tourism mean many places don't last a whole year. The ones that do survive are generally low priced and moderate quality. The harvest of the sea is captured and distributed to other places with stronger economies and stronger demand.

We stop at Ecola Seafood for lunch. To our surprise we find a menu full of delicious ideas and a deli case stocked with fish and shellfish of all kinds--whole crab, salmon fillets, halibut steaks, shrimp cocktail, oysters. Stacked in front of the case is something I'd never seen before--locally caught Oregon tuna in cans.

Fish Balls

In The Essential Mediterranean, Nancy Harmon Jenkins says the fish balls recipe comes from a little Sicilian fishing port of Porticello and that Franco Crivello serves them like tiny meat balls, rolled no bigger than marbles, as an appetizer. The recipe is simple--make meat balls out of tuna and serve them with red sauce. In her recipe she uses tuna steaks, then grinds them like ground meat. Egg and bread crumbs hold things together just like a real meatball. But I don't have tuna steaks, and I don't have time to drive across town to Flying Fish Co. to get responsibly caught local tuna. Then I remember the cans.

Canned tuna, while probably not as good as fresh tuna, would probably work just fine in a pinch. Luckily, I find some at New Season. Whole sections of tuna in a can. 7 oz of loin steak for $7. Expensive. This is the sames as $17 per pound of fish. The pricing is not competitive, especially when Starkist is on the self below at a fraction of the cost. But it is the only option for line-caught, local tuna. And it is only half a mile from my house. It will have to do.

Franco Crivello's Fish Balls

The recipe is very simple, basically make little meat balls out of fish. If serving as an appetizer, make them marble sized. If serving as a main dish, make them ping-pong ball size. Make sure to add enough egg to get them to hold together. I had to add an extra half an egg.

Oregon responsibly caught canned tuna
Grated Romano cheese
Mint
Italian parsley
Roast pine nuts
Black Currant
bread crumbs
egg

Mix everything together to your liking and form into balls. Saute the balls in vegetable oil until they are brown and the egg has set.

For the sauce, make a simple red sauce. I don't like red sauce very much so mine is chunkier than they call for in the recipe.

Can of tomatoes (crushed or diced depending on your texture preferences)
Onion
Garlic
White wine
Pinch of sugar
Spices

Saute the onions and garlic until soft, reduce the white wine, add tomatoes and spices. Done.

How you serve this is up to you. I put it over rice for lack of imagination. Overall the recipe is good. I would add more spices to the fish balls next time, more salt at least. I left out the currants because I didn't have any and the pine nuts didn't really add much for me so they could stay out next time too. More cheese might be nice. And the sauce needs more complexity. But different and healthier than beef meat balls. A fun thing to experiment with.

Oregon Oysters are Delicious

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:48:00 +0000

A few years ago I learned about Oregon oysters and decided that I must learn to eat oysters. I'd never had an oyster before. Although I really like clams, I avoid mussels because I don't like a big gush of mushy guts in my mouth when I'm eating. Remember Tidal Wave Bubble gum? That juicy center? Disgusting. No thank you.

But if you are going to eat local, then a part of that is eating what grows well here, not just what you can get to grow here. Acceptance, not imposition.

Oysters grow well in Oregon (and the PNW in general), so I tried to eat oysters. Tried is the main word, because whatever I did was absolutely disgusting. I tried frying them. I tried breading them. I tried raw. And then I was done. Oysters were something that I caulked up to a long term objective and an acquired taste--something I'd have to work at over time and eventually learn to tolerate. But at the time, all I could do was gag.

Fast forward a couple years. The desire to learn to eat oysters is still there, and I have not made any progress. Then I find a place on N. Williams called Eat, An Oyster Bar. The only reason I went into this place is because I heart Cajun food. And with oysters so close, how could I not try them again. This time different. The server even offered to give me a couple for free just to give it a shot.

So I did.

I ordered their Oysters Rockefeller. Baked oysters with creamed spinach and cheese melted over the top. Browned under the broiler. My life changed. They were delicious. The oysters were petite. The spinach was mild and the cheese just sharp enough and browned enough to bring texture and substance. It was a revelation. Finally. Finally. Finally, after several years of hopes and disappointment I'd found the key to a truly local treasure.

Then the server brought me a couple raw oysters. The smallest Tillamook Sweets they had. On the house. Just to try.

With great trepidation I poured one into my mouth and braced for the disgusting gush of shellfish mush I'd experienced with dread so many times before. But this time was different. The oyster was soft, but not an exploding shit bomb of guts in my mouth. It was briny, and sweet. It was something I did not need to fear. In fact, I wanted some more of them. They were delicious, and I was amazed.

All of this is a big lead up to the actual point of this blog post, which is that I am making oysters as an appetizer for this year's solstice dinner. Normally, for the appetizer, I put together a charcuterie and fromage plate. But this year I'm trying to increase the amount of seafood in my diet. Plus solstice dinner always has a local focus. Plus I have finally found the path to the mysterious Oregon oyster, and it is delicious.

So this weekend I tested some recipes. Next Saturday (6 days away! Yikes!) we will be doing solstice dinner, and I need to know if the oysters will work. After reading far too many recipes and opinions, I narrowed it down to two finalists. Here they are.

Oysters Rockefeller

Based on a recipe from The Best of Gourmet. I've written about this splendid cookbook before and I'll do it again here. Here is my version of the recipe in a nutshell:

Saute spinach, parsley, watercress, and scallions in butter. Chill.
Shuck your oysters,then set in salt.
Sprinkle bacon over the top of the oysters.
Put some of the spinach mix over the top, sprinkle shredded and bake.

Now, I changed their recipe a bit because I didn't use Pernod and bread crumbs in the spinach mix. Instead I kept it to greens and then added a layer of Parmesan over the top. This is how Eat does it, and that's good enough for me. It was good. And very attractive. But next time I think I'll add some cream to the greens.

Baked Oysters with Leaks and White Wine Cream Sauce

Based on a recipe from Fish and Shellfish by James Peterson. James Peterson just writes the best cook books. This was a much more mild recipe than the Rockefeller. It was luxurious and buttery. It was delicious.

Saute fine julienne leaks in butter.
Shuck your oysters.
Put the leaks in the shells, then oysters on top.
Spoon the white wine and cream reduction over the top.
Bake and then broil to finish.

I left out all the details of Mr. Peterson's instructions on how to cook the oysters. There were a few steps involved.

These were very tasty. Rich and buttery. Not as picturesque as the Rockefeller oysters though.

Not sure what way I'll go for Solstice dinner next weekend but its outstanding to finally be able to do oysters.

By the way, Eat also sells oysters direct. If you are looking for a good place to get local, sustainably farmed Oregon oysters, stop by Eat and see what they have.

Thanks-sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:36:00 +0000

No turkey.
No cranberries.
No candied yams.
No green bean casserole.
No cornbread.
No pumpkin pie.

What we did have was one outstanding dinner. We broke from tradition and made a new meal that was a welcome relief.

This year it was a conglomeration of the best flavors we could come up with. Instead of sticking to the Thanksgiving script, we decided to make this food holiday about the food that we love rather than the food we are supposed to eat. Each person brought something different; each person shared a little of themselves in the process. They were small gifts to each of us, from each of us, enjoyed together.

There were, of course, a lot of meats. Jamie called it a "meat-fest" and it pretty much was. Dave laid out an amazing collection of charcuterie and cheeses as an appetizer. Delicious cured salamis--thin and fat--from Olympic Provisions and imported cheeses from New Seasons--soft and hard--one of which was the best blue cheese I think I've ever eaten. By the end of the night, I realized that in the hurley-burley of getting dinner ready, we did not spend enough time with this part of the meal.

When dinner did get on the table, it looked like a winter feast of foods. I brought a sirloin tip roast. Dave brought a full king salmon fillet topped with pesto and laid on a bed of parsley. Tiffany brought her infamous champagne mushroom risotto as well as yams with yogurt. Jamie provided the beet salad. I made chard packages filled with sausage stuffing. There was fruit salad. There was a lot of wine.

Desert was no different. Pumpkin pie is wonderful, but custards are more wonderful. So, pumpkin creme carmels it was. Pecan pie also showed up, as well as a beautiful apple pie.

Sitting around a table of food made by people who are sharing from themselves, and enjoying that experience with those same people has to be one of the great experiences of life. We do several big meals a year--birthdays, holidays, etc.--but none is a holiday really devoted to breaking bread together the way Thanksgiving is. It's a unique time. It's a wonderful time. Thank you to all my friends, for sharing.

