Category Archives: Features

Food News: Obama, Chicken, Crap

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Do you like your chicken?  Bad news, dude.  And it’s news involving chlorine, Obama, and poop.

The gist: In September, the Obama White House will

  1. reduce the number of USDA food inspectors working each poultry plant to one,
  2. allow poultry producers to monitor and ensure the safety of their products themselves,
  3. increase the allowable processing speed of the kill line by 25%,
  4. and spray every chicken on that line with a chlorine soup in lieu of washing off feces.

    This is the less gross, poop-free version of chicken-nuggets chicken. I found it on a site named The Stir.

    This is the less gross, poop-free version of chicken-nuggets chicken. I found it on a site named The Stir.

This has been branded an effort to increase food safety.  Good times.

The specifics: At the moment, four USDA inspectors monitor individual kill lines that process 140 chickens a minute.  Let’s close our eyes and visualize that for a minute…

These monitors are in charge of singling out birds visibly tainted by feces, bruises, blood, etc.  The new rules will increase the fpm (fowl per minute) to 175 and put company employees in charge of weeding out defective birds.  The single USDA inspector will be tasked with randomly selecting for testing 20 to 80 birds per shift. All bird carcasses, “whether they are contaminated or not,” will be showered with chlorine and other antimicrobials. Continue reading →

The Seduction of Spring: A Seed Catalog Puzzle

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Renee's GardenI woke up this morning feeling, in light of last weekend’s sidewalk thaw, that it might be a good morning for a run. Then I realized it was 14 degrees outside, and my enthusiasm waned considerably. I like winter (I do!), but this is the time of year when gardeners and cooks alike begin to itch for warm weather and the promise of fresh local produce.

Reading through seed catalogs on a morning like this feels illicit, full of sensual but very distant pleasures. This is at least in part due to the descriptions themselves, which are colorful, exuberant and (at least to my cold-addled brain) a touch erotic. Below, I’ve pulled some names and descriptions from the online seed catalog for Renee’s Garden. Can you guess what kind of vegetable is being described in each case? If you can identify all twelve, you’ve got it bad for spring.

1) Chelsea Prize: Elegantly slender, thin-skinned English with absolutely delicious, crispy sweet flesh. Easy to digest. Self-pollinating, vigorous vines.

2) Circus Circus: Our trio of cool colors includes creamy white, bright orange and a deep, dark purple with orange centers. All 3 well-bred Dutch varieties are sweet tasting, crisp and smooth.

3) Garden Babies: These babies have softly folded leaves, a lovely buttery texture and outstanding sweet taste. Ideal for containers, Garden Babies are slow bolting, heat tolerant, and make compact 6-inch heads at maturity.

4) Mandarin Cross: Golden-orange fruits with wonderful creamy texture and a mouthwatering sweet, even flavor finish These gorgeous fruit are borne in abundance and ripen like jewels on strong indeterminate vines.

5) Neon Glow: Color combo of vivid Magenta Sunset and Golden Sunrise stalks that contrast beautifully with green savoyed leaves for bright color and great eating. Eye-catching, productive, and striking in both vegetable and flowerbeds.

6) Profuma di Genova: Our fine Italian import is bred for pure bright flavor without minty/clove overtones, a compact shape and excellent disease resistance.

7) Raven: Dark green, smooth-skinned, cylindrical fruits are glossy and especially tender-fleshed. Delicious flavor picked as babies or at larger sizes. Abundant fruits are born high up on bush style plants that don’t sprawl.

8) Slenderette: The sleek rounded pods of gourmet-quality Slenderette are particularly tender, juicy, and sweet tasting with no tough tips or fiber. Vigorous, productive plants bear delectable, bright green, 5 inch pods early in the season.

9) Striped Chioggia: Italian heirloom with bright, candy-red exteriors & interior flesh beautifully marked in alternating rings of cherry red and white. Delicious sweet flavor & fine texture. Great tasting leafy tops.

