Lunch at the End of the Line: Cheese Making at the Edge of the Continent

Posted on by

The ladies of the Qualicum Cheeseworks on Vancouver Island are gushers.

As the momma cows trudged out of the field into the barn, each udder, roughly the size of the plastic bladder inside a Costco box o’ wine, swung to and fro.  I’d been petting the new calves just a minute before, and they were charming, all nuzzle’y with dewy black eyes.  Their mommas were not.  They were massive and slobbery and their black eyes were more dull than dewy.

The crammed against each other at the base of a ramp, knew their routine, were probably eager for the relief of the milking room beyond the door at the top of the slope.  When the young man opened the door to that room—a 25’ X 25’ collection of gates and  hoses and foot-tall glass containers shaped like medicine capsules—ten mommas at a time eagerly waddled in, took their standard places at their individual feed troughs, and proceeded to thoroughly destroy the mix of oats, molasses, barley, and wheat that poured out of from chutes above. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: Jay’s Pop-up Tomato Shop, Instructions Included

Posted on by

The tomatoes I started from last year’s seeds took off.  I fixed a three-bulb lamp about 20 years older than I am with CFLs and kept it on the guys all day for about four weeks, and produced this.

So I was left with sixteen seedlings (Beefsteak, Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, and Hillbilly varieties) that I decided to give away to passers-by on a Sunday afternoon, re-potting instructions included.  It was all so very Golden Age of Brooklyn, what with an ethnic and sexual-preference spectrum that would make a recruiter for a small liberal arts college weak in the knees, and folks ranging in age from about their 60s down to the seven.  Pascal, Naomi, Erin, and Pepe were amongst the takers.  I promised everybody I’d include care instructions.  So….

Caring for tomatoes is pretty easy.  You’ve got some gear you need, but you can DIY  share of it, and once you own it, you can keep reusing it. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Canadian Coconut Crush Edition

Posted on by

coconut shakeI have a problem with restaurant crushes. I’ll find someplace that I like, and then, just like crushes on boys in high school, I’ll be unable to think of little else for days and unwilling to consider any alternatives. Once I had (and—let’s face it—probably still have) a crush on my local Mexican favorite, Chavela’s, that was so intense that I feared I’d come down with some weird form of pica that involved tacos instead of rocks.

So it’s just as well, really, that Chau VeggiExpress exists on the other side of the continent, or I probably wouldn’t be able to resist eating there multiple times per week. On a recent trip to Vancouver, a city with a large Asian population, I developed a serious hankering for some pho, that delicious Vietnamese noodle soup. Pho, however, can be a little difficult to find in vegetarian form, so I poked around on Yelp and quickly came up with a review that claimed that the coconut shake at Chau was the best beverage the reviewer had ever tasted. She followed this assertion with the sentence, “Seriously,” which is one of the gravest statements a Yelper can make. So Jason and I decided to fortify ourselves there before embarking on the brutal bus/plane/train trip home.

canada kicks assAnh, a sweet woman in a “Canada Kicks Ass” t-shirt, explained the menu to us when we walked in, which included, among other things, three different kinds of noodle soup. Anh’s family has long owned restaurants in the Vancouver area, and they decided to make this one vegan to match their Buddhist lifestyle. They cook their own coconut cream for the storied coconut shake, which you can get virgin or with rum, and they also use it in their coconut curry. Continue reading →

Community News: Monsanto Wheat Returns from the Dead and the Rest of the Globe Kicks the U.S. Economy

Posted on by

In 2004, Monsanto ended its field trials of Roundup-Ready Wheat, the proprietary, genetically-altered version of the grain that would allow it to be sprayed with the company’s Roundup weed killer and survive.  The public was too uncomfortable with the prospect of eating techno-genetic food.  Last week, The New York Times reported that Roundup-Ready Wheat returned from the dead to kick U.S. exports in the shin.