In the interest of continuing the sharing, here are the recipes for a couple things:

Packing not Stuffing
Stuffing is good stuff. I actually wish we ate more of it the rest of the year instead of reserving it mainly for holiday times. With no turkey to stuff, I had to come up with something different. This worked perfect.

Chard Packages Filled with Sausage Stuffing

Chopping Leaks

This is a cosmetic variation on the recipe from The Best of Gourmet, 20th anniversary edition. The original calls for the chard leaves to be drawn up into a "purse" shape. However, I found this impossible to do. What was much easier--just fold the chard leaf over the stuffing and use the leak strips to tie it closed.

The flavors of the stuffing are simple and down to earth. The bread is a nice medium for the salty, sage-y sausage and the earthiness of the only 2 vegetables. Add salt and pepper and it is a nice uncomplicated stuffing.

Pork breakfast sausage
Dried bread cubes then soaked in milk
Red chard stems and leaks chopped and sauteed in the sausage fat.
Mix together and use egg (to bind)

For the packages use blanched chard leaves. Plop a half a cup of stuffing in the middle and fold the leaf over. Use strips of leak to tie it closed. Bake with a little bit of chickstock to keep them from drying out.

WWROD (What Would Richard Olney Do)
I made a sirloin tip roast, but I knew it would need something to help it. There was a good chance I would mess up the roast (it did come out a little over cooked) and a good sauce can help bring almost anything back to life. But what kind of sauce? In these moments of culinary confusion, I frequently turn to The French Menu Cookbook by Richard Olney. Once again, i found what I needed to find. As an accompaniment to a formal autumn dinner, he puts Poivrade Sauce with a leg of venison roast. But does it only go with game? I checked in with my Larousse Gastronomique and found that no, Poivrade Sauce goes with most red meats but as some well known variations for game meats.

Poivrade Sauce

One thing to know about Poivrade Sauce, is that it is an old school (1700's) french meat sauce. What that means is the flavor profile will be more vinegary. It also means you will be able to find 100 variations of this sauce because everyone does it differently. Given those circumstances, you can really bend the flavors of this sauce to be whatever suits you. Poivrade sauce is in the general family of sauces that use black pepper as a main flavor. I stayed pretty close to Olney's formula.

Carrots and onions and soup bones all sweaty and browned.
Flour roux for thickening.
Wine vinegar to deglaze (and some white wine)
Beef stock, tomatoe juice, herbs and juniper berries simmered for a few hours and reduced.
Add crushed black peppercorns at the end.
Add some butter to make it shine.

I also used more flour at the end to thicken it up like a gravy.

Pumpkin in a Cup
Pumpkin pie is delicious, not for the pie, but for the pumpkin. Custard is delicious, for every reason. What better time of the year to get two great tastes that taste great together? I checked in with my buddy Alfred Portale. In 12 Seasons of Cooking he has a nice recipe for Pumpkin Creme Brulee. However, I had just eaten creme brulee a couple weeks ago. So, it had to be creme caramel instead.

Pumpkin Creme Caramels
Of course, for the definitive recipe for custard anything, I have to check in with my other buddy, James Peterson. In chapter 46 of Glorious French Food, he gives the best overview of each kind of custard and how to make them I have ever read. Basically one egg will set 2/3 cup of milk. After that come the variations, and there are a ton of them. I used his orange creme caramel as the starting place and infused pumpkin flavors instead.

whole milk infused with pumpkin puree, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar
whole eggs
more sugar melted to make the caramel sauce

Epilogue
Here are a few random pictures from the night.

Waiting for Local Tuna

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 05:01:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about having a more balanced diet. This mainly included eating more grains, vegetables, fruits, and fish while eating less cheeses, eggs, and animal meats (esp. fatty meats like bacon...sigh, just kill me now). This doesn't seem like it should be that hard, and technically it isn't. But there are so many delicious ways to cook up animals that it really involves ignoring a universe of edible delights. Or it involves making totally unacceptable substitutions (i.e. vegetarian "breakfast sausage").

Getting back to the point, one meat that the Old Ways Mediterranean Diet says we should eat more of is fish. Not just any fish, but fatty fish full of Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, calcium, and minerals. Some great examples of these fish are salmon, tuna, halibut, and trout. Coincidentally ALL of these are available either locally or close by. Wonderful! No problem! Support the local food economy AND eat a more balanced diet.

Yeah, not so easy. Vegetables are a no brainer. Go to the farmer's markets. Go to Pumpkin Patch farm on Sauvie's Island. But finding fresh local sustainably caught fish at a reasonable price is an entirely different story.

Can I Get A Fish Monger Please?
Of the places I went, the guys behind the counter usually had very little knowledge of the fish they were selling. They knew what kind of fish it was (usually). They knew where it came from (for the most part). Mainly they knew when the distributor dropped it off. Surprisingly, Newman's Fish Market on 21st was the absolute worst even through they are located in upscale City Market NW. The workers there were clearly just day labor hired to wrap and tag fish they knew nothing about. Questions seemed to irritate them and they didn't even do a good job filleting the whole fish I bought. On the other hand, the guy at The Flying Fish cart knew a lot about the fish he was selling and where it came from. Unfortunately, he was out of stock of what I was looking for that day. I was looking for was fresh tuna.

In the end I went with some nice fresh tuna I bought at Fred Meyer. Not local fish, but the rest was pretty local. I'm still working on finding good, sustainable sources for local fish.

Fresh Tuna with Tomato Stew
The recipe I used was from a book I have: Mediterranean, A Taste of the Sun in Over 150 Recipes. Although this is a kinda cheesy theme book, the recipes inside are actually really good. In fact, I've used this book many times over the years and never has a recipe turned out bad. Just remember that an aubergine is an eggplant and a courgette is a zucchini.

This recipe is a pretty simple one. It's just cubes of tuna cooked in stewed tomatoes and onions with some herbs. This also makes substitutions easy. I, personally don't like sun-dried tomatoes, so I left that out. It had the effect of making the sauce thinner. Also, since there were no baby onions in the house, I used chunky normal onions and it worked out fine.

Here is how I did it:

Tuna
Tomatoes (I used canned tomatoes but the recipe calls for stewing your own)
Onions
Olive Oil
Garlic
White wine
Clam juice
Herbs--fresh sage, rosemary, and thyme.

I laid this over some cous-cous with a fresh cherry tomato and lemon cucumber salad on the side. Overall it was real good. A nice light summer meal.

Epilogue: Local Fish Ain't Beef
What a pain in the ass it is to find fresh, sustainable, local fish in Portland! You want grass fed beef or buffalo or "pastured" chickens--no problem. But you want local fish on a Tuesday night, WTF!

Part of the reason I haven't posted in a while is because I've been looking for local fish to write a very nice and informative post on how to find local, sustainable fish. But to tell the truth, it's been a huge pain. There are very few places to get reliably local and sustainable fish in town. This just confounds me because fish, especially salmon, is so iconic in the PNW.

Fred Meyer has fresh tuna. I went there because if good fish is going to be a normal part of my diet, then it has to be accessible. I walk up to the fish counter at the Hawthorne location. There is a wide display of fish and shellfish laid out, everything looking like it just came in that morning. On the far right are stacks of pink tuna steaks, each one looking exactly like what I was hoping for. James Peterson gives a great list of items to look for when choosing fish steaks and fillets in Fish and Shellfish on page 3.

No slime. Check.
No off color. Check.
Should be slightly translucent. This tuna is mostly opaque.
Tuna should be big chunks wrapped in plastic. Big chunks yes, plastic no.
Tuna should not have a rainbow-like opalescence. Check.
No spaces between the flakes. Check.

There are other factors but they didn't apply to me this time.

Then I looked at the tag. "Product of Indonesia." Seriously? It's frickin tuna season in Oregon and you can't get a nice piece of tuna from our own home-grown Fred Meyer grocery store.

I have to admit, I didn't check New Seasons. They are just too expensive. I'm over New Seasons.

Back to Fred Meyers' tuna. It was wild caught Indonesian tuna. Besides the "not local" factor, is it bad? According to Seafood Watch, this Tuna had a 50-50 chance of being either something to "avoid" or a "good alternative". Unfortunately, I will probably never know exactly which it was. Seafood watch lists and grades 29 variations for tuna. Of these, 17 are not US or Atlantic specific. Of these, 10 are rated "avoid", 5 are "good alternatives", and 2 are "best choice". Of these, there were 6 that seemed the most likely category that this fish could be. I had about a 50-50 chance of destroying the planet with my purchasing decision. Here's to rolling the dice.

