1.  A delightful interview with Kim Gorton, conducted by Bella English, in which Ms. Gorton talks about fish.  She notes that the annual International Boston Seafood show will take place March 15-17.  If you haven’t been, you ought to go: Booths of producers, purveyors, and high-tech doodads for restaurants and industry chock full of lively, funny characters.  I reported on the event for public radio, back in the day.  http://www.bostonseafood.com/10/public/Content19221.aspx

2.  Meat loaf recipe.  Intended for people who: A) Do not have access to the Internet.  B) Have access to the Internet, but do not know how to google, “meatloaf.”  http://www.tastymeatloafrecipes.com/

3.  A piece on what makes the best butter.  No criteria are listed, such as: Taste, texture, and appearance.  The judges are anonymous, except for the author of the piece.  Bizarre piece of reporting.

4.  Review of East by Northeast, a new restaurant that sounds good in East Cambridge.  For some odd reason, the chef, Philip Tang, is compared by the reviewer to chef David Chang.  It’s odd because chef Chang is the owner of  highly regarded, exclusive restaurants in NYC.   Momofuko Ko, for example, offers extensive, complex tasting courses that rock your senses.  Chef Tang has a nice, new storefront place that’s pretty straightforward.  (I wrote Chef Chang up in Robb Report in 2009 as one of the best restaurants in the country.)  Are they compared by the reviewer because both men are Asian-American?    (Chef Tang is Chinese-American.  Chef Chang is Korean-American.)  Wow, exotic Asians!  What a big world we live in.

The New York Times

1.  Great short piece on a panel discussion to be held about Joe Baum on March 16 at the Theresa Lang Community and Student Center of New York at 55 W. 13th Street, 212-229-5488.  For $5, you can learn about how to run a successful restaurant.  Mr. Baum was the creator of Windows on the World and The Four Seasons, among other places, and his knowledge of the business informed current leaders like Drew Nieporent and Danny Meyer.

2.  Coffee Town.  Do we really need  three full pages on how NYC is now, “A coffee town?”  The pieces mention “java hounds.”  I don’t know about you, but if I see a java hound coming towards me, I’m running the other way.    Besides, when was NYC ever not a coffee town?  What?  You never heard of Porto Rico Importing Company?  Best coffee in the universe: http://www.portorico.com/store/index.html

3.  Nice small blurb on Gastronomica’s new book compiling many articles: http://www.amazon.com/Gastronomica-Reader-Darra-Goldstein/dp/0520259394.  I hasten to add that I’ve reported for them on: The psychology of chefs, sous vide cooking, and chef Andrew Carmellini.  Chef Carmellini is just like chef Mario Batali and it’s not what you think, it’s not because they are both Italian-American.  There are other reasons.  Really, I mean it.

Not your mother’s meatloaf:

I mention this by way of saying that many of the world’s great chefs have a lot of baggage, too.  Lucky us, that they left home.  Found new cuisines, new flavors, new techniques, new ways of seeing and feeling and, indeed, expressing love.

I think of an interview I did with Jean Georges about his initial arrival  in Thailand: “I made the taxi driver stop at least eight times on the way to the hotel just to taste the food at the markets we drove by.”

Or a conversation with Eric Ripert.  Why he was traveling to Scandinavia: “To explore–to taste new things.”

I loved Lutece, who didn’t, and it was unfortunate that Soltner did not leave his kitchen enough.

Nowadays, our great chefs are peripatetic, having left their homes where the horizon was visible at a hillock or colline: Boulud, Ducasse, Robuchon are a few who took to the road.

Certainly there are chefs who remained rooted and great depth is evident in their cooking.  And yet, the globalization of consciousness in cooking is a kind of revolt of the senses.

Thank goodness for food.

Big discovery: I feel better when I eat.

Last night, using a thick filet from New Deal Market, I made “Hake, Salerno style,” adapted from a recipe in Dave Pasternack’s book based on the food he serves in his restaurant, Esca.  Esca is my favorite restaurant on the planet.

You preheat an oven to 450 degrees.  You take little Yukon potatoes and boil them for 10 minutes in salted water.  You put two garlic cloves, a handful of fresh basil, a handful of fresh parsley, and about a cup of fresh breadcrumbs in a Cuisinart.  You let the potatoes cool and slice them in half and make a layer in an ovenproof pot.  You put the hake on top of the potatoes.  You put two sliced garlic cloves and about an ounce of butter on top of the hake.  You put some of the mixture from the Cuisinart on the potatoes and fish.  You put a lid on the pot and put it in the oven for 10 minutes.  Remove and eat.

I felt much better.

This week, however, it’s going to be lazy:

Monday: Chicken parmesan

Tuesday: Tuna Bolognese

Wednesday: Rendezvous.  This is a very good restaurant in Central Square where I am being taken to dinner by a dude with deep pockets: DDP.

Thursday: Turkey chili

Friday: Penne amatriciana.  Found some guanciale at Russo’s at Sunday.  Oh, yeah!

