Author Archives: Jason

What Was On Hand No. 982: Sweet and Shredded Mexican Sausage

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Grocery shopping in NYC can be a mixed bag.  On one hand, I’ve got a 24-7 Korean grocer two blocks away who has lots of produce (even if it is of anonymous origin) and high-end staples (even if they are kind of expensive).  On the other hand, I can’t get in a car and drive to Trader Joe’s or Wholefoods, instead having to do my best to squeeze into the average day sizable blocks of time to get to stores that aren’t really convenient.  The result, particularly as the work hours and the number of jobs increase, is too often an 8:00 p.m. choice between a motley mix of past-their-prime leftovers and takeout.

So  I’ve decided to focus, whenever possible, on whipping together dinners from assorted odds and ends in the fridge: the quarter gourd of a butternut squash, the apple that by tomorrow will be too soft, the spicy pickles hiding in a tub in the back corner.

The other evening, I came up with the following.

Jay’s Sweet and Shredded Mexican Sausage

Ingredients:

  • 1 small sweet potato (sitting on the counter for a week and a half)
  • 7 ounces of real or fake sausage (half a package left over from brunch a few days prior)
  • half a package of frozen broccoli florets (living in the freezer for however long)
  • two handfuls of salad greens (bought on sale around the corner)
  • cheddar cheese (a staple, duh) Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Mexican Cold Ones

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I believe that we need more salt-rimmed beverages in our lives.  Or, at least, in my life.  As the salt cures me, it will preserve my liver as well.  This is all about science.

We all know about salt-rimmed margaritas and licking the salt before taking a shot of tequila.  A few years ago, however, I was turned on to micheladas, Mexican beers mixed with various lime-tomato-chili combinations and served on ice in a salt-rimmed glass. My favorite has long been the one served at the incomparable Chevela’s in Prospect Heights.  Their tomato mixture is some kind of spicy bloody mary mix and the salt on the rim is mixed with something tangy.  Shannon speculates dried tamarind.  (Shannon, who loathes tomato juice, loves micheladas; so what does that tell you?) Last night, though, we ate at El Centro in Hell’s Kitchen after watching Alvin Ailey’s dancers kill it, and the micheladas there are simply Modelo Especial mixed with fresh lime and mottled costeño chile, a moderately hot chili used in sauces.  They were fresh and refreshing.  Presented with straws, we sucked them down in minutes.

They got me wondering, though, about the origins of the michelada.  And the wondrous internet provides a handful of different possibilities. Continue reading →

East Nashville’s Resident Apothacary Wizards

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On a recent visit to Nashville, my brother introduced me to High Garden, an “old fashioned apothecary herb and tea shop,” in the proto-gentrifying neighborhood called East Nashville.  The location felt appropriate to me because this is the kind of store that in New York would detonate like a bomb in Williamsburg or play the beckoning outpost empty warehouses in Bushwick.  But High Garden is not in Brooklyn.  It is far too charmingly humble and reasonably priced to be so.  When I walk into the shop, I want to buy everything.

High Garden is a bit like something out of The Shire or else from a hard-pack crossroads where friars and maidens going this way chew the fat with knights and knaves going that way.  I love the place, and not just because I’m at least 1/3 a hippie. High Garden is kind of magic.  Glass jars containing herbs and teas both familiar and obscure cover the back wall floor to ceiling.  Need lung wort, yarrow, or kava kava?  Not sure at all what ashwaghandra, milk thistle, or catuaba bark are for?  Well, you’re in luck because owner Leah Larabell not only sells them but thoroughly knows this stuff like the back of her hand.  She’s a trained counselor specializing in teens and adolescents, but this—the ages-old wisdom of which plant is good for which of our ailments—is obviously a passion.

Present Leah with any number of symptoms and she’ll ask a few questions, cross to her jars, and mix together in a silver bowl on a wooden table teas and herbs to address your needs.  I told her, for example, that I sleep like hell, am frequently anxious or angry, and just might be prone to the occasional delusion about the fabric of the world (though maybe you’re the delusional one, buddy) and the woman nodded, went to her jars, got to work.  While this went on, her husband and co-owner Joel spooned gourmet tea blends into tea bags and poured me a milk-steamed Oolong and orange drink that was a crackerjack transposition of a creamsickle into beverage form. Continue reading →

Smoky Greens with Cranberry and Pine Nuts

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Shannon and I were visiting my brother and his wife last week, giving me an opportunity to play further with greens.  Their CSA delivered them a clutch of beautiful orange, yellow, and purple carrots.  Andrew is all about his carrot greens, which is convenient since they’re super high in potassium, Vitamin K, magnesium, etc.  We also had on hand a bunch of beets, so I tore the greens off of them (high in Vitamin A, as well as K) and tried to figure out what to do.  Andrew and I then came up with the following, Thanksgiving-inspired dish.