The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, but last week Japan and South Korea banned the importation of the grain – and the E.U. recommended that all 27 of its nations increase testing – because the Roundup-Ready strain was found growing in an Oregon Field.  According to Monsanto’s web site, tests of the grain were never conducted in that field.  This brings up a few points worth emphasizing:

  1. The very fear American farmers have about Monsanto’s techno-genetic seeds – that natural crops cannot be protected from contamination by them – is true even in the case of a controlled field test conducted by one of the biggest and most advanced companies in the world.
  2. When contamination of those natural crops occur, ownership of those crops automatically transfers to Monsanto, meaning that farmers must then pay Monsanto or have their businesses destroyed.  This is enshrined in law by the Plant Variety Protection Act and a recent decision by the John Roberts Supreme Court.
  3. Wheat can, according to Monsanto, linger in the ground for up to two years before germinating.
  4. The company’s GM wheat apparently lingered in the ground for nine years before germinating.
  5. Wheat exports contribute, according to U.S. Wheat Associates, an industry marketing firm, account for between $961 million and $1.8 billion of our GDP.  South Korea imports 2.5 million tons.  The E.U. imports over 1 million.
  6. Countries with large numbers of educated individuals do not want to import GM food.
  7. The inability to control the Roundup-Ready wheat – an inherent component of its design – threatens the U.S. economy and our trustworthiness as world merchants.

And on a final note, Monsanto’s new strategy to introduce its proprietary, fundamental foodstuff into the global food chain is to start selling it to India.

Matrimoni-Ale Bliss & A Hoppy Ever After

Posted on by

It was all beer and pretzel necklaces in the beginning...

Our wounds from replanting the hops plants healed enough to be barely noticeable in our wedding photos. In fact, in most of the pictures, save a few formal ones for the parents, I am sporting my red sunglasses and a tall glass of our homemade beer. The brew, a floral pale ale called “Hop Burst,” was a hit — or at least everyone felt obligated to compliment us since we dressed up and everything. We filled pitchers of the Hop Burst for every table at toast time, and it felt quite nice to have everyone toasting us with our own beer, I do say.

But now what?

Though our guests drank an admirable amount of beer during the wedding and the next day’s barbeque, Ben and I are still left with a fridge-full of bottled homemade beer, complete with cute labels, which someone was supposed to hand out to guests as they left. (That someone was quite possibly me.) We surprised ourselves yesterday by saying to each other, “how are we going to drink all this beer?” Did I really say that ? What is happening to us?

In the beginning, we didn’t tell people we were planning to make beer; it seemed crazy from the mouths of two people who’d barely just met. But by our third date we knew we were destined to brew together. Continue reading →

The Best Kind of Mess

Posted on by
fresh curd

Fresh cheese curds--this is where the magic is.

Canadians are full of good ideas: bloodless emancipation from Mother England; electric buses; and, perhaps greatest of all, poutine.

For those of you not familiar with this wonder, it’s a fantastic artery-clogging mash-up of French fries, cheese curds and gravy. It’s true that in New York, that great cauldron of dining options, there is poutine to be had. I was introduced to the dish by my friend Ethan at a burger joint in Brooklyn, a mere mile or two from my apartment. (Ethan, I am now realizing, has long served as my food guru, introducing me to all sorts of essentials like Cones gelato in the West Village, the Punjabi cab stand on Houston street and New Haven-style apizza. Combine that with poutine, and I feel that it’s more than anyone can reasonably expect from a single human being.) But in Canada, poutine is more than just a quirky random menu item. It’s omnipresent. It’s a way of life.

poutineLet’s dwell for a moment on the genius of these ingredients. You’ve got French fries, the most addictive item that the fast food industry has yet been able to create. You’ve got gravy, which, more than a term that for any particular collection of ingredients, is basically just a word for a substance that you put on top of something else to make it taste better. And you have cheese curds, glorious cheese curds, those delectable bits of newborn cheese, so squeaky when bought fresh from Wisconsin supermarkets, so crunchy and salty when deep-fried at the Minnesota state fair. In poutine, they become melting, glisteny globs of fatty heaven. (Jason and I made a special trip to a dairy farm on Vancouver Island so that we could get fresh curd at the exact moment it was released to the public—more on this magical place in coming days.)