This is what the pasta on Friday will look like:

But yesterday while trawling for fish in Cambridge and Boston,  looking for sources, I came across New Deal Market on Cambridge Street in East Cambridge.  It’s a clean, wonderful store selling thick filets of fresh fish, including hake, cod, and…blue fin tuna.  I’d never seen it sold as retail in the U.S. before.  Apparently, the store caters to a Japanese clientele ready to shell out the $39 per pound.

I would have thought that more discretion was called for: I mean, why not have a system where you go up to the counter and say, “Takeshi has a big smile,” and the counter person could say, “His sister’s smile is bigger,” and then sort of tilt his or head to the back room where you’d hand over an envelope of twenties and in exchange get a small, brown paper bag of endangered fish.

So I hope you enjoyed our version of Weimer as much as I did.  Next time around?  It’s going to be if you white you right, if you black, get back, as they said in my hometown of Plainfield, New Jersey, home of Texas red hots on Main Street, race riots in ‘67, and George Clinton, my personal guide.

“What would George do?”  I ask myself in any given situation.  It’s like having my own personal Jesus, as Johnny Cash sang or croaked, but with the liberty of funk.  Yeah, that’s right, you all citizens of One Nation Under A Groove if you just let it happen.  Serious.

Of course, the Palin-Brown or Brown-Palin regime will be good news for gourmands.  Food is the #1 distraction for the well-heeled whose appetites will be sated and imaginations quenched by 9-course tasting menus instead of taking it to the streets.

Sarah Palin has a view of food, by the way, consistent with a free range outlook on raising animals, no joke.  In a terrific review of her memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” (implying perhaps that our current leader’s Indonesian childhood makes him funny in a Joe Pesci kind of way), Jonathan Raban, writing in The New York Review of Books, quotes her as saying: “I love meat.  I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak.  But I especially love moose and caribou.  I always remind people that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals–right next to the mashed potatoes…”  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23723

All this said, it’s the second night of the weekend!  The new Polanski!  Time to try a new Chinese place, East by Northeast!

The ship is up-ending!  Cocktails!

This would be nice on a bed of rice, grilled, and braised.  I’d call it, “Moose Three Ways.”

Salmonella.

Discovered?  By a customer who then alerted the F.D.A. as required by new legislation (2007).

This time it’s “hydrolyzed vegetable protein,” sold by Basic Foods Flavors, a Las Vegas based company.  The company sold the ingredient to companies all across America.  According to the NYT article, food manufacturers have recalled “more than three dozen products,” on the market since 9/17/09.  The F.D.A. said that more products are likely to be recalled.

For now, the products include:  Castella Imports’ Castella Chicken Soup Base, Marzetti’s Southwest Ranch Veggie Dip and Follow Your Heart’s Curried Tofu.

Not curried tofu!  Yes, curried tofu.  I’m sorry.

In addition to the specificity of this current recall, here is what is really fascinating:  According to the NYT article, “The F.D.A. learned of the Las Vegas contamination because of legislation passed by Congress in 2007 that required food manufacturers to alert the government when they find salmonella or other contaminants in ingredients from suppliers.  But the mandate took years to go into effect because the F.D.A. could not get its database off the ground. The delay may have contributed to more than 500 illnesses and at least eight deaths last year that were linked to contaminated peanut butter from the Peanut Corporation of America. At least one company that interacted with Peanut Corporation was aware of sanitation problems at the company’s plants but never alerted federal officials.  In September, the agency activated its contamination database. As a result, when one of Basic Food Flavors’ customers found salmonella in a batch of hydrolyzed vegetable protein, it was required to alert the F.D.A.”

So a company knew about the sanitation problems, but didn’t report it?  Makes me think of Harry Lyme in, “The Third Man,” profiting from diluted antibiotics.

It also drives home the point that just as regulation is needed for banks mucking with derivatives and credit default swaps, so it’s needed in the world of food.  Unlikely, though, since both parties benefit from lobby money that funds their stays in office.

Better learn to go homegrown, folks.

I still can’t get over the curried tofu.  Man!

Curried tofu salad with or without salmonella?  Who the heck knows?

Philadelphia has Reading Terminal where Amish and Southeast Asian vendors sell spectacular stuff in a wonderful old building where one of the world’s great diners serves delicious crispy bacon.

Then there’s Pike Place Market in Seattle, the Embacadero in San Francisco, Eastern Market in Detroit, the Union Square market in NYC, the Saturday market in Hilo.  To name only a few.

The Boston area has Haymarket: It’s a remnant of what it once was, ages ago, and now is populated with stalls where vendors sell the produce and fruit that larger buyers passed on at the Chelsea wholesale market.  Haymarket is important for people with fixed incomes, low incomes, and no incomes, but it can’t compete with other places if you can afford them.

