A Carbohydrate Fantasia in Three Movements

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bergen bagel

Bergen Bagel, mi amor...

My obsession with carbs is not a new development. In eighth grade health class* we had a homework assignment that involved reading an account of what a fictional someone had eaten in a day and identifying what was wrong with that person’s diet. The person who ate chocolate cake for breakfast or the person who ate fried food at every meal was a no-brainer, but I recall looking at the one who ate pancakes for breakfast, a potato for lunch and pasta for dinner and thinking, “What’s wrong with that?”

Nothing is more enabling for the carb-obsessed than marathon training. It is the perfect cover while snarfing down great quantities of noodles, which is exactly what I have been doing, probably more than is strictly necessary. What is necessary is a carb-heavy diet the day before the marathon (it helps you finish faster and in less pain—I swear I am not making this up), which has led to my elaborate fantasies of what exactly I am going to eat for each meal this Saturday before I run the New York marathon on Sunday. And as I was constructing this ideal New York carb triptych, I realized that I haven’t written much about two of the three places I had in mind, which seems utterly unjust, an oversight that I should rectify.

I. New Yorkers tend to be very opinionated about their bagels, but for me, there’s really not much of a contest when it comes to where I’ll be eating breakfast on Saturday. Bergen Bagels are everything bagels should be: dense, chewy, flavorful, slathered with cream cheese, and without a chip on their shoulders about being toasted. Not that long ago, Bergen Bagel opened a third location just a couple blocks from my house, and, no joke, I consider this one of the highlights of the past year.

II. For lunch, I think I’ll mosey over to Manhattan Continue reading →

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.

Freedom & Unity: All for Beer and Beer for All!

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This is how Vermont starts a beer tour

The first Vermonter I met on our week-long stay in the Green Mountains was a red-faced middle-aged man in pajama pants, Birkenstocks with socks, and a lilac LL Bean fleece vest. “All right! Here we go! How you doin’? Great! Let’s go!” he shouted as he clapped his hands and bounded into the convenience store. A toxic cloud of alcohol breathed along behind him. I ducked down in the refrigerated aisle, debating which of the dozen or so Vermont-made beers there to try first.

Vermont does small up big. Next to my home state of Ohio, it’s really a puny place, but they lead the country in breweries per capita. Many of the breweries and brew pubs are small and don’t distribute widely. Big is not always better, and this is something that Vermonters completely understand. Sustainable, local, green, independent business practices are the standard here. These seem to be in the citizenry’s very attitude toward living in the state, which fosters the perfect atmosphere for small breweries.

A Burlington sunset over Lake Champlain

One might argue that this local pride and self confidence stems from the Revolutionary War. Ben and I are staying in the Green Mountains in the northern end of the state, right around where Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys terrorized British authorities and scared surveyors from the land. The sentiment being, as far as I can judge, “The hell you’re going to take my land.” After seeing these hills in an autumn sunset, I can see why you would fight so viciously for them. Continue reading →

Doogh the Right Thing: Persian Delicacies at the Pars Grill

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ghormeh sabzi

That rather impressive garnish is an entire pickled lime.

When my co-worker Kamal went to his native Iran this past summer for the first time in several years, I asked him what he was looking forward to the most. He could have fed me some sentimental line about seeing how the country had changed, or something like that. Instead, he paused, and with a dreamy look in his eye, said, “Probably the pastries.” Kamal’s honesty and love of food are just two of the things I like about him.

Another thing I like is that he was so determined to score some good Persian food this week that he decided to take me and a couple of other people from the office to the Pars Grill in Chelsea and teach us a thing or two about the cuisine of his homeland. I’m not sure what I was anticipating from Persian food, but I had some notion that it would be akin to what I think of as generic Middle Eastern fare, with most vegetarian food running in the hummus and falafel vein. But I was dead wrong; it was really unlike anything I’d eaten before.

dooghTo drink, I ordered a savory yogurt beverage called doogh, which, admittedly, is sort of an unfortunate name, but which couldn’t have been more delicious. It was thick and rich and icy and flavored with dill and mint and probably lots of other things that were beyond my powers of identification. Seriously, it was probably the best drink to pass my lips since that crazy coconut shake in Canada, and I still find myself daydreaming about that thing months later. It was so good that it made me feel a little drunk even though there was no alcohol involved.

kashk-e bademjanBut it’s not like the food was anything to sneeze at, either. Early highlights included some delicious bread (similar to pita bread, but crisper) and an eggplant appetizer called kashk-e bademjan, which had the consistency of babaganouj but was spiced completely differently and garnished with ground pistachio. Even my devoutly eggplant-hating coworker Devin had to concede that it was pretty good.

As for main courses, it’s true that the menu catered mainly to meat eaters. The massive size of the grilled meat slabs that everyone else ordered spurred multiple conversations about The Flintstones. Continue reading →

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 →

My Very First MOOC: Adventures in Harvard’s Cyber Kitchen

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the professors

The Professors: This is what would happen if you took Heidi Klum, crossed her with a chemical biologist and then made her stand next to a mathematician who is fond of fleece.