The origin of the dish is usually traced to Quebec, and the name is almost certainly French, though apparently there is some debate about what it means. Some say that is derived from the English word for pudding, while others maintain that it comes from a French term that means (I’m paraphrasing here) “a big, fat mess.” Continue reading →

When Two Hop-Heads Fall in Love…

Posted on by

Last year's ripening hops

Four days from our wedding and I find myself sitting in the dirt of a mostly unplanted garden, wishing I could turn the hose on myself. Ben and I have just finished uprooting an entire row of hops plants from his parents’ old home and replanting them at my family’s place out in the countryside of central Ohio. Bill, my parents’ orange cat, is rolling around in the dust next to me, but knew enough to not get too close. It is so hot and sticky and dirty and we haven’t even set up the trellis yet. But if we want to make beer right ourselves, we have to do it right. Ourselves.

Hops on a trellis

Hops are a climbing perennial plant, much like grapes, only taller. They grow in rows on trellises about 12 feet high. They are said to have originated in China, but apparently no one there thought, “Hm, I wonder what would happen if I threw this in water and drank it after several weeks!” There are records of the Dutch processing hops as early as the 1400s, which is how it got some fun-to-say phrases attached to it like “oast house” (drying barn) and “scuppet” (flat spade for turning drying hops).

We knew the plants were pretty tenacious and spread easily, but we did not fully grasp how hard they’d be to move. First, I have to admit here that I’m not exactly the most experienced of gardeners. So when I was handed a shovel I eyed it warily before pushing at it ineffectively with one tennis shoe. Fortunately Ben’s father saw I was struggling (as much as you can call not trying “struggling”) and took the tool from me — clearly this was not a two-person job for these particular two people. Continue reading →

What Will Oscar Eat?: Arugula vs. Cannellini Edition

Posted on by
taste test

Dylan, poised to steal Exhibit C

Were you a fly on the wall of our apartment, it would not be uncommon, of late, for you to witness a seriously weird scene near dinner time: a human voice screaming “Oscaaaaaaar!” from the kitchen as a black and white cat hauls tail through the living room with a massive, floppy arugula leaf clutched in his jaws as though he just pulled off a highly impressive capture the flag victory. Oscar is the preeminent gourmand among our cats, but even for him, the frequency of this new trick is alarming, not to mention hard on our supply of salad greens.

sensei cat

Meditating and contemplating the Mysteries of the White Bean

It made me wonder if arugula had supplanted cannellini as his favorite food. There was a time when merely opening a can of white beans would send him into near-hysterics, yowling and rolling around on the floor like Beyonce at the Super Bowl halftime show. But human tastes are said to change every seven years, so perhaps cats experience something similar. I decided to devise a taste test to find out.

Let me begin by saying that trying to run a feline taste test in a small New York apartment is not an easy task. I first tried to do a comparison of different kinds of beans, but the other two cats kept dashing into the room and stealing them, leading me to the theory that beans are the salt and vinegar potato chips of the cat world. Finally I managed to divide them so that Oscar (known aliases: Tomato Slayer, Mr. Fofoscar, Fuzzle Face) was left nervously glancing at the door where Dylan (known aliases: Dyl-Sack, Dyl-Hole, Dyl-Bag) was meowing petulantly at the audacity of being shut in the bedroom. Continue reading →

Great GoogaMooga: Jezebel

Posted on by

GoogaMooga, you tease!  The beginning of our relationship held so much promise.  You debuted with The Darkness, a magnificent treat that so many of your suitors couldn’t get off work early enough to see, a guitar shredder clad in David Lee Roth’s best zebra-striped jumpsuit doing handstands on the drum riser and wailing falsetto.  You wooed me with Mac and Cheese from Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, so creamy and dense, the word succulent comes to mind.  And even if Wayne Coyne’s voice was ragged, the La Mamasita Arepa from Caracas Rockaway was crisp, chewy, oily-as-hell, and stuffed with grilled mushrooms and plantains and cheese.  It’s true that the mushrooms got lost a bit in the jumble of tastes, but it was yummy all the same.  I washed it down with a strange and tasty Chery and Basil soda from Brooklyn Soda Works and then watched Karen O leap and yawp across the stage like a maniac, all dressed in a collision of Liberace and Michael Jackson, grungy blues riffs turned into dance music and Brooklyn jumping about happily. Continue reading →