Fishformation Overload

Seafood Watch has a very lovely fish app that you can get for free. This makes it easy to look up the fish you are thinking of buying to see if it is:

"green" fish (sustainably caught and responsibly harvested)
"red" fish (avoid--if you buy this fish you are financing the death of the oceans)
"yellow" fish ("good alternative")

This seems great, but it has some practical usability issues. Take the tuna example for example. There are 29 different listings for tuna, and it is a mixed bag of red, yellow, and greens. Much of the distinction lies in how the fish was caught. Nets are bad, hooks are good (sometimes). But the package never says how the fish was caught, and the 22 year old behind the counter usually has no idea either. So unless you are buying direct from the fisherman, who knows what the heck you are buying?

One Spot of Fishy Light, Unexpectedly

There was only one time that the Seafood Watch fish-o-matic was actually usable. I was at Costco, looking over the fish section at stacks of lovely coho salmon and stealhead fillets. I decided to see how this stuff rated. I knew these were wild-caught, Alaskan salmon. This was great, because according to the Seafood Watch app, all the wild caught salmon is either green or yellow. Only the farmed stuff comes up as red. At $7.99/lbs, Costco is one of the most affordable places to buy big fillets of responsibly harvested salmon. This is actually a way to make fatty fish and all it's Omega-3 goodness a normal part of a daily diet. Big box stores can do somethings right, it seems.

Eating With Your Wallet and Some Imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 04:37:00 +0000

I had this idea that the way we eat is killing us. I don't think I made this up. It seems like there are warnings all over the place about foods. Shows like The Biggest Loser and Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution really hit home the fact that obesity and diabetes are on the rise like never before.

Although refined sugars and empty calories are primary culprits in our ill-health epidemic, another aspect is that we eat too much meat. Meat gets a bad rap by all kinds of people. Meat takes more resources to produce, the meat industry uses insane amounts of antibiotics in really unsafe ways, etc. Also, eating more red meat (and cured meats) is related to increases in cancer and heart disease. Here are some fun facts about meat:

Meat is devoid of the protective effects of fiber, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and other helpful nutrients, and it contains high concentrations of saturated fat and potentially carcinogenic compounds, which may increase one’s risk of developing many different kinds of cancer. http://www.cancerproject.org/survival/cancer_facts/meat.php

Eating one serving a day of processed meat -- or the equivalent of a single hot dog or two slices of salami -- was associated with a 42% increased risk for heart disease and a 19% increased risk for diabetes in the study, conducted by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health. http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=116365

High red meat intake was also associated with increased risk of esophageal and liver and a borderline increased risk for laryngeal cancer. And high processed meat consumption also was associated with borderline increased risk for bladder cancer and myeloma, a kind of bone cancer...In addition, both red meat and processed meat consumption were associated with increased pancreatic cancer risk in men, but not women.
http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/healthday/071211/high-meat-consumption-linked-to-heightened-cancer-risk.htm

Take this chart for example:

http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-2859/AGEC-603web.pdf

Or this chart:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3045642/

Americans are eating a lot more meat than we used to. If the research on disease is right, than we are all increasing our chances of cancers, etc.

Given the plausible epidemiologic evidence for red and processed meat intake in cancer and chronic disease risk, understanding the trends and determinants of meat consumption in the U.S., where meat is consumed at more than three times the global average, should be particularly pertinent to researchers and other public health professionals aiming to reduce the global burden of chronic disease. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3045642/

Now, I'm not advocating not eating meat. Anyone who knows me knows that I like a good barbecue as much as the next guy. But what I am trying to get to is the idea of a balanced meal.

I had developed this theory that the subsidy system and food industry was producing more of the foods that are bad for us, driving price down on those items, and making us sicker at the same time all in the name of profits. It sounds crazy, but I had some time to kill so I thought I'd look into it.

What is a Balanced Meal?
First, let's understand what a balanced meal is.

http://www.choosemyplate.gov/
In 2011 the government got rid of the pyramid and now have a much better way of showing you what you should be eating. This is an outstanding info graphic. If you go to the website, this graphic is interactive. Clicking on the different sections will take you to drill-down information on vegetables, fruits, grains, etc.

I was surprised at how much protein they recommend eating. By protein they mostly mean meats, but also include fish, nuts, and beans.

This is the original food pyramid which was designed in 1992. It replaced a much simpler graphic that showed all food types as equal--four squares. Interestingly, it was very controversial when it first came out because the food industry did not want the government telling people they should eat less meat than vegetables. Nutritionists also had a problem with it because of the emphasis on grains (huh?).

Just for giggles, I also included the revamped federal food pyramid for reference. Released in 2005, this is an information visualization disaster.

http://www.oldwayspt.org/
Oldways is my personal favorite. Old Ways is an organization that promotes traditional diets from cultures historically known to be more healthy than everyone else. They are doing some really interesting work in the areas of diet research and promotion.

"This pyramid continues to be a well-known guide to what is now universally recognized as the “gold standard” eating pattern that promotes lifelong good health. It has been widely used for years by consumers, educators, and health professionals alike to implement healthier eating habits...
The pyramid was created using the most current nutrition research to represent a healthy, traditional Mediterranean diet. It was based on the dietary traditions of Crete, Greece and southern Italy circa 1960 at a time when the rates of chronic disease among populations there were among the lowest in the world, and adult life expectancy was among the highest even though medical services were limited."

Comparing them, the Oldways pyramid is much more clear about getting more of your protein from fish, dairy, and vegetable sources. Red meats are the most limited kind of protein. The USDA plate, although the easiest of all to use, is much more ambivalent about where your proteins come from. This would allow a diet high in red and processed meats to fit the model, even though these are some of the most likely suspects for various kinds of cancers.

Also, the Oldways pyramid includes a glass of red wine with dinner. Allllriiiighhhttt!

Comparing Prices--Are there different ideas at work?
The costs of buying local food has also been on my mind. Is local food really more expensive? So many people are in favor of higher prices for local food because they claim it is more accurate price of what the food actually costs, plus it keeps more dollars in the local economy. I think these are great points, but if local food is ever going to be anything more than a dinner party braggable for the bourgeois, then the pricing really needs to be able to compete with mainstream foods. Josh from Stone-Buhr understands this. Few others do.

My conspiracy theory goes along these lines: Americans eat more meat because meat is cheap and this is bad for us. Why would this be? I don't know. I've read that, sociologically, meat played a symbolic role in American culture, especially after WW2. It represented success. It also represented affluence and something to aspire to after the hard times of global warfare. The decadent, juicy steak at a swanky restaurant. The good times of hamburgers on the grill with friends in the summer time. The elegance of marinated, thinly sliced flank steak layered over a bed of baby greens with blue cheese crumbles. Etc. In order to make the most money, the meat industry played these ideas up while also bringing prices down. Everyone could partake of the good life. The combined effect of this bought a flood of money to the meat industry. The birth of the fast food industry in the mid 20th century exacerbated this trend. Maybe the health implications were unknown at the time, but the profit motive certain was not.

I went to two grocery stores and the farmer's market to see how things priced out. I was looking to see how meat prices compared to other products. My thinking was that pricing structures that support a healthy diet would make meat more expensive than vegetables, grains, etc. My suspicion was that the pricing structures did not support a healthy diet by making meats artificially cheaper than they should be thereby encouraging people to skew the balance of their diet toward meat.

My unscientific methodology was pretty simple. If you bought 10 items and spent $10 on each, how much could you get?

I went to New Seasons (premium grocery store), Fred Meyer (normal grocery store), and the St. Johns Farmers Market.
I compared items as close as I could but admittedly did not get apples to apples (the farmer's market had a different selection than the grocery stores, especially in fruit).
No sale prices
No premium products
No preference for organic or local foods
Just looking for low, everyday prices on standard items.

My own notion was that corporate pricing in the grocery stores would lend itself to a less healthy diet, and the farmer's market pricing would be more true to a healthy diet.

As it turns out, I was totally wrong. You could get more vegetables, less meat, and a middle portion of eggs and beans from all of the vendors. The pricing scheme at each place was roughly in line with the food pyramids above.

Despite New Season's healthy image, their price structure was almost exactly the same as Fred Meyer, just a little bit more expensive overall. And the farmer's market was not much better, just a lot more expensive overall.