Some believe they herald a new dawn of equality in learning and some think they are the ruin of the American educational system, but regardless of how you feel about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes), there are more of them being offered with every passing semester. The idea is that anyone can audit a digital course from a prestigious university (for free, provided one doesn’t want academic credit for it), which is how I ended up attending my first Harvard class, Science and Cooking, while eating leftover pad thai in my pajamas.

One of the allegations against MOOCs is that they can’t possibly be rigorous enough to mirror an actual university class (see: pajamas, leftover pad thai), and I admit that the first few pitches in Science and Cooking seemed like big, slow-moving softballs. There were some fun facts about the invention of the pressure cooker and the modern oven. There was Ferran Adria jumping around and talking about spherification of yogurt like it was a religious experience. There was a music video about El Bulli (Adria’s famous restaurant) featuring a compilation of pretty food pictures edited together at a breakneck pace and set to music that would not have been out of place in a Hans-Zimmer-composed uber-dramatic film soundtrack. This was going to be a piece of cake.

And then I arrived at Lecture #2, in which the actual professors (a German chemical biologist and a mathematician who always looks like he just woke up from a nap) took the reins of the class back from the celebrity chefs. We started to calculate how many molecules were in a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Wait, what’s Avogadro’s number again? Am I really supposed to already know that water is a byproduct of the formation of triglycerides? How the hell am I supposed to know what protein is found in an egg and what its shape is like? And can I even solve logarithms without first locating the graphic calculator that I haven’t turned on since I was seventeen? Continue reading →

Sacre Bleu! Beer Lingo Part Deux

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The Science of Skunking

In our last Beer Lingo post we covered some basic confusing terms that describe a beer’s style and how it’s made. In today’s educational edition of Just Add Beer, we’ll look at terms that specifically describe a beer’s taste.

Before the beer even hits your tongue, you get an idea of the taste through the smell. In beer lingo it’s the nose. I learned this from a bartender who kept referencing the banana nose of hefeweizens, which of course, made me giggle. The smell reinforced the beer’s fruity taste and now I can’t drink a hefe without imagining the a yellow hook of that fruit sticking out of one those tall, thin glasses. Is that a banana nose I smell or are you just happy to see me?

A word that’s tossed around a lot lately is hoppy. It is used a lot because IPAs are hoppy and also sooper dooper popular. It’s used so often, in fact, I’m afraid it will go the way of ironic, as in, “Isn’t it ironic that hoppy is used to mean bitter?” No, no it isn’t. Hoppy actually refers to the flowery, aromatic taste and smell released from the hop flower; it has nothing to do with the bitter flavor you can feel on the back of your tongue — that’s just bitterness. That twang of bitter is what is measured in International Bitterness Units, as in, “That beer has the same IBU as my high school algebra teacher.” Continue reading →

Brace Your Sweet Tooth. It’s Festival Time.

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Sugar-Sweets-Poster-webHear ye, hear ye, worshippers of the sucrose! Get thyselves to Havemeyer Street, because it’s time for the Fourth Annual Sugar Sweets Festival this Sunday! It’s the bake sale to end all bake sales, and proceeds will benefit the City Reliquary, a fun and funky museum in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

It just so happens that this year Pitchknives will be represented at the festival in the flesh! Get there earlier enough and you can snap up the sweet treats that we’ll be whipping up on site. Fans of the site will know that we consider ourselves more the cooking and gardening type rather than skilled bakers, but have no fear gentle readers: we’ve come up with the perfect way to circumvent this obstacle. We’ve cooked up a sweet version of Jason’s famous masala peanuts, and we’ll be unveiling them in all their sugary glory this Sunday.

So come on down to hipster-town, eat our peanuts, watch some fun baking competitions and nab some treats from some of the hottest bakers in Brooklyn. Entry is free, so what’s not to like? You can find more details right here.

The Dessert Cure: Down in the Dumps Pudding

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novel-cure-coverLately, I’ve been hearing a lot about The Novel Cure by Susan Elderkin and Ella Berthoud, a book of literary “prescriptions” to alleviate whatever ails you. I know this sounds a little impulse-buy-at-the front-table-of –Barnes-&-Noble-ish, but two facts caught my attention: 1) the authors do not limit themselves to the illnesses of the mind that you might expect, but also bridge the gap between physical discomfort and psychological panacea (they suggest Shantaram for constipation, for instance), and 2) the book is indexed both by illness and book, for handier use as an actual reference.  I really am going to try their suggestion for “Dinner Parties, Fear of.”

Why don’t we already have something similar for food? There are homeopathic guides, of course, but I’m thinking more of something that would tell me the perfect dish to cure my headache or the muscle strain in Jason’s shoulder. For instance, preparing and eating bibimbop will rid you of hangnails. Actually, that’s not true, but I’m not saying that I want to write this book; I just want to have it at my disposal.

In fact, the only recipe that I could think of that wears its medicinal target baldly on its sleeve is the Down in the Dumps Pudding that my mother used to bake at the end of summer vacation to usher in the first day of school. Though I grew up in the Midwest, this is a very British use of the word pudding–more of a cake, if you ask me. It’s a molten chocolate number that should be eaten hot, so make sure that you’re adequately depressed to take on the whole pan or have some friends around to help you polish it off. Either way, you should feel better by the time it’s gone.

Down in the Dumps Pudding 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 →