 

Smoky Greens with Cranberry and Pine Nuts

  • two bunches of carrot, beet, or any other green
  • cup of dried cranberries
  • quarter to half cup of pine nuts
  • one large yellow onion
  • olive oil
  • garlic
  • paprika, chili powder, cumin, salt & pepper

Chop onions and saute over low heat until soft.  Add garlic and infuse the oil.  If your Continue reading →

I Stank I Can, I Stank I Can: All Aboard the Forager Express

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You know Ginko trees, those numbers with the stanky yellowish berries that I, and perhaps you, called “stinky trees” as a wee lad?  Well, I ate some of that stank.

This came about because Shannon is awesome and for an anniversary present took me deep into Queens to spend an afternoon with Wildman Steve Brill.  A name like Wildman primarily conjures in me images of either a crazed and burly mountain man type or a happily-hard-livin drummer in a band opening for Dokken in 1987, but Steve Brill fits neither of these molds.  In fact, this is the picture he has of himself on his website, which more perfectly sums him up than anything I could write this morning.

Our afternoon with Steve, billed by Shannon as “New York’s top wild food foraging expert,” was spent walking Forest Park learning about and filling up a bag with wild roots, berries, and greens (or weeds, if you want to be classist) that we could incorporate with dinner.  It was nothing less than unflaggingly awesome. Continue reading →

The Maitake: Sexy, Lethal, Dance-Worthy

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I’m a big fan of mushrooms.  A few years ago Michael Pollan turned me on to the fact that the mushrooms we see are actually just the furthest reaches of vast fungal organisms that can stretch for miles and miles under the ground.  We can only study them so much because to unearth them is to destroy their most delicate points of composition.  How awesome is that?  Very awesome.

Justin Laman, fearless American Education entrepreneur and unfailingly gracious host, agrees.  I presume.  He’s been a mushroom hound, an amateur mycologist, for as long as I’ve known him, and I have to think he must be at least as turned on by the forever-unknowable heart of the mushroom mystery as I am.

I did not ask him, however.  I’m simply imposing my own feelings onto his.  I did ask him about his favorite mushroom of the moment.  He told me it’s maitake.  I asked him why.  He told me, “Tasty. Real flesh that doesn’t just melt. Hearty meat. Very hard to miss-identify. Nice woodsy flavor. And they grow super huge!”

You probably know maitake.  They’re also called Hen of the Woods, and they’re awesome.  You can drizzle them with some oil, sprinkle on some spices, and roast them for a spell to end up with a hefty entre or side for dinner.  They have substance.  They also, according to the American Cancer Society, were once worth their weight in silver in ancient Japan.  “Maitake” means “dancing mushroom” in Japanese because people were so psyched to discover them.  The American Cancer Society cares because they’re sponsoring research into the tumor-reducing properties of beta glucan, a polysaccaride contained in maitakes.  Japan has been using them as medicine for centuries.

I don’t know if Laman knows any of this.  I asked him which or what kind of band maitake would be if  it were, in fact, a band.  He simply sent the link below.

 

My interpretation is maitakes are fun, even playful.  You can enjoy their essential components because you’re enjoyed them a million times before in different forms, but this time, your enjoyment just might lead to the shrinking of a cancerous growth.  Refraining from imposing upon the ‘shroom any larger meaning beyond the simple, nay—syllabic, joy frees it to thrive in its essential fungal’ness.  Perhaps they create dance parties or playtime butchery in the mouth as well.

So How’s Congress Going to Nip that Salmonella in the Bud? Neil Young Will Tell You.

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Last Thursday was Food Day.  What is Food Day?  Is it like Administrative Assistants’ Day or National Doughnut Day (These are both true “holidays,” the latter dating from 1938)?   I guess so, at least in the sense that nobody seems to know about it.

Skinny men...

But Farm Aid, (which has a pretty great picture of Neil Young just not giving a damn on its web site) dropped an email noting Food Day’s existence.  It did so in the context of the Food Safety Modernization Act, pending legislation that aims to address situations like the recent cases of melamine in baby formula, e. coli-spiked spinach, etc.  There are a variety of things to learn about current food safety (including the fact that 15 federal agencies now share responsibility for it) as well as about the Act, and it’s worth reading about them here, but here are a few key things to keep in mind.

  1. Proposed legislation currently mandates on-farm safety standards that dramatically favor industrial-sized farms and threaten the ability of small and mid-sized farms, the very farms that more effectively get fresh produce to all of us and the very farms more likely to be run be people we know and can thus trust, to compete.
  2. The overwhelming source of the pathogens finding their way into our food come from factory farms, where animals and produce are exposed to massive lakes of animal shit, and the antibiotics that are pumped into those animals (70% of the country’s entire use of antiobiotics) so they can remain “healthy” while standing around in that shit, in turn making those pathogens resistant to antibiotics.
  3. The Act currently makes zero mention of those two primary sources of food contamination.
  4. There were an average of 100 food illness outbreaks a year during the 1990s.  George W. largely left safety regulation up to the industry and the average yearly outbreaks during his tenure numbered 350.