Relative volumes of food purchased with $10 each based on averaged pricing.

The only thing that can be said, is you'd probably be less likely to over-eat if you shop at the farmer's market because you simply get less for your money (perhaps helping with overnourishment and it's associated health problems).

Compared to the Old Ways pyramid, all of these vendors fall short in that:

Fish is too expensive. Old Ways encourages more fish eating than red meat, but at these prices beef is the more affordable option.
Beef should be much more expensive to discourage purchasing. Beef was most expensive at the Farmer's Market (but so was everything else).
Fruit is over priced. This changes with the season and is an average, but it should probably be closer to the price of vegetables (apples actually were, but anti-oxidant rich berries were super expensive).
Eggs could be a little more expensive, just to get them more in the proper place.

Because my initial price gathering was pretty limited, I will probably continue to test pricing. In the process of collecting this information I realized just how much variability there could be and how much more research would be needed to give a truly accurate picture. But it's interesting anyway. What it did do is get me thinking in other directions.

Chef de Cuisine (a.k.a. The Protein Dealer)
If the problem isn't the pricing structures themselves, then maybe it is something else. Maybe is it just the way we choose to spend money. If our purchasing habits reflect the way we think about food, then the problem may be just the way we think.

Imagine you are going to cook dinner. If you are like me, you think of the main item first, then build out the things that go around it. For instance, for dinner tonight, I could cook pork chops, then put a simple garlic pan sauce over it. Some boiled baby potatoes would go nice with that. For greens, I can use either the asparagus I bought at the market or go trim some lettuce from the garden for a salad. This is how I think through cooking dinner for the family.

What is wrong with that way of thinking? Most of the food groups are represented. It's home cooked with local, (mostly) organic ingredients. It's not overloaded with fats, processed oils, or sugars. It leads to the whole family sitting down together and eating together. Everything that a meal is supposed to be is here.

But what it also is is centered on a single chunk of meat that becomes garnished with all the things that are good for you. Potatoes are chosen because they match the flavor of the pork chop. The greens are chosen because they don't conflict with the flavor of the pork chop. Had I started with a salad as the first thought, then I probably would not have ended up adding a pork chop. At most, some slices of very lean pork tenderloin might have shown up.

It's this way of imagining what we eat that drives us to have unhealthy diets. To avoid the pitfalls of excessive meat consumption, create balanced meals that are more in line with the recommendations, and truly treat food as a primary means to good health, we need to upend the way we envision the plates of food we prepare and how we see ourselves eating them.

I was hoping to see a more informed perspective from the professionals in this world. If anyone should understand the nature of meal and menu preparation, I thought it would be them. But unfortunately, this is not what I found. At least not in the way they talk about their food and describe it on the menus.

Here are some examples:

As an example of affordable, mass-market dining, Denny's really focuses on the meat in the meal. Their descriptions and pictures are all very clear about what the priority is. If red meats and proteins were supposed to be 90% of the meal, Dennys would be right on.
http://www.dennys.com/#/menu

Denny's Steak and Shrimp dinner. The name says it all. This is almost the exact opposite of what the food guides recommend.

The LePigeon dinner menu for June 20th.
Meat, meat, meat, meat, mushrooms, meat.

LePigeon is an upscale french restaurant here in Portland. I was hoping that price would influence perspective but that didn't happen. Again, the meats are the focus at dinner time.

Granted, LePigeon is devoted to excellent food. My understanding is that they source as much of their ingredients as locally as possible. They make no mention of this on their website, however, because their focus is quality and deliciousness. To people not familiar with preparations inspired by rustic french cooking, some of the dishes may seem "out there". But they are delicious. Unfortunately, they are also totally unbalanced. The menu continues to use language that favors proteins over everything else.

Paley's Place is one of my favorite restaurants in Portland. Vitaly Paley is regularly recognized as one of the top chefs in Portland and his restaurant gets all kinds of awards. The Paley's Place cook book is also very good.

Paley also has a focus on local, organic, sustainable ingredients, which I really appreciate. But when we look at how the dishes are characterized, it is the same problems.

http://www.paleysplace.net/menu/index.html

Paley thinks meat first. In the entree list, 4 out of 5 of the dinner entrees focus on the meat and only secondarily mention the accompanying vegetables. There is a seafood section that comes after this where everything is meat based. We are supposed to be eating more fish than red meat, but it is still the psychology of "proteins first."

I would like to point out an interesting disconnect. Take for instance this beautiful image of what looks like seer'd tuna and a spring salad that I stole from the Paley website. Not doubt this dish was described as a tuna entree that also happened to come with some greens. But if you look at the actual portions, the tuna is not so dominant as the name implies. The photographer, like the menu writer, is focusing on the tuna, but the chef that composed the meal actually gave a lot of balance to the accompanying vegetables. In fact, the greens provide a physical foundation for the main attraction--the tuna.

I have to say, that through the course of my investigations, I really didn't find anything that provided a nice contrast to the repetitions I was finding. This was a bummer because I was hoping to have an example to contrast with. But, whether cheap eats or fine dining, the language of food is very similar everywhere. If language is thought, then there is a lot of similarity in the way corporate menu planners and executive chefs think about food. Most of that thinking gets focused on the "main" item of a dish which is normally the big protein. This way of thinking about food is in sharp contrast to the way we are supposed to be actually eating based on the food pyramids.

How did we start thinking this way? I don't believe the meat industry created this phenomena. They just capitalized on it.

The Modern Meal is a Super-Condenser
Here is my theory on how this came to be: In the past the wealthy and the common folk ate differently. The common folk could not afford as much meat and ate only one course meals mainly. The wealthy could get whatever they wanted to eat (mostly) and took more time at home to have leisurely multi-course meals with all their smelly friends. What else would you do without movies and internet and cars and video games?

Circle of Frans Francken the Younger, (1581-1642) Belshazzar's Feast.

These aristocratic meals were probably something like what Richard Olney describes in The French Menu:

"A dinner that begins with a soup and runs through a fish course, an entree, a sherbet, a roast, a salad, cheese and desert, and may be accompanied by from three to six wines...the movement through the various courses should be an ascending one from light, delicate and more complex flavors through progressively richer, more full-bodied and simpler flavors." (p 22)

If you were a peasant, your meals were much simpler. Depending on the era and the location, peasants had access to better or worse foods, but in general:

Medievalists agree on certain characteristics of medieval diet such as the overwhelming importance ascribed to cereals generally and bread in particular, or the great disparity in protein consumption between an upper class that enjoyed vast quantities of meat and fish and a lower class more dependent on grain, dairy products and vegetables. http://www.uv.es/consum/freedman.pdf

If you were an English peasant:

The main meal was vegetable pottage. Again, if the family was lucky there might be some meat or fish to go round. Bread would be available and ale.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/food_and_drink_in_medieval_engla.htm

German peasants seem to have had it better than most:

But the German peasants, workers, and the many poor made do with their homemade beer and filled their stomachs with kraut and bacon, lentils and peas, firm satisfying breads and light dumplings. By the 1800s more than four-fifths of the German population were peasants, and their own pigs were the mainstay of their diet. Thanks to Frederick the Great, it could be said that by the end of the 1800s, "potatoes were such a regular item that smoke coming from a cottage chimney at night was almost a certain sign that inside, potatoes, bacon and onions were frying." http://www.food-links.com/countries/germany/germany.php

The poor ate closer to the food pyramid (less meat and more vegetables and grains) in one course. The wealthy at closer to the food pyramid but spread it out across many courses.

Our current diet has roots in classical, aristocratic dining. The hotels adopted it, Escoffier codified it, and we live it. And, thanks to government and industry, it is made up of foods that only the wealthy could afford in years past. But, in our modern, democratic disdain for the hoity-toity aristocracy of the past, we eat like peasants--usually only eat a single entree plus maybe a desert or appetizer. Because of that, we are jumping straight to the main course (the big protein), bypassing the other courses that provide for an overall balanced meal.

The occasional exception is that even though the language may not be that much different, sometimes in fine dining the actual meal may not be as unbalanced as in lower cost establishments. Compare the Paley's tuna meal to the Denny's Steak and Shrimp. Denny's is clearly the meal with a higher percentage of red meat and heavy fats. And it is cheaper. And obesity is linked to social class. No kidding.

How do we fix this? I think a good place to start is quiche.