10) Sugar Daddy: High yielding bush vines that load up early with double pods, plump and nutty-sweet, at each plant node. Hard to resist eating right on the spot.

11) Sunset: Beautiful heirloom mix yields huge, elongated tapering fruits with thick, meaty flesh that mature to rich red, yellow or orange. Perfect for snacking, salads, sauté, or roasting.

12) Wyatt’s Wonder: Gorgeous, globe-shaped, deeply lobed, rich orange giants. Developed especially for impressive size and beauty.

Don’t click Continue until you’re ready for the answers… Continue reading →

Preparing for National Corn Chip Day, or the Strange World of Food Holidays

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I have neither the skill set nor the personality to be a good bartender or business owner, but I think if I ever received a windfall of money it would be hard to not capitalize on an idea for a bar that my friend Mignon and I developed many years ago. It would be called Holiday, and it would operate under the premise that “every day’s a holiday.” There would be a drink special of the day that would pay homage to whatever bizarre and little-known holiday happened to fall on that date.

National Corn Chip Day

It’s best to eat a few in advance to really get in the spirit of things.

You might think it preposterous that we could find a holiday for every day of the year, but the real problem would be choosing between all of the possible options for any given day. As I type this, it is, according to various sites, Fun at Work Day, National Kazoo Day and Thank a Plugin Developer Day. It would be a stretch, I think, to create a plugin-themed drink. But come on—a kazoo-themed one is just too easy.

One thing that quickly becomes apparent if you scan one of these lists of holidays is that a disproportionate number of them have to do with food. This month alone is Hot Tea Month, National Oatmeal Month, National Soup Month, Artichoke and Asparagus Month and California Dried Plum Digestive Month (among others). Unfortunately, you missed Chocolate Cake Day by a hair (January 27th), but there’s still time to prepare for National Corn Chip Day (January 29th). Continue reading →

Cornbread with a Side of Stalinist Hijinks

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von bremzenLast fall at the Brooklyn Book Festival, I wandered over to one of the stages where a panel of food writers were holding court and became instantly charmed by a woman with audacious glasses, voluminous scarves and a loud Russian-accented voice. She was just the blend of frank and weird that I like in my authors, so I resolved to read her newest book, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing.

I’m so glad I did. Anya von Bremzen’s bizarre mash-up of cookbook, family history and anthropological study of Homo Sovieticus is one of the oddest but most enjoyable food volumes I’ve ever laid hands on. There is surprisingly little talk of borscht, but instead you’ll learn about Russian meat patties while also finding out how Stalin kept himself amused at his summer house meals. (It involved leaving tomatoes on chairs and exhorting high Politburo officials to put “dick” signs on Khruschev’s back. That wacky, mass-murdering prankster!) And the book is beautifully written, so much so that I laughed out loud when she described how her ex-boyfriend humbly offered himself up to co-author her first book and correct her “wonky English.”

cornbreadThe USSR seemingly having been full of voracious meat-eaters whenever supplies allowed, there aren’t a lot of recipes here for a vegetarian to attempt, but von Bremzen did provide a recipe for cornbread that I was eager to try. She actually included it as something of a joke, representative of Khrushchev’s certainty that corn was going to solve all of the USSR’s food shortage problems. Instead, he managed only to baffle and disgust millions of Russians who held firmly to the belief that bread could be made only with wheat. For this, he earned the title Corn Man, which I gather sounds like a worse insult in Russian than in English.

Anyway, the USSR was a massive place, and some of the people there did, in fact, eat corn, like in Moldova, whence the author drew the cornbread recipe. I was attracted to it mostly because it calls for as much feta cheese as it does cornmeal, with some butter and sour cream to boot. Continue reading →

A New Year of Food Resolutions

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egg nog“One of my goals this week,” Jason said to me a few days ago, “is to drink a lot of eggnog.”