So guess who has their hands in the current legislation?

Less-skinny men

Not that that’s a surprise.  But there are proposals to at least keep the local and regional guys from getting buried, including the Growing Safe Food Act introduced by Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow.  Read more about it and help Farm Aid support that and other small-farm protections here.  You can fill out seven boxes with your name and zip and such and hit “send.”  Easy.

Jason’s Middle-Eastern Greens & Beans

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It’s winter greens time.  I love my dark greens.  Other people don’t.  Most people don’t, probably.  Shannon has traditionally been one of these people, and this is convenient for me because 1) I live with her, and 2) one of the things I love in life is winning converts to foods they’ve previously sniffed at.  I have yet to convince Shannon that V8 is awesome, but I did manage to whip up some greens last night that won approval and even an extended life in the form of a second helping.  Greens are insanely healthy for you, and you’ll notice a difference in your day if you eat them regularly.  With a little creative spicing and coupling with beans, they’ll easily become one of your staples.

We had a bunch of braising greens from the CSA, a clutch of mustard greens and kale and turnip greens and other things I couldn’t identify.  We also had some nice new carrots, and I twisted off their greens (6 times as high in Vitamin C as the roots, plus high in magnesium, potassium, and Vitamin K) and added them to the mix.  I then proceeded with the following simple recipe.  Any mix of dark greens will work.

Ingredients:

  • 1 large bunch of greens
  • 1 can of cannellini beans (or other white bean)
  • 1 bulb garlic
  • 1 jalapeño pepper (or any hot pepper)
  • olive oil & butter
  • salt & pepper
  • cumin
  • 6 tbs of za’atar (more to taste)

Crush the bulb of garlic and divide it between two pots.  In one, add olive oil, the diced jalapeño, and a pat of butter.  In the other, add just a bit of olive oil.  Set the first pot aside. Continue reading →

Bananas Foster, Proprietary Erythritol, and Life After Spinal Tap

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Amongst those bee keepers and bacon curers and renegades of raw-milk cheese on hand at the Mother Earth News Fair a week ago were a few purveyors of actual manufactured food.  Amongst these was Begley’s and Bill’s, an all natural soda company owned by Ed Begley, Jr., that most famous of Spinal Tap drummers and a long-term and pleasingly unassuming environmentalist.

Begley’s sodas are not only all natural (a term not regulated by the FDA), but calorie free (a term which is).  Or, to be more precise, they have 0.2 kilocalories per gram which is the same, as far as the FDA is concerned, as calorie free.

I am not a soda guy.  I haven’t had a Coke in years and only occasionally mix ginger ale in a drink.  Our favorite Chinese delivery place (J’s Wong, here’s to ya) continues to bring us cans of Pepsi and they are lined up like soldiers beside the sink, waiting to see which of my impulses—(a) to not waste and thus put them on the stoop for passersby or (b) to do the world a favor and pour them down the drain—will win out.

And I think artificial sweeteners are poison hand’s down.  After all, what foodstuffs taste like poison until you ingrest them enough to become inured?  Other than Aspartame and its cohorts, the thing that springs to mind is whiskey.  I like whiskey.  But I’m under no illusions.

So I was interested in checking out Begley’s soda.  I bought a four-pack that included root beer, ginger ale, strawberry, and banana’s foster.  That’s right.  Whomever thought of that last as a soda flavor was a genius.

But first, let’s address the zero calorie thing. Continue reading →

At the Mother Earth News Fair: Torrential Rains, Pens of Alpacas, & an Improbably Delicious Vegan Taco

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Alpacas, just about the softest creatures you'll ever touch, tend to look like Muppets when rained upon. They are always, in the words of Cluckin Awesome Coops owner Reece McClung, "very unlikely looking creatures."

The Mother Earth News Fair is an odd duck.  I write that rather than “strange beast” because the fair, held at a verdant ski resort an hour east of Pittsburgh last weekend, was far more plucky than beastly, and not just because torrential rain and wind walloped the thing all through Saturday.  The “fun-filled, hands-on sustainable lifestyle event” was awash, as could be expected, in exhibitor booths hawking bee keeping products and heirloom seeds and energy efficiency technologies.  There were over 240 pretty fantastic workshops, hour-long sessions with titles like “How to Cure Your Own Bacon,” and “Homesteading the Suburbs with the Kids,” and “Hand-Milk Your Goat; Make Feta, Chevre, and Ricotta; and Stay Out of Jail.”

But there were also exhibitors demonstrating for rapt middle aged men the newest and greatest development in drill bit technology, pens of alpacas, and a wildly popular booth selling slim plastic devices that allow women to pee standing up.  The event was slammed with people.  When the Continue reading →