Quiche Will Save Your Life
What is in quiche? Almost anything you want. Is quiche a meat or a vegetable? Probably both. Does it give primacy to a big protein? Well, besides the fact that it's mostly eggs, no. We've often had frittata at home filled with only vegetables. And they were wonderful.

Gratins would fit the bill also. So would salads. So would soup. So would stir-fry. So would gumbo. So would a calzone.

There are a lot of meals we could make that are not formed around language the reinforces an unbalanced view of what a meal should be. When eating a simple dinner after work, maybe it's best to conceive of meals that are "one pot" style meals.

Soup with crusty bread could be perfectly balanced, and it gets us out of mentality that you build a dinner by starting with a slab of meat then adding some veggies.

A summer salad of fresh greens, baby sweet onions, lentils, cucumber, goat cheese crumbles, a few flank steak slices, and a light vinaigrette would perfectly balanced.

A calzone filled with spinach, garlic, some bacon crumbles and gruyere with a side of pear slices would be delicious.

Quiche could be a perfect surprise. Lots of veggies. A little chicken. Some cheese sprinkled on top. You just ate the food pyramid properly and your chance of getting cancer is theoretically lower.

When several courses are involved, it makes more sense to have a big steak and shrimp plate in there somewhere. But the rest of the food pyramid shows up also. It's just exploded out across several plates.

By changing the way we talk about food, and consequently the way we conceive of our meals, maybe we can start having intrinsically better meals for the health of us all.

Hello Pot, My New Friend
In the interest of practicing these ideas, I've been trying to bend my thinking to this new model. It is hard. Like the example I gave before, my normal way of imagining meals is to start with a main ingredient and build out. In this new model, it is easier to start with the pot you cook with and add in.

Pretty similar to my fish stew. http://bit.ly/qto26n

I've found that the way I describe even one-pot meals tends toward old habits. I'm making a simple seafood stew.

16 oz can of tomatoes, drained
Two cups clam broth + one cup water
carrots
celery
onions
garlic
6-8 shrimp
some clams
1 cod filet
spices

By volume, the dominant ingredient is tomatoes and clam broth. However, I call it seafood stew. Why don't I call it tomato and clam broth stew? I don't know, but proteins are powerful things and it's going to take some practice to break out of their hold.

Lobsterfest: Eating Local in Rhode Island

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 02:02:00 +0000

Although Rhode Island is only 37 miles wide and 48 miles long, it has 400 miles of coastline. If you like seafood, that is outstanding. Eating local in The Ocean State means eating from the ocean, and that was exactly what we intended to do.

Every summer my wife's family in Rhode Island has Lobsterfest. This is exactly what it sounds like. You eat lobster, and a lot of it. A month in advance her Uncle Nino sent out an email asking for people's orders so he could order the lobsters in advance just to make sure there would be enough. These people are serious about lobster.

Monster Lobsters of Yore http://www.raremaps.com/maps/medium/8732.jpg

For those of you that don't know, the lobster has not always been something to celebrate. Lobsters used to to be so abundant in New England, the Native Americans in the area used them for fertilizer. After a big storm, piles of lobsters could be found washed up on the shores around Boston and Cape Cod, sometimes several feet deep. The new European settlers didn't even need traps to get lobster. They just walked out to the tide pools or out the beach after a storm and grabbed lobsters by hand. The lobster industry became strong, but really didn't take off until the mid-19th century when canning made it possible to ship lobster meat greater distances. In the 1880's, the lobster industry was pulling in over 130 million pounds of lobster per year. However, during this time, lobster was always considered a poor-man's food reserved for indentured servants and anyone who could not afford something decent to eat. Kids who brought lobster sandwiches to school got beat up regularly and no one wanted to trade lunches with them. In the jails, the criminals would riot and refuse to eat if they were served lobster for dinner more than twice a week.

But all that changed in the mid 20th century as the lobster population got crushed from over-fishing and people discovered how delicious fresh lobster with melted garlic butter and a sprinkling of flat-leaf parsley can be.

In 1977 the largest live lobster on record was caught off Nova Scotia. This 44 lbs monster was over 4 feet long! A 42 lbs. giant caught in 1935 is on display at the Museum of Science in Boston. To get an idea of how freaking huge that is, take a look at this measly 17 lbs lobster:

At my wife's family's house, Lobsterfest is a more reasonable affair and normally doesn't involved monster lobsters. But it does involve t-shirts. Everyone gets lobsterfest t-shirts. Even the babies.

Then there were the clams. Half a bushel (apx. 15 lbs.) of little neck clams steamed in a giant pot of white wine, garlic, onion, parsley and butter.

Then there was the steaks. If you are the sort that does not like lobster, you're covered. T-bones and ribeyes were ready.

Then there are the sides. Most sides are brought by guests. Pasta with shrimp and artichokes. Chips. Potato salad.

The main show is the lobsters themselves. This year Nino got twenty-two 1.5-2 lbs. lobsters. Mike went and picked them up from the dock that morning. Talk about fresh! These would not last long.

After all that comes the deserts and hanging out with family and friends.

That's how you eat local in Rhode Island. Thanks to all of Kim's family for the great time!

The New Geopolitics of Food is Crap

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 20:19:00 +0000

The most recent issue of Foreign Policy is the "food issue" and the lead article is :

The New Geopolitics of Food

From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_new_geopolitics_of_food

I saw this article come across my feed reader and thought it looked interesting. It was very interesting. Admittedly, I don't know much about the geopolitics of food systems, but the concept of food systems has been on my mind lately.

A Little Bit About Where I'm Coming From

We do this thing every so often called 7 Days 100% local challenge. The goal of the challenge is to move our diet in a more local direction with the goal, for those 7 days, of getting as close to 100% locally sourced food as possible. A big part of this is discovering what my friend would call an "honest" local meal. What does it look like to really eat local? What would be missing from your plate? What new items would show up? How is eating local in Portland different than eating local anywhere else? It's not about making substitutions. It's about discovering what "here" means. (Of course, the ultimate in "honest" local food would be only foraged an indigenous items, but I haven't gotten there yet.)

Doing this challenge has also let me to thinking about other issues--mostly what really is the impact of eating local. If part of the goal of the challenge is to move more people and dollars away from industrialized food and toward local sources, does that really have an impact? How many people and how many dollars would need to be moved out of Kroger Corporation's pockets and into the local food economy before it could be considered "making a difference"? According to the 2009 Kroger Fact Book (PDF), Kroger has 2468 super markets representing 36 different brands with over $76 billion dollars in annual sales. That's freaking huge! There there is a gigantic industrialized agriculture machine pumping unimaginably large quantities of food products out these stores.

How in the world can choosing to eat local impact this system? How can something so big, so entrenched, and with so much money behind it be moved by just by choosing to eat local? We could do the "our family chooses to eat local" thing, but that just feels too self-righteous for me. Honestly, I've started to become pessimistic about the whole thing.

Where the Article Steps In

The New Geopolitics of Food does not brighten my day. It's a really interesting article that hit home the point that the world of food is really about food for the world. This is the opposite of local intention. The article points out how food is used for foreign relations. We export massive amounts of food to other countries when they are having a bad year. It also points out how as economic growth and the appetite for meat seems to go hand-in-hand. China is a specific example. Meat production is soaring there, and demand is outpacing supply. For anyone concerned about the horrors of industrialized meat production, this represents a very real and growing nightmare. It also makes a good point about the rising price of food and how foreign governments (mostly in Africa) are leasing their arable land to foreign food companies while their own population starves. It also points out the we are starting to use grain for fuel as a substitute for fossil fuels. This is putting tremendous pressure on grain production because its using up our "surplus".

Multiple Problems. Multiple Answers.

The answer the article positions at the end, is to find ways to increase crop yields in a hurry because there is an international food catastrophe on its way.

The answer, apparently, is not to transition more to local sources.

Increasing yields also could be a way of supporting more intensive industrialization of the food chain, along with more GMO products. Overall, this solution is the opposite of what the local food movement cares about.

Also, as food--especially meats and grains--becomes even more of an international bargaining chip, having deep production reserves will be a key component of being a powerful nation, just as oil reserves are now. Given this reality, it seems unlikely that the government will want to support reducing industrialized food production. This puts the local food movement fundamentally at odds with the government also.

What to do!

Is the local food movement really taking everything into consideration? Is local food philosophically aligned with isolationism? And is that realistic in today's interconnected world?

