The Way of the Mushroom

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Shannon

Here are two truths that I have come to realize. 1) There are people out there with a natural affinity for finding mushrooms. You will know these people when you happen upon them, because at some point in the conversation, they will not be able to control themselves, and they will tell you about the massive morel supply they scored the previous day. When they go hiking, they practically trip over puffballs and hen-of-the-woods. If physics allowed for the sparkle in their eye to be mushroom-shaped, it would be. 2) I am not one of these people.

To explain how I learned this, we need to back up a step, to my birthday last month. My friend Mignon gave me a mushroom box from Back to the Roots, out of which you can grow your own delicious fungi. It was a lovely gift, and one that filled me with trepidation, since Jason and I had bungled a similar gift a couple years ago. Twice. But this one did feature smiling children, oohing and aahing over their mushrooms, on the back of the box, which boosted my confidence. I can do most, if not all, of the things a four-year-old can do. And yet, when I found myself balancing cat food cans in order to anchor a wobbly and submerged bag of peat, I had little hope that this experiment would actually work.

Enter my brush with some mushroom folk at Bonnaroo. Continue reading →

Wearing Your Food on Your Sleeve

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Shannon

For those days when a t-shirt is simply not enough.

It’s been a slow blog week, dear readers, but I swear we have a good excuse. We were recovering from another fun year at Bonnaroo, where Jack White and Neutral Milk Hotel rocked my socks off. And while, sadly, the primitive skills guy was not there this year to impart his wisdom on mystical fox goodies, food was never far from my mind.

If there was one dominant theme in the t-shirts I saw people wearing at the festival, it was definitely…kittens. (Jason spotted two different kitten/Jaws poster spoofs, one that said Paws! and one that said Claws!). But taking a close second place were food-themed t-shirts of many flavors. And so today, let’s look at the ways you can let your foodie flag fly with your choice of garment. (I’ll link the photos to where you can buy these beauties, in case you want to bolster your summer wardrobe.)

Bonnaroo prides itself on its politically engaged audience. For instance, I saw a pretty awesome “Stand Up for Your Food” shirt at the festival, which I coveted but have not yet been able to find online. Anyway, why not make a statement with your tee, whether your opinions run toward supporting local farmers or force-feeding more geese?

Continue reading →

Good Beer, Bad Hair: A Visual Journey for Father’s Day

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Llalan

There’s actually beer in that milkshake we’re holding at this father-daughter dance.

A helpful PSA from Just Add Beer: this Sunday is Father’s Day! It’s one of my favorite made-up holidays because 1) I’m very fond of my father, and 2) the holiday-creating entities of our capitalist oligarchy have decided beer should be a big part of Father’s Day. The beverage is featured in store displays of cards, ties, and books alongside the same items geared toward cars, sports, or meat. Because that’s what American dudes do. Never mind that NONE of the men in my life define themselves using any of these stereotypes. Except beer.

He may not know it, but my father, Boyd, gave me my first real drink of alcohol, a glass of wine when I was visiting from college for a holiday. I went to Ohio University, and by all rights I should have been a heavy drinker by then, but I wasn’t. That night SNL had never been funnier and I helped myself to another slosh before bed.

This was a Bad Hair Year for us both

It’s only fitting then, that I helped him enter the world of craft beer. When I was growing up, Dad was a Busch man. I tried a can in college (having quickly embraced the drinking culture the next quarter) and wondered at my father’s fortitude. How had this man drank several of these a night for years and still maintained decent gastrointestinal health? Good God! When I was very young he referred to it as his “skunk juice,” which I took literally at first and later adopted as our code for beer in public, much to my mother’s chagrin.

Continue reading →

Tamarind Time Machine

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Shannon

I didn’t even have to squeeze anything out of a sock this time!

A lot of the time, my days in Cambodia feel very far away. Going through my old notebooks is like walking into a weird time portal, full of interviews with people I don’t remember (“Question: how long does it take you to paint a single tuk-tuk?”), odd to-do lists (“Find copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for Savuth”) and discarded lyrics for a comedic folk song entitled “All My Linga Wants Is Your Yoni” (funnier than it sounds, I swear).