There’s something to be said for the attainable resolution. I know that it’s traditional to set yourself high bars this week that you will spend the next twelve months attempting to clear, but I’ve always thought New Year’s resolutions are a little silly. Not that you shouldn’t be constantly striving to be the best version of yourself you should be, but did anyone ever move mountains (or lose ten pounds, even) because of a drunken whim that passed fleetingly through her consciousness on New Year’s Eve?

That’s why my own resolutions tend toward the vague (Be more gracious!) or the pleasant. It’s far easier to count them as successful that way. This year, I will bake more bread. I will finally eat the world’s spiciest pepper before the pepper experts change their minds again about which one that is. I will pickle things. I will stop forgetting Jason’s requests to avoid cleaning his cast iron pots with soap. I will remember to make more pesto before the basil plants freeze. I will compliment people more heartily on their cooking.

Tell us your own food resolutions in the comments section. But seriously, dieting is kind of a snooze; consider following Jason’s lead.

He’s been doing a magnificent job of fulfilling that eggnog resolution, by the way.

Ice Sculptures and Newborn Cheese: More MOOCing Adventures

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fruits of my labor

Fresh ricotta with dill

One day, while I was procrastinating from doing homework for my online Science and Cooking class and a million other tasks by poking around on Arts & Letters Daily, I came across this article from the London Review of Books. Apparently, I am not the only person who was lured into taking a Harvard science class by the insertion of “cooking” into the title. Just remember, readers, where you heard it first.

rocaWhen I did finally stop surfing the web and started doing my online coursework, I noted dismally that I am falling pretty far behind. I have waded through material on phase changes, but I still confuse elasticity and plasticity, and who knows when I’ll finally get around to spherification. I think the main problem is that I get weirdly hypnotized by certain videos and have to stop working to let them sink into my brain. For instance, who would have guessed that very, very pure water doesn’t freeze easily, even in a refrigerator that is kept below the freezing point, because there are no microscopic bits of muck for the ice crystals to glom onto? It’s called supercooling (no, I am not making that word up), and it allows for wacky poured ice sculptures to be created at the table by fancy chefs like Jordi Roca. (Note: the instant formation of it is more magical and less phallic than this still image would have you believe.) Seriously, don’t you feel like you need a few minutes to digest that image before you memorize some formulas? I did.

ricottaAnother problem is that I’m lagging behind on my labs. The use of my disorderly, cluttered kitchen as a laboratory makes me nervous and leaves me with little hope of precision. But when I can rouse myself to action, they usually prove interesting. By far the best lab so far has been making ricotta cheese from a quart of milk and a little white vinegar. I’m actually not sure what I was supposed to learn about phase changes from this, but I made cheese, guys! From scratch. 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 →

A Tasting Platter of Food Links

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We strive for original content here at PitchKnives, but it just so happens that lately I’ve crossed paths with some interesting food ephemera from all corners of the web. Not wanting our readership to miss out on these tidbits, I’ve compiled a few of them here so that you’ll have more than just your cookbooks and our humble blog to help you while away these long, dark winter evenings. Click away and eat up.

  • RedwallThe book lists on Flavorwire are enough to single-handedly lengthen my to-read catalog beyond any sensible proportions. That’s why I was so excited when they recently published a a list of 50 Essential Novels for Foodies. It’s stuffed with plenty of tasty-sounding options that I’ve never heard of before, but any list that includes the cordial-fueled feasts of Redwall…well, they had me at hello.
  • Being a frequent runner, I’m obsessed with podcasts of all stripes, and one of my new favorites is Snap Judgement. It guess it’s loosely based on the theme of pivotal decisions, but more accurately, it’s theme is…um…cool stuff. A good place to start is their Thanksgiving episode, which is supposedly about gratitude, but ends up being largely about food, too. Just listening to the way the spy in the first story pronounces “Gummi Bears” is worth the price of admission. Continue reading →

Food and Death on the Small Screen (or TV with a Side of Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto)

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sopranosAlright, I admit it: I like watching television while I eat dinner. I KNOW, okay? I am single-handedly destroying the time-honored tradition of family suppers, and Jason and I will probably forget how to have actual conversations, and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. And yes, I, too, hate the zombie-like stare-at-the-screen epidemic of the modern era. But, but, but…I like coming home from a frenzied New York City day and cooking dinner and letting myself be hypnotized for a little while.