The Boston area also has farmers markets all over from May through October.  I stopped going to these about three years ago.  The fruit and produce is half as good and twice as expensive as what’s available at Russo’s (Boston’s answer to Fairway) and Whole Foods.  These markets are like open-air boutiques.

So it’s very exciting to see the glimmer of a farmers market in the future.  It could provide a place to rub shoulders, chat, and enjoy an exchange of ideas as is true in any great marketplace.

The New York Times

1. Lead story: Bunnies.  Let’s kill bunnies.  We see a big, white rabbit, adorable, courageous, refusing to plea for mercy, held by its neck, about to meet its maker.  Sort of looks like that wonderful National Lampoon cover: “If You Don’t Buy this Magazine, We’ll Kill this Dog.”  Back story?  I heard that Daffy Duck planted this story in the press.  See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgAVroI6_34&feature=related.   See what I mean?

2.  Great recipe by Bittman: 4 steps to make Yaki-soba.  Sign me up.

3.  Review by Sam Sifton of new Village restaurant “Choptank,” where he rates it as, Satisfactory.  These negative reviews are Dorothy Parker-like in their snideness, but Sifton overplays his hand revealing inchoate snottiness with the piece’s best line: “New Yorkers probably deserve better.”  What?  The rest of the country probably doesn’t?

The Boston Globe

1.  A nice, short, hands-off interview with ex-con Jeff Henderson who transformed himself into a chef.  No note is made in the piece of the “nearly 10 years,” Chef Henderson spent incarcerated after a conviction for cocaine trafficking, nor his life in Las Vegas currently, but we do learn that change is possible through hard work and sobriety.  Also: His kids are vegan!  They don’t like it when dad roasts a chicken!

2.  Terrific short piece on a storefront restaurant in what remains of an old Boston fruit and vegetable open air market: Haymarket International Food.  Run by Adib Kabbani,  the shop sells falafel, tabbouleh, and shawarma.  Mr. Kabbani is reported to have arrived here just three and a half years ago from  Lebanon where he was said to have run a 24-hour hospital cafeteria.

3.  Underground restaurants.  Chefs phone friends, friends phone friends, people gather in a house or apartment, and everyone throws in cash and wine for a tax and tip free dinner.  This is the culinary equivalent of raves.  The operative word is: Cheap.  The other operative word is: Illegal.  Why is it illegal?  Well, the chef isn’t paying taxes on income.  If that’s OK with you, pull up a chair.  If not, drop a dime.

There are few jobs on the Cape outside of seasonal ones such as cleaning houses, cottages, and hotel or motel rooms.  There is no manufacturing base, no industry, and the restaurants are often family-owned.  On top of that, public transportation is virtually non-existent and few people I meet can afford cars, car insurance, state excise tax, and upkeep.

People I meet don’t leave the Cape because where would many of them go?  This is where their families are, their communities, what’s familiar, what they love and hate.  Makes me think of Mickey in Sabbath’s Theatre: “Everything he hated was here.”

For people to leave it would take the stamina, peculiarity, and vision of the emigrants who continue to flee their homes and make a new life in America.   But wait a second: This is America.

It’s confusing, but not quite The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

After leaving the office, having heard and absorbed narratives of staggering loss, I drive to a fish store on West Main Street.  Pristine fish in aluminum trays so good and fresh that at home the cooking required is fast and easy.  And: a free lemon!

Most prominent in my thoughts, I am working especially hard to deny my overriding sense that all of us bright “foodies” over the past 20 years should have spent 10% as much time thinking about the larger world as we did enjoying the private, sybaritic pleasures of food.  Trying to explore how food gains meaning with contexts–emotional, psychological, economic.  Perhaps then we wouldn’t be in such a colossal mess with the worst still to come.  You just wait and see.  Serious, as Ludacris would say.  Serious, serious.

What a self-centered couple of decades it has been.  Amazing, makes those who profited during the gilded age look like a bunch of tightwads.  What a shame.

Ah, breathe.

But I mean, honestly: Chinese food and no equal talk among foodies about the effect of the Chinese snapping up all those T-bills?  Big restaurant tabs and no one asking where the money came from?  Foodies.  The name itself sounds like something Tolkien would have arrived at: “The foodies lived at the base of Mordor.”  As my grandma Rae from East New York in Brooklyn would say, “What?  You kidding me?”

Fortunately, of course, food does provide mind-numbing comfort and distraction from our moral responsibilities.  That said, let’s look at the rather thrilling week ahead in The Haas Test Kitchen.  We’re pretty darn excited about the lighter food heralding spring.  Hope you are, too!

Monday: Pan seared sole Puttanesca style with baby Vidalia onions.

Tuesday: Grilled swordfish, candy beets, and “poached” cauliflower.

Wednesday: Tuna Bolognese: This is becoming a staple around here.

Thursday: Little veal meatballs with penne and roasted yellow peppers.

Friday: Chicken parmesan and crispy Romaine hearts.

This is all assuming that the unemployed rioters will wait a week before taking their protests to the streets.