But with the publication of this cool anthology, which includes some of my Cambodian musings, I was looking for a way to pay homage to and feel reconnected with the Kingdom of Wonder. That’s when I went hunting through my notes for the recipe for Tofu with Tamarind, Chili and Basil. I scored it while writing a weekly column for The Phnom Penh Post called The Learning Curve in which I would try to learn traditional Khmer pursuits and then make fun of myself while I bumbled my way through them. Looking back, I see that I must have irritated a lot of busy people while researching this column, but they tended to be unfailingly good-natured about it, and Oeurm Pav at Arun Restaurant was no exception.

But would I be able to remember enough about interviewing her to recreate my favorite Khmer dish? It was a long time ago, my notes were sketchy, and even in optimal conditions, I’m lazy about measurements. However, I was able to purchase tamarind paste in an Indian grocery store in Queens, whereas in Cambodia, I had to boil the tamarind and squeeze it through one of Jason’s socks for lack of a cheesecloth. Perhaps giving undue weight to this head start, I decided that I could just intuit my way through the rest of it. Continue reading →

A+ Number One Lazy Man’s Irrigation Scheme

Posted on June 10, 2014 by Jason

I have such noble intentions. I understand that new acquaintances might not always deduce that. For instance, that woman I called out on the corner of Broadway and Houston for throwing her cup on the ground might have been surprised when, after I called her lazy before realizing she was hammered at five on a Monday afternoon, received my middle finger and a laugh in response to her threat, “I’ll clean you so bad you won’t even know!” Certainly a small handful of supervisors and employers have been unsure of how to assess my exuberance, vehemence, volume, and proclamations at holiday parties. But I almost always start out on the right track.

Such is my way, I’m a bit ashamed to confess, with my gardens as well. To reach my flagship model, I have to scooch around Rachel and Tim’s hand-me-down futon, clamber over the garden paraphernalia and assorted whatever “stored” in that corner, thrust open the ancient window, leg it out on to the fire escape where I clamber over more paraphernalia, drop the ladder, and climb down. Every year I tell myself this is but a small hassle, and it’s not like I’m trying to grow dates in the West Bank. Continue reading →

School Lunches and Fomenters

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Jason

I get a fair amount of propaganda in my inbox. One recent email trumpeted Congress: Don’t Gut School Lunch Standards and Damage our Children’s Health! I learned there was a party-line vote to move forward in the House with a bill to provide more “flexibility” in applying the school lunch standards set by the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFK).

The death of a public good by a thousand, GOP-led cuts? How much more zeitgeist’y can you get? I was on it.

And then, well, I had to dig for the meat and potatoes of the situation. And those meat and potatoes illustrate remarkably well a different contribution to the zeitgeist: folks barking in caps and exclamation points to rally the hoi polloi to post a rant, click send on a petition.

So the caps-&-!! email informed me that four years into the country’s current experiment in mandating healthy school lunches, Republicans seek to let schools opt out of applying those new health standards if their budgets are suffering as a result of implementing them. The School Nutrition Association, a professional group of school nutritionists, supports the idea; however, it also happens to be funded in part by food manufacturers like Domino’s. But the National School Boards Association, a national federation of 95,000 school boards, supports it as well. Hmmm.

It turns out the opt-out folks have some good points. Continue reading →

My Darker Self, Buried within a Knish

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Shannon

“Okay, I’m really going to do it this time,” I whispered to Jason as he flipped through books on Brooklyn history with antiquated titles like Fire Laddies and Every Kind of Shipwork.

“Yep, you got this,” he told me. “Remember: spinach. Eye on the prize. Don’t get distracted by the lady with the pigtails.” He was right; the woman in question definitely had crazy in her eyes. I circled the table, trying out a stealthy, jaguar-like walk, and moved in for the kill.

We had come not with the purpose of hunting, but of listening. Laura Silver, author of the new book Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food, was giving a reading in the Brooklyn Collection of the library. The reading and the Q and A session did turn out to be fun; that woman seriously knows her knish. But I found it a little hard to concentrate, still flustered by the scene of primal competition that had gone down at the preceding wine and knish reception.