As a person interested in transitioning away from industrialized food and who believes that the commoditization of food in general creates lower quality food, damages the environment, and encourages a system ripe for abuse under the guise of increasing "production efficiency", this article causes a lot of thoughts. Unfortunately, not all of them are hopeful.

Start of Summer Pork Barbecue

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 02:06:00 +0000

It was time again for our annual birthday barbecue. Time for bags of hard wood, pork shoulders, and a little Buckwheat Zydeco. Every year Kim and I have a big get together with our friends to celebrate our birthdays, the start of Summer, and the beginning of barbecue season. The normal activities ensue--buying bags of hardwood for the smoker, tracking down two Boston Butts, checking how much brown sugar and apple cider vinegar is in the house, scrubbing the back deck, etc.

Central to this party, is the barbecue. When I say barbecue, I mean pork that is smoked for hours, shredded, simmered in sauce, and served on a bun. Later in the summer we'll have our annual rib barbecue. But for our birthday its always pot-luck, and I smoke some pork butts. Since this is a food blog, let's get right to the goods. Here's what we made for our party this year:

Pulled Pork Sandwiches

The one in the middle is
the local picnic ham.

This year I'd planned to do something a little different. Last fall I got a whole pig. In the process of butchering it, we specifically left one shoulder whole just for this event. That's a 20 lbs piece of meat! Normally the shoulder is cut into the Boston Butt and the Picnic Ham, but this time I wanted to keep it all together and do one big, glorious smoke out! And make this the first year we do 100% local meat in the bbq.

Unfortunately, I didn't plan things well and the shoulder didn't defrost in time. However, there was a single Picnic Ham that I was able to get defrosted, so we did half local. The butts came from Costco which is where I normally get them from. I've looked into other places in town for local meat, but none of them sell whole butts at a price that is reasonable. Considering we're talking about a 8-10 lbs chuck of flesh, getting 2 or 3of these can get expensive if you are paying $4-$5 per pound for local meat.

Anyway, in my experience, running the smoker around 250 means keeps the cooking time at around an hour a pound to get to an internal temp of 185-190. So, for an 8 lbs shoulder, you'll need 8 hours of cooking time at 250. This will produce a nice crust, a quarter to half inch smoke ring, and make the meat soft enough for shredding with forks.

For the pulled pork, I use my own rub which is a modified version of a Memphis style rub I found online. The print out I have actually says the original rub recipe comes from The Barbecue Bible, but I checked my copy and couldn't find it.

Jason's Pork Rub
Paprika
Black Pepper
Brown Sugar
Salt
Garlic Powder
Dried Oregano
Chipotle Powder

This is my "magic powder" (a la Mike Mills). I altered the original with the garlic powder, oregano, and chipotle powder to give this rub a touch of herbiness and a little more heat. The sugar-paprika-pepper combo is pretty normal barbecue flavors and seemed too dry to me, especially for Oregon. To alter this rub for fish or chicken, just reduce the paprika and black pepper and increase the garlic and oregano.

Don't be shy about laying on the rub. It will make a nice crust.

The beast at work.

2 butts, a pot of beans, and smoked cabbage (in the tin foil) on the smoker.

The picnic ham ready for shredding.

Once the shoulders have smoked and are all tender and black, I take them out of the smoker and shred them down with forks. This can be a time consuming process, but it really does produce better results that chopping the meat. Then I simmer the meat for at least 30 minutes in a ketchup vinegar sauce, pretty much following the recipe for North Carolina Pulled Pork from The Barbecue Bible. I'm not much for barbecue sauce, but the sweet-hot tang of the vinegar sauce combined with the salty-sweet crust of the rubbed pork makes for outstanding pulled pork.

Smoked Cabbage

Last year, while looking for something different, I found a recipe for smoked cabbage in The Legends of Texas Barbecue. My first thought was "gross." My second thought was "cabbage is cheap". My third thought was "I'll give it a try if I have room in the smoker". It was outstanding. If you haven't had smoked cabbage, I highly recommend it. Uncle Kermit's Barbecued Cabbage is outstanding and simple.

Cabbages cored and packed with spiced butter.

Cabbage
Butter (one stick per cabbage)
salt
pepper
garlic powder
onion power

Make a spiced butter and pack the entire stick into the core of the cabbage. The cabbage will groan and seem like it's going to burst from the butter. Wrap in tin foil and stick it in a smoker for a couple hours. Cut into wedges and serve. Wonderful.

Cole Slaw

Normally I don't do cole slaw. I just don't like it that much. But this year it seemed like a good idea, just as an experiment. To match with the vinegar sauced pulled pork, I found a vinegar based cole slaw recipe in Peace, Love and Barbecue. The Lexington Barbecue Red Slaw recipe was a good match, especially since I added a little too much chipotle pepper to the first batch of pulled pork. Cole slaw still isn't my favorite thing, but this was about as good as I could ask for. Note: make this the night before so it has time to marinate. Otherwise, it just tastes like cabbage and vinegar.

Potato Salad

Mama Faye's didn't last long!

Kim made potato salad. She found the simplest recipe and it turned out great. She looked through several options and then found Mama Faye's Home-Style Potato Salad. This turned out to be another hit from Peace, Love and Barbecue. A classic, simple, delicious potato salad.

Beyond that, everything else was provided by the people who showed up. In normal pot-luck style we had all sorts of goodies to choose from and they were all delicious.

Here are some random pictures from the barbecue and some of the people who showed up to help us celebrate our birthday...and eat!

There was a lot of food!

Marsh mellows too!

The real power of barbecue...bringing friends together.

The BBQ Books I Gots on my Shelf

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 03:32:00 +0000

Tomorrow is our annual birthday BBQ, so, of course, today is the run around like a maniac and get ready for the BBQ day. Part of this running around is figuring out what to cook. We normally do it pot-luck style and let people bring whatever sides they want (except Blu--he is required to bring deviled eggs). For our part, Kim normally makes something and I make pulled pork sandwiches. I'll have more on this tomorrow. This year I thought I'd also do a cole slaw to go with the sandwiches which sent me digging though my BBQ books to find something great.

As a preamble to the much anticipated BBQ of the Year post coming in the next couple days, I figured I'd give a run down of the BBQ books that I use in case anyone is interested in getting some books on BBQ.

Now, let's define BBQ (Bar-B-Que) for a minute. Many people think of Weber grills and charcoal briquettes when they think of summertime, have-your-friends-over bar-b-ques. This is not what I'm talking about. Although the rich petroleum aromas of Matchlight briquettes brings back many childhood memories for me, and the explosive rush of lighter fluid is fun, I'm doing something different.

When I'm talking about Barbecue, I'm talking about something that is more like what people think of when they imagine smoking foods. I'm talking about slow cooking using indirect heat with hardwood logs for hours on end in a big, black metal drum. Technically, what I'm talking about is called "hot smoking". Hot smoking is like slow roasting in the oven, but with smoke. Hot smoking is meant to take tough pieces of meat and melt them down over time. Normally the temperature is around 225 degrees (f). I don't want to go on about this, but I just want to be clear about what kind of cooking we're talking about here.

Grilling is direct heat, high temperature, fast cooking. Grilling is for hamburgers and steaks and bratwursts and legs of lamb, etc. Grilling is what most people do. It's gas grills or Webers with charcoal briquettes.

There is another method called "cold smoking" which takes several days, never really gets over 90 degrees (f) and is what you do when you are trying to cure large peices of meat or some types of sausages. I personally have never cold smoked anything...yet. Cold smoking is used in some kinds of charcuterie.

Okay, now that we've got the definitions out of the way, let's get on with the books. I'm leaving out the charcuterie books because those are more in line with "cold smoking" and that is not what I feel like writing about today.

The Barbecue Bible

I'd resisted this book for a long time because of the cheesy title (I've resisted buying the rest of Raichlen's books that came after this one for the same superficial reason). Actually, this is a really good book. I have been surprised how often I reference it for ideas on barbecue. The international nature of this book is interesting, but not my favorite part. What I really like is that it is that this book is well rounded. It's the kind of book that you can sit down with and find something. It is by no means exhaustive (although I think the sauces and rubs chapters are given more room than they need), but what is in here is good and interesting. That's why I like it.

