Curried Brussels Sprouts and a Vinegar Sop

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Jason

I surely ate Brussels Sprouts growing up, though I can’t seem to remember them. They’ve merged in my mind with the steamed cabbage that accompanied corned beef and that I’d drown in red wine vinegar.

Your assumption might be that I turned the cabbage into a vinegar sop in order to liven up a limp, unseasoned vegetable, and you’d be right. But I also came to view those limp leaves as an excuse to drink vinegar, something I will unabashedly admit I still do with some frequency. I also clean our kitchen counters with vinegar, (though the white wine kind) and mix red wine vinegar and my buddy Reece’s honey as a tonic before bed. Shannon’s grandmother’s best friend Naomi (pronounced, in rural Ohio, as “Nee-oh-ma”) drank it nightly without fail, and she made it into her early 90s without being prescribed a single medication. It’s the wonder food!

I don’t eat much steamed cabbage any more, but I do rock the Brussels Sprouts, and sometimes with vinegar. They’re a fantastic winter veggie that you should pick up at the market and prepare, possibly, in one of the following two ways.

Cooking and eating these very simple recipes will make you happy.

Brussels Sprouts with Curried Yogurt

Ingredients: Plain, low-fat yogurt / Brussels Sprouts (the smaller ones are tastier) / One Onion / Garlic / Chili, either as pepper or power / Curry Powder / Salt

Trim any woody ends off the Brussels and, if you’ve got those guys that are the size of those big, hollow gumballs, cut them in half.
Steam them, either in some container built to be used with a pot on the stove or in a covered bowl in the microwave with a teaspoon of water poured in. Remove them when they’re a bright, Easter-grass green.
Meanwhile, slice the onion and sauté it in olive oil until it’s soft.
Meanwhile², mix half a cup of the yogurt with curry powder to taste. Continue reading →

Turkey Bones and the March of Time

Posted on November 22, 2012 by Shannon

McSorley’s Old Ale House, in the East Village, is not my favorite bar. The service is inevitably surly, the place is always in-your-face packed with tourists and frat boys, the smell is a bit on the musky side, and the weird little half-pints of beer only come in two varieties (brace yourself, Llalan), dark and light. They didn’t even let women in the front door until they were forced to do so in 1970. Basically, if the bar itself was a person, I probably wouldn’t like him much.

A photo of the bones, pre-dusting, from the New York Times

But I can’t help but hanker for an occasional trip to McSorley’s. Established (or at least allegedly established) in 1854, it’s one of the few places where you can still feel how old of a place Manhattan really is. If you could manage to elbow your way to a table and order up one of their cheese plates (The cheddar—so sharp! The onion—so raw! The mustard—so spicy!), you’d have a perfect vantage point of some weird artifacts of Old New York, like photos of long-gone drinking club members and antique fireman helmets and turkey wish bones hanging above the bar covered in decades of dust. You could eye those bones and, depending upon the story you chose to believe, think about the quirky bar owner who’d collected them or the WWI doughboys who never made it back from Europe to take them down. And, a little tipsy, you could have deep thoughts about death and decay and the long slog of time and wash it all down with a gulp of light. You could have, that is, until the health department stepped in last year. Continue reading →

Holiday Season Preview

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Shannon

Yes, it’s been a wild and wooly few weeks here at PitchKnives, with a whirl of hurricanes, marathons and work foibles. But fear not; plenty of holiday treats are on their way.

What’s on the menu? The real story of cornbread, a Grub Match revival, holiday cookies aplenty, Shannon’s Christmas vodka infusions, and maybe even a festive holiday fast. So pour yourself a nice glass of nog and keep checking the blog. The season of epic eating is upon us!

What Will Oscar Eat?: Antipasto Edition

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Shannon

The Tomato Slayer is at it again, but this time he has moved onto another Mediterranean delicacy: olives. The other night, Jason was holding an empty olive container, and Oscar, drawn to its briny traces like a moth to a flame, began lavishing affections on it to a degree approaching lewdness. His eyes took on a blank, glassy look as he became increasingly mesmerized by his single-minded pursuit, and he remained undaunted by dozens of camera flashes. This continued for about ten minutes, and the spell was only broken when we became nervous that he was choking on an olive pit and had to pry apart his beastly jaws and shake it out.

Which begs the question, I suppose, of whether Oscar’s strange food proclivities are really good for him. He does seem blessed with a remarkably strong constitution, but it’s also true that he is becoming rather zaftig. Over the weekend, Jason dreamed that I called Oscar fat and that, in response, Oscar picked up a pencil in his paw and flung it at me. In reality, though, pleasantly plump though he may be, he remains unable to launch projectiles and will have to resort to the more passive aggressive but time-tested revenge of coughing up nighttime hairballs in places where I might step in the morning before putting my contacts in. I fear for my soles should a stricter diet be enforced.

Community News: Prop 37 and Our Lens on Life

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Jason

Prop 37, the California referendum that would have required the labeling of all food that includes genetically modified organisms, failed on Tuesday in a 47% to 53% split. The initiative was riddled with holes indicative of the way the laws that regulate our daily lives today are bought and sold: exemptions for dairy products (feed the cows GM corn), exemptions for meat (feed them more!), exemptions for organic labels (wait, what?!)*

In spite of that disappointing reality, approval of the ballot would have brought to the fore a public discussion in a country dying of its own obesity and caloric emptiness. We are what we eat, and we should consider our own physical well being a value beyond calculation in dollars. Prop 37 lost because its opponents (spending $44 million, compared to $8 million) had the support of the rural counties where so much of our food is grown. They convinced those communities that Prop 37 would cut into their profits, and for most folks those profits are already slim. So those concerns are real for people, even if not for Monsanto, who donated $8 million themselves and would certainly not be harmed by a dip in profits.