What was at stake (photo courtesy of the Village Voice)

If we can back up for a moment, I will try to explain why I was excited about this reception in the first place. It’s possible, if you are reading this from somewhere that is not New York, that you have not tasted a knish. I don’t think I knew what one was until I first moved here, and, walking friendless and hungry around Central Park, I pointed to a deep-fried little square on a hot dog cart and asked if it was vegetarian. I think I got laughed at, but I was rewarded for my humiliation with a greasy, mustard-drowned potato pastry. A street knish: not fine dining, but exactly what I needed in that moment. And later, I found the sublime, handmade knishes at Yonah Schimmel, mounds of mashed potato filling so substantial that the thin pouches of pastry can barely contain them. Every cuisine has its dumpling comfort food—the pierogi, the gyoza, the tamale, the ravioli—and the knish is among my favorites. Naturally, when I heard about the reception, I looked forward to the opportunity to commune with fellow knish-lovers and break potato with them.

So I was a little upset when the other attendees turned into a pack of slavering, ravenous wolves, stealing the free knishes right out from under me. Continue reading →

Be a Sour Puss: the Argument for Puckering Up

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Llalan

Yup. It’s sour. What about it?!

Pucker up, my friends! Today we look at sour beers, simply because I was recently involved in a conversation that, itself, turned sour. I was engaged in a bitter pissing contest with a total stranger who thought he knew more about beer than I do. We started off on the wrong foot when he suggested to me hangover remedies. (Bitch, please.) Matters escalated as we one-upped each other nastily until he asked with a challenge in his voice, “Well, have you ever had a sour beer?” I answered that I had and I quite liked them and I just tried several at the Jolly Pumpkin in Ann Arbor thank you very much. Then I stopped listening.

Sour beers do live up to their name, and some consider them an acquired taste. I hasten to mention that one needn’t be a sour puss to enjoy this style, in fact it helps if you maintain inner reserves of sweetness; but if you don’t at least try one, I will call you a sour pussy.

Sour beer is an old tradition, begun in Europe back before brewers and consumers were so nitpicky about having unknown variables floating in their brews. The sour flavor comes from the wild yeasts used to ferment the batches as well as live bacteria. Wild yeasts being the unpredictable beasts they are, brewing sour beer can be a challenge, but when it’s done right it’s a delightful mix of untamed tastes and solid chemistry. So good I wouldn’t even waste it by tossing it in that little pucker’s face. Continue reading →

Spring Cleaning, or Landscape of Culinary Failures

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Shannon

No, I’m not really sure what I was going for here.

Last weekend, Jason and I decided to clean the apartment. We like to test the limit of MCHT (Maximum Cat Hair Threshold), and we had recently been attaining new heights of achievement on that count. Given that, I wouldn’t really describe myself as being in a sunny mood as the cleaning got underway, but things steadily worsened as proof of my poor food blogger performance was discovered behind every dust bunny.

First, scattered about the living room, there was the leaf litter of forgotten blog post ideas. I had been so enthusiastic about making my own homemade limoncello when I first picked up this recipe card months ago. Ditto on that cauliflower pasta recipe that someone sent me, and the instructions for infusing honey with…actually, I don’t know what you infuse into honey, but I do know that I haven’t done it yet. Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but by the time I unearthed an article that Jason had saved on making one’s own complex spice blends, I had serious doubts about the likelihood of a successful follow-through, especially since he’s married to me.

On to the TV room, where I found menus for pizza and Thai takeout lurking among the sofa cushions and under the DVD player. I had been looking for these! Even so, they made me feel a little dismal. I suppose my affinity for takeout is no secret, but it’s a little depressing when a whole room of your home is decorated in couch potato chic. Besides, what kind of self-respecting food fan loses the best menus?

But the worst room by far was the kitchen. Even if one was able to overlook the lurid green jar in the corner, containing my sadly unsuccessful rock candy experiment, and the proof in the refrigerator that I am woefully inept at estimating the usefulness of allspice-flavored simple syrup, there would still be the stove to consider, cloaked in stains and difficult questions. Continue reading →

PitchKnives and Butter Forks

Stories of food, from the seed to the platter