Legends of Texas Barbecue Cook Book

I have to admit that Texas style barbecue is not my favorite. Mesquite smoked beef is good, but not my personal favorite. That being said, this is an outstanding cook book. It really does try to be a "cook book" in that it features a deep collection of old-school Texas barbecue recipes from masters around the state. And Robb Walsh is successful at doing what he seems to set out to do--bring forward the down-home roots of Texas barbecue. He clearly prefer history over awards in this book. If you're still running the same pit your grand-dad started in 1940, then you've got a good shot at getting into this book. This book could be called "Roots of Texas Barbecue". It's a good read

Peace, Love and Barbecue--Recipes, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue

Easily my favorite BBQ book; this is a unique BBQ book. There are more stories than recipies in this book. It's more like a tour around the professional bbq world that just happens to pick up some great recipes along the way. If you want a specific recipe you have to go to the index, because the chapters are about the bbq world and the pit masters who inhabit it. Mike Mills clearly knows the BBQ world inside and out. This is the kind of cooking book that can go from night stand to kitchen counter in the same day. It's just fun to read.

Dinosaur Barbecue

From what I understand Dinosaur Barbecue is a pretty good place to eat if you are in upstate New York. I wanted the book because I'd found a recipe online a long time ago and it was attributed to Dinosaur Barbecue. The cook book is good. It has some interesting ideas about meats and sauces. I like to use this book for some alternate ideas and to see how they mix flavors. And the pictures are good.

Weber's Charcoal Grilling

Not really a barbecue book at all, but it's in the same general world of outdoor live fire cooking. There are some recipes for indirect heat cooking using 2 stage fires, etc., in a Weber grill. I got this as a gift and have been really surprised at the quality of the recipes. There are some really interesting ideas with small sauces and grilled meats. And the photography is beautiful. Like the Dinosaur Barbecue cookbook, I use this as a secondary reference to see some alternative ideas on flavor pairings.

Seven Fires

I was really looking forward to getting this book, and when I got it I was mostly satisfied. Again, not really a barbecue book, but more a grilling book using seven different ways to set up the fire. The chef--Francis Mallman--is Argentinian and the book positions itself as a sort of manifesto on Argentinian outdoor cooking. What this book really excels at is surprising you with some really new ideas on how to grill meats. The example of cooking an entire cow whole on a giant metal rack raised over a bonfire using cables and pulleys is amazing. Hardly practical, but amazing.

A Little Bit More About Cheese--My Last Blog Post Ever?

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sat, 21 May 2011 15:44:00 +0000

I previously wrote a post about trying to make 100% local cheese. At the time it was all I could do to make 99% local cheese because of the issues with finding a mesophilic starter. Buttermilk was the best substitute I could find, but even that has small amounts of added cultures which make it not 100% local.

However, there other ways of making cheese that do not require mesophilic starter and rennet. I'm thinking about something yellow...something yellow...Lemons! That's right, lemons can be used to make a few kinds of soft cheeses, most notably, lemon cheese. The acid in the lemons curdles the milk making it possible to separate the whey from the milk solids and there you have the start of a cheese.

Skeptical of the outcome, I tried one of these lemon cheeses and it was...okay. The baby liked it (but he also likes plain tofu with prunes). Probably if I'd added some salt and spices the taste would have been better, something I'm learning about every kind of soft cheese. But, since I'm a bit of a deconstructionist when it comes to cooking, I had to start with plain first just to understand the underlying flavor structures (yes, I have been finding ways to combine my degree in literary theory with cooking).

One problem with making lemon cheese is that lemons do not grow well in Oregon. It's just too freaking cold here for those sun-loving tarts. That could be a problem...unless you have a green house. Which is exactly what the people at Raynblest Farm have. They were the only people at the PSU farmer's market to have lemons, and that continues to be true (as far as I know). Thank god for them. They never have very many, but if you are there early, you can get them. And some very nice honey too. And three kinds of prunes.

So, I have to retract my former statement. It IS possible to make 100% local cheese in Oregon. Using lemons, milk, and whatever herbs you have at hand, 100% local cheese is possible and could be delicious.

Unripe lemons growing. Meyer lemons fruit all year round but take about 9 months to ripen.

If you don't want to depend on the whims of the market, growing your own lemons is pretty easy for anyone reading this blog, because I'm betting that if you have internet access you also have central heating. And if you have central heating, then you can keep a lemon tree in a pot in your house. Planting it outside would kill it, so don't do that. I bring this up because Graceful Blades is selling Meyer lemon trees at the Hillsdale Farmer's Market. The wonderful thing about these trees is they can be trimmed to be whatever size or shape you want them to be. That way they don't have to take up any more space than the average ficus, but with lemons.

(Btw, having local lemons now makes 100% local eggs Benedict possible. Hallelujah!)

So, this isn't meant to be a 100% local post, but one more thing. I had also previously written that thistle juice was a viable alternative to liquid rennet. Well, I've tried this a couple more times and found out that...it's totally true! AND it keeps in the refrigerator. The only "however" is that you need to use a little bit more than what the recipe calls for. For instance, I made Bondon cheese first and it worked great. Then I tried to repeat the recipe and it completely failed because the milk never properly separated and I was left with a weird sort of slimy yogurt. But I tried it again this week using twice as much rennet as the recipe calls for and it worked great! So, that is my current theory--the thistle juice is not quite as strong as real rennet so you need to use more. In my case, I used two drops of rennet to one quart of milk instead of one drop of rennet. The cheese turned out really good (with some added salt, garlic powder and herbs).

Thistle juice. Black and smelly,
but perfect for cheese.

Now, if you would like to make your own thistle rennet, here is what worked for me. Buy (or gather) a bag of thistles. One bag cost me about $4 at the farmer's market. Stick them in a food processor and grind them down until they are a wet messy paste. This will take a little while and you'll need to stop periodically and use a wooden spoon to mix it around. Once it's as pasty as you can get it, scoop it out into a fine mesh sieve and press to extract the juice. You want only juice and no solids, so use the finest mesh thing you can find. Pour the juice into a glass jar and keep in the refrigerator. I don't know how long it will keep, but mine's been in there of a couple weeks and seems fine.

One bag of thistles yielded a little less than 2 oz. of black, gross looking liquid. But because each cheese recipe only calls for a few drops of rennet at a time, this should be enough to make many many pounds of cheese. As long as it keeps in the refrigerator, this little bottle of liquid black gold will last a long time.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to use any other that rennet because today is May 21, 2011 and the rapture is happening this afternoon. So, it's been a nice time eating and blogging. Thanks for reading. For everyone left behind, good luck with the thistles.

7 Days 100% Local Round 2, Completed

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sun, 01 May 2011 17:52:00 +0000

We actually finished the 7 days last week, but I've been kinda slow in writing about it. It was a good time. Some other families joined us which made for a new dynamic. The social part of it made it more fun, and helped with supplies. But just talking about the challenge with other people was interesting to me. If you take a hair-brained idea and put it out there, you can get some pretty neat stuff.

My new Meyer lemon tree.

Anyway, moving on to our week. It was pretty good. It was easier than last time. I already wrote about the yogurt issue. That was the big lesson for this week. We didn't have the shock of the limits of local food; we knew what to expect. We knew how to find most of what we needed. But the devil was in the details. How local is local? When is it okay to bring in outside things? What is reasonable? Those were the things we dealt with, mostly around fermented dairy products. One surprise was that I didn't really miss spices as much as I thought. If you have salt, butter, and/or garlic, you can make most anything taste pretty good. Having lemons was nice too.

Things we really liked this time

One really good thing we found was the corn grits from Gee Creek farm. Kim used these to make polenta a couple times and it was really good. So easy and a perfect base for all kinds of stuff.

Another treat was the blueberry pancakes on the last day. I don't know how Kim figured this one out, but they were great. No baking soda meant they were a bit flatter than normal buttermilk pancakes, but that was fine with me.

The rock fish from Linda Brand was really good. After this meal, we decided we need to eat a lot more fish. At around $9 per pound, the price wasn't bad and the quality was excellent.

Fruit roll ups from Raynblest Farm. These were a great find. And these are the people who had meyer lemons also. Raynblest Farm mainly sells honey products, but their fruit stuff was a real treat for us.

100% local corn levain bread from Grand Central Baking. A great loaf of bread that seriously made the week so much easier. Bread is such a fundamental food.

Here is a run down of what we ate this past week, with some pictures.:

Chicken, roasted potatoes and salad

Monday

B: Oatmeal with honey, mint tea

L: Nut butter and Jelly Sandwiches

D: Sauted fiddleheads, blackbeans and spinach with garlic. Potatoes au gratin.

Tuesday

B: Gruel. Mint tea, strawberry yogurt, toast

L: Sandwichs, hard boiled egg, apple

D: Roasted chicken with potatoes and carrots. Spinach salad with pears, cranberries, and lemon cheese.