And maybe 37 really would have cut into those profits. Interviews with Industrial Agriculture companies indicate that those companies would switch to non-GM, and thus likely more expensive, ingredients rather than risk the market share loss anticipated from labeling. Continue reading →

Cool Things I Learned from “The New York Times Magazine’s Food & Drink Issue”:

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Jason

Isn't this a nifty way to get them out? Yes, it is.

The original kitchen whisks were handfuls of twigs used in 17^th Century Europe. Two hundred years later, the Victorians began making them out of wire.

Al Michaels has “never eaten vegetables.”

Ital food, the food of the Rastafarian religion, is vegan except for the inclusion of fish. And here I was thinking that the West Indian places in my neighborhood that sell “soy chunk stew” with roti were making concessions to the marketplace. As if Rastas make concessions.

5,000 years ago much wine was made in qvevris, huge beeswax-lined clay pots that are buried in the ground.

California’s Central Valley is the world’s largest Class 1 plot of soil. It’s the largest supplier of canned tomatoes in the world and grows most everything under the sun. Three of its cities are among the five poorest in the nation, and the microscopic dung from industrial megadairies and feedlots and the exhaust trapped between the valley’s mountain ranges make the air taste like shit and rank amongst the most polluted in the country. The place is going down it it doesn’t get checked.

A farmer named Paul Buxman is promoting his California Clean system, which unlike an organic classification system allows for chemical fertilizers but limits participants to farms less than 100 acres and which have active plans promoting healthy soil and local ecosystems.

We have no national food or farming policy that protects our farmland from depletion or promotes the public health.

The Times ran an illustrated telling of the Frederick the Great Potato Scheme I believed I had noted here (but was apparently mistaken, and which I will now have to address next week), adding the fact that folks to this day place potatoes on Old Fritz’s grave

There exists a photo of Bob Dole eating a hot dog in such a way that it sure looks like he’s giving a blowjob.

Because there's no better way to turn The Politician into The Common Man than making him eat in public.

Jonathan Swift: Puzzle Nerd and Foodie?

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Shannon

"Riddles always make me a bit peckish," he is probably thinking.

This week, I came across a collection of poetry riddles that Jonathan Swift and his pals used to mail back and forth to each other as a form of light entertainment in 1724. (Let’s pause for a moment and appreciate that there was an age in which mailing puzzles to one’s best friends was considered a raucous good time. I think I was born in the wrong era.) I was particularly amused by one called “On the Posteriors,” which is really worth looking up. But I also found this one, which is related to the culinary arts and therefore scores a place on this blog. Can you figure out who the “I” of this poem is?

Though I, alas! a prisoner be,
My trade is prisoners to set free.
No slave his lord’s commands obeys
With such insinuating ways.
My genius piercing, sharp, and bright,
Wherein the men of wit delight.
The clergy keep me for their ease,
And turn and wind me as they please. Continue reading →

The Perils of Research

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Shannon

I’m not sure anyone ever really taught me how to do research, which is probably why my skills don’t go much beyond Googling something. Nevertheless, determined that the same fate should not befall my adult literacy students at my neighborhood library, I decided to have them research some facts about countries. On the day we were looking at websites, one guy, who was writing a paper about Australia, decided he wanted to know more about Australian food. “Perfect,” I thought, “I have a food blog. I should be able to manage this one.”

However, nothing about Australian food really came to my mind besides the vague words “bush tucker” and the haunting question of whether Anthony Bourdain was in the Australian outback during that one episode of No Reservations when he ate warthog anus. Anyway, we typed “australia” and “food” into Google. And this, on some dude’s blog in 2005, was quite honestly one of the first things to turn up:

I tried to point out that this might not be the best fit for inclusion in his paper, but by then a crowd was beginning to form. “I know they have this thing in Australia called Vegemite,” I tried lamely and was quickly drowned out by disgusted ewwws and echhhs as we scrolled further down the page and found this: Continue reading →

Baggin’ It: Lunch Packing Tips

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Shannon

The lunch tips from our Baggin’ It Challenge are in, and our winners have been declared!* In this post, we’re compiling some of the ideas we received so that our readers never again have to worry about the grim prospects lurking within that brown bag.

Some Assembly Required: Picnics are inherently fun, so take one to work with you. Tearing off hunks of baguette and putting together the perfect combo of pesto, cheese and tomato is the kind of thing that never fails to cheer me. And as an added bonus, packing your lunch piecemeal keeps the bread or crackers from getting soggy over the course of the morning. (One caveat: If you’re packing a lunch for people other than yourself, you might want to clue them in beforehand—my father once choked down a plain dry bagel before finding the container of peanut butter my mother had packed in the bottom of the bag.)

Changing Form: Just because you have leftovers, doesn’t mean you need to eat them in exactly the same way the next day. My office has a microwave, but I rarely use it. You’d be surprised how good (and different) take-out like Chinese or Indian food tastes cold. Put some cold General Tso’s Tofu atop a bed of lettuce and veggies, and you’ve got yourself an excellent salad for tomorrow’s lunch. Continue reading →

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