Jason and I excuse this guilty pleasure by telling ourselves that at least we watch good TV. And it really is a grand age for television dramas, isn’t it? We don’t have cable, so most of our viewing takes the form of gobbling up the latest DVD releases of shows like Game of Thrones or Homeland or Mad Men or (R.I.P.) Breaking Bad. But I like the “classics,” too. I’ve sat through two viewings of Deadwood and I’m not above a third. And when I heard that Jason had never seen all of The Sopranos, the show that ushered in this golden television epoch, we went back to the pilot and started from there.

It’s funny; after my first viewing of The Sopranos, six or seven years ago, most of what stuck with me was the violence, but this time it’s the food that really stands out. Everyone, even the skinny teenaged daughter, is constantly packing away the ziti and manicotti and cannoli and other Italian foodstuffs ending in “I” that I can’t hope to spell correctly. It’s like they’re defying death with the stuff of life. In the last episode we watched, the recent-immigrant cousin Furio expertly formed a massive ball of mozzarella cheese (baby-soft, lily-white, the closest cheese approximation of mother’s milk), while pulling on a cigarette and almost ashing into the bowl. Then he went and beat some people up. Life and death, man, life and death.

Anyway, you shouldn’t try to take on The Sopranos without the proper sustenance. Here’s a recipe for a sun-dried tomato and walnut pesto that’s hearty and delicious and will leave you yearning for the next episode.

Sun-Dried Tomato and Walnut Pesto Continue reading →

Whale Sushi, Salt Junk and Other Mysteries of the Sea

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rockwellkent

Eat at your own risk.

I’ve had whales on the brain this week. First, an article from The New Yorker’s annual food issue informed me that a fashionable sushi restaurant in Berkley, California just got busted for serving black market sei whale meat. The restaurant is now closed, and the offending parties are facing up to sixty-seven years in prison and 1.2 million dollars in fines.

While I don’t condone the eating of whale meat, I am a little confused about why this incident caused such a furor in our ravenously meat-eating country. Why is okay that we eat some mammals and not others? Surely part of the reason is because many whales are endangered, but serving up horse is also illegal in California, and we’re not suffering a horse shortage. Is it because they’re cute? Is it because they’re smart? Need I remind all the bacon lovers out there that pigs are pretty smart, too? (In Japan, for example, whence the contraband sushi came, it is culturally acceptable to eat whale, though it is not in vogue with the younger generation, and the government has recently unloaded several tons of its whale meat surplus on Japanese schools for Traditional Culture Week. In comparison to a week of whale on the cafeteria menu, my elementary school’s dreaded enchilada casserole seems pretty benign.)

While I react to the confusing problem of which animals are acceptable for consumption with vegetarianism, my co-worker Devin goes for the opposite approach. “Whales? Sure, I’d eat them,” he announced confidently. “Horses? No problem. It’s not like I’m going to go shank someone’s pet, but I’d eat some horse. Dogs, cats, sure. I had this pet iguana, Freddy? But it didn’t stop me from eating iguana meat. I’ll eat anything except other primates. Well, and rats. And maybe street pigeons.” This seemed like a strange collection of forbidden fruits, but I suppose we all have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

But back to whales. Devin would almost certainly fare better than I aboard a whaling ship; I reached this conclusion while attending an event called “Thar She Blows!” at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint this weekend, celebrating the 162nd anniversary of the first U.S. release of Moby Dick. Amid the “Melvillainy” on offer (including a sea shanty sing-along, a dramatic reading of one-star Amazon reviews for the book and a pitch for a television version in which Captain Ahab would be played by Zooey Deschanel) was a presentation by a woman who had spent three weeks in Nantucket reading through old whaler logbooks to see what the crew members ate. Continue reading →