Wednesday

B: Scrambled eggs, gruel, toast, tea

L: Sandwich, hard boiled egg, popcorn, apple

D: Kate and Ian came over and brought Quiche. We made polenta with mushroom cream sauce. Rogue beer. Spinach salad.

Dinner with Ian and Kate and Celeste was a mid-week 100% local treat.

Thursday

B: Eggs on toast. Tea

L: Leftover polenta. Hard boiled egg. Apple. Popcorn.

D: Braised ham with carrots on pasta. Spinach salad

Friday

B: Egg sandwiches

L: Leftovers

D: Leftovers

Saturday

B: Oatmeal with cranberries and honey

L: Sandwiches, yogurt

D: Potato Leak Soup, spinach salad, toast

Sunday

B: Blueberry pancakes

L: Soup with Ham

D: Broiled rock fish, sauted kale with garlic, golden potatoes.

School Lunches--!00% No Problem

School Lunches were not a problem again. My daughter usually likes local week lunches better than her normal lunches, in face. In general, we just pack these items, more or less, each day.

A 100% local school lunch for a fourth grader.

Sandwich (hazelnut butter and jelly)

Hard Boiled Egg

Carrot sticks

Cranberries

Yogurt with fruit

Fruit roll ups

Popcorn

Honey Sticks

The baby had these foods this week, mixed around at most every meal. We found out he loves black beans, which is pretty neat.

Oatmeal with blueberries
Steamed carrots
Yogurt with fruit
Hard boiled egg yolks
Polenta
Pureed prunes
toast strips with lemon cheese
black beans
chicken breast meat

Bacteria in Local Food

noreply@blogger.com (Jason) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 15:25:00 +0000

Lactobacillus bulgaricus from http://bioweb.usu.edu/microscopy/

This is a post about thinkin. No recipes today. Probably not many pictures.

We are doing 7 Days 100% Local Challenge again and a couple issues have come up. This time the work of the experience is easier. I am expecting not to drink coffee. I am expecting to eat smaller meals. I am expecting to have limited choices. Definitely no going out with clients out for beers. I dealt with these issues last time.

But this time the issues are deeper. They are more complicated. They are asking me to look deeper into what 7 Days 100% Local really means. We went to the farmer's market a couple weekends ago and were talking to a vendor about the challenge. She was pretty clear that 100% local was nit-picking. 95% local was just fine.

This seems to be coming up more often. More and more the negative feedback is coming from the people who either have no interest in local food or the people who are eating mostly local already. These two opposite groups seem to view the 7 Days 100% Local challenge as far-fetched? Comical? Ridiculous?

But what they don't understand is that is not the point of the Challenge. The point of the challenge is for people who want to try to push their diet more local than it currently is, with the ultimate goal of 100% local. Someone who is 20% local may work their way to 80% local for the week. Afterwards, they may end up being 50% local because they learned some new things and found some great sources in the process. Someone who is 90% local already, if they are willing to try to stretch a little bit further, may make it to 95% local. That is the beauty of this challenge. It is not for people who are done looking. It is for those of us who are willing to go a little bit further and see what is there...

Ok, back to the point. In my house, we're past the surprise of local food limits. Now we're facing the tougher choices around what those limits of local food really are and what we are going to choose for ourselves. My wife is thinking always about the baby and my daughter--what to feed them, how to make meals for them, how local limits are impacting their food choices.

The issue of yogurt has come up a lot. What is "local yogurt". The baby loves yogurt. At 8 months, we are trying to give him more and more "solid" foods. This includes yogurt mixed with all sorts of berries, etc. The problem is that yogurt is milk + bacteria cultures. The milk is local fo'sho. But what about the Lactobacillus bulgaricus cultures? I can guarantee they aren't home grown. And even if they were, they would be home grown in a laboratory which is the anathema of small farm goodness we also look for in local week.

So, I've been doing some research. Here is what I found out:

Bacteria grows fast and dies fast. The lifespan is hours to weeks. That's it.
It reproduces itself as clones asexually, making it the least fun organisms on earth.
It is microscopic and lives in a world very different than ours.
Live ("active") cultures are good for you because they are probiotics.
The bacteria cultures needed to make yogurt are called a thermophillic starter. Cheddar cheese also uses a thermophillic starter, so you can see that when we address the topic of yogurt, we can extend this topic to cheese and, ultimately, all fermented milk products.

Now, how does this enter into the topic of local food?

An apple and a tub of yogurt walk into a bar...
If you have a quart of yogurt made from the cows down the street + a packet of yogurt starter ordered from a laboratory in California, can you call that 100% local in Portland, Oregon? No you can't. It may be 99% local, but it is not 100% local. By extension, does any fermented milk product that uses bacteria automatically get excluded from the 100% local challenge? Seems like it. If you are adding foreign ingredients to your mild to make yogurt, then it's doesn't meet the 100% local standard.

Here is another way to think about it. Hood River, Oregon, is famous for the apple orchards. No one would disagree that a Hood River apple is a local apple. But the saplings and the seeds used to grow these orchards very likely came from somewhere else. I really really doubt that these are indigenous apple trees. We have no problem eating these "local" apples even though they originated at one time from foreign sources.

Why is bacteria any different than an apple tree? Both are cultured. Both are living organisms. Both are used as food producers. Both are transplants. Why be a size-ist and say that bacteria grown from an east-coast starter kit isn't local while a tree grown from an east coast seed supply company is?

Let's talk about yeast for a minute. Yeast is very small and is used in bread. If you make a loaf of sandwich bread, you'll probably need some packets of instant yeast. But if you make a sour dough from a cultured bucket of wild yeast, then it is local. Also, if you culture your own yeasts in San Francisco it will taste different than yeast cultured in Portland . Wild yeast has it's own flavor profile depending on where it is. That is one of the things that makes it so great.

Now, does this mean that a natural yogurt culture will taste different in Portland vs. Ohio? Probably not. There is more to the flavor than just the bacteria and these other factors will most likely overwhelm.

But what is not different is the idea that you can do things in a variety of ways. You can get Fleishman's Instant Yeast out of a package or you can culture your own. You can order apples from Idaho or you can plant a seed and grow a tree. You can empty a packet of Lactobacillus bulgaricus into your milk and make a quart of yogurt, or you can cultivate a "mother" culture of yogurt bacteria.

In each case, culturing the thing is what makes it local. It imparts an artistry. It shows a certain amount of care. It creates a local "colony". Also, it creates a chance to fail.

Failure Can Be A Good Thing
A big part of appreciating local food is appreciating that there are lots of things that are not local. There are lots of things that will fail if they are planted here. Mango tree = fail. Raspberries = success. That is how we separate what is true to this place from what is not. That is how we know we are someplace distinct, that we are not just floating in a Willy Wonka wonderland of edible conveniences. It is the opposite of Ray Krock's dream of universally accessible and homogeneous food. As a person interested in local food, I'm glad for that.

Eating local means understanding that this place is not like every other place. You're feet are on this ground. This air is in your lungs. This wind is on your face. This food is in your belly. These horizons are your horizons.

Back to yogurt. Does yogurt have a chance to fail? I guess that depends a lot on the competency of the yogurt maker. If you constantly supplement the yogurt and keep pouring in more starter, it won't fail because you have it on life support. But if you are cultivating something and you take it off life support, then it has a chance to fail.

Supplementers or Cultivators
Because of the nature of bacteria, it really does come down to either it's okay or it's not. There cannot be much gray area with something that has a lifespan so short and reproduces by cloning itself. These things will never become "acclimated".

It is the intention of the producer that matters more here. Are they cultivating the culture, or are they just supplementing? If the intention is to cultivate the yogurt rather than just pour in another packet of yogurt starter each time, and if the intention is to create a local yogurt bacteria colony, then I'd say we're on track to local. It represents a local intention, with a kick-start. Those east coast apple seeds are a kick-start too. They start a local orchard, and we eat the local apples.

I don't think my family's struggles with sorting though the finer points of local food are done. The question of fermented foods and bacteria presents a real challenge, especially when you realize just how much of these sorts of things we eat. We'll keep working it out.

In the mean time, we figured out that making yogurt at home is actually really really simple. It just takes milk, yogurt, and an oven. Using some yogurt bought from a local dairy as the kick-start, we're starting our own yogurt colony. Then we'll have local yogurt and the baby will be happy.