Category Archives: Features

The Union Square Farmers Market Nightmarket: Very Pretty, Pretty Pricey

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Last week, the Union Square Farmer’s Market, one of the biggest and best in the city, put on its first nightmarket, billed in a lavender promotional jpeg as “A Midsummer Night’s Green Market.”  The farmers stayed twice as long as they usually do, there was beer and music, and a handful of area restaurants turned out to dish out.

So we turned out, too.  We were psyched.

It ended up a bit of a very crowded catwalk of very good looking food.

We tried Telepan’s blueberry crescent and fried eggplant with ratatouille, both of which were pretty, decent, unspectacular.  Each of these guys were four bucks.

 

Next up was the peach turnover from Union Square Café, which was not only infinitely superior to its blueberry cousin but pretty damn delicious.  Once you accept the fact that any turnover stuffed with corn syrup gloop masquerading as fruit is an offense to all that is good and noble in the world, you are left with a turnover’s pastry as its defining feature.  The Café’s was fantastic: delicately crispy on the top, firm and flaky elsewhere.  Cost: six bucks. Continue reading →

Quotable Vegetables Puzzle

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vegetablequotesIn all the plant kingdom, no food inspires more words of wisdom than garlic. Or so it seemed, at least, as I went searching for questions for our latest food puzzle. Everyone from Cervantes (“Do not eat garlic or onions; for their smell will reveal that you are a peasant.”) to William Shatner (“Stop and smell the garlic! That’s all you have to do.”) has been willing to offer up an opinion on the humble bulb, and a few have even extended their commentary to include other vegetables. Can you identify which vegetable has been removed from each of the quotes below? (Hint: The answer to none of these is garlic, and no vegetable is repeated.)

  1. “_____ is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” –Mark Twain
  2. “The day is coming when a single _____, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” –Paul Cezanne
  3. “For every _____ full of weevils, God supplies a blind grocer.” –Arabic proverb
  4. “When General Lee took possession of Chambersburg on his way to Gettysburg, we happened to be a member of the Committee representing the town. Among the first things he demanded for his army was twenty-five barrels of _____.”—Editor of ‘The Guardian’ (1869)
  5. “We kids feared many things in those days – werewolves, dentists, North Koreans, Sunday School – but they all paled in comparison with _____.” –Dave Barry
  6. “A man taking _____ from a woman will love her always.” –Sir Thomas Moore
  7. “My boy, the ‘quenelles de sole’ were splendid, but the _____ were poor. You should shake the pan gently, all the time, like this.” –Marie-Antoine Carême (Supposedly his last words, spoken to a favorite pupil, January 12, 1833)
  8. “A cooked _____ is like a cooked oyster: ruined.” –Andre Simon
  9. The ____ is “one of the earth’s monstrosities.” –Pliny
  10. “The _____ is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. ____ are deadly serious.” –Tom Robbins
  11. “Fatherhood is telling your daughter that Michael Jackson loves all his fans, but has special feelings for the ones who eat _____.” –Bill Cosby (1986)
  12. “My idea of heaven is a great big _____ and someone to share it with.” –Oprah Winfrey

Don’t click continue reading until you’re ready to see the answers!

Continue reading →

Batten Down the Hatches, Eatbox: Shannon’s Brief Return to Food Service

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eatbox

Jonathan, posing with his food truck empire

When Jonathan Coffman took over command of the Eatbox food truck and moved it to Jackson, Tennessee, nothing could have fully prepared him for the Sisyphean effort it would take to feed twenty thousand hungry Bonnaroovians at the Food Truck Oasis. First of all, festival organizers threw him a bit of a curve ball by asking him to fill the gourmet meatball niche at the festival, when he was more used to serving kebabs and burritos at much smaller events around Jackson.  Undaunted, Coffman built a trailer filled with chest freezers. He rallied a small army of friends and family to staff the truck. He rolled thousands upon thousands of meatballs. And then he allowed me, a food truck novice, to wander into the middle of all of it, just because I asked.

My previous experiences in food service are dark-night-of-the-soul kind of material; I was truly one of the worst waitresses to ever spill a drink or drop a dessert at the Big Boy and TGIFridays of Mansfield, Ohio, and my tips usually reflected it. But Bonnaroo is all about new experiences, and I thought that working behind the scenes of one of the food trucks, preparing the food itself, might help to erase the memories of those old disasters.

Elbow room in a food truck is limited, but even so, there are a number of people working behind the scene at any given moment to get your food to you. I by-passed the grill and assembly positions (though, bless their sweet Southern hospitality, I think the Eatbox workers were prepared to let me do whatever I wanted in there) and apprenticed myself to Maria (non-Bonnaroo job: fourth grade teacher; favorite summer hobby: teasing Zeke, who was working next to her) at the topping station, where I figured I would do the least damage. Continue reading →

Jim and Nick and The Fatback Collective: Fresh Pig at the Food Truck Oasis

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This is probably not the kind of image that comes to mind when you think about Bonnaroo.

This woman, who was as nice as could be, is named Banjo. That's not her christened name, but it's the one Bonnaroo folks gave her when she brought the heaviest Southern accent to Jim and Nick's. She seemed proud to carry it.

But it’s an image I saw my first night there.   I snapped it just after I watched a couple of people saw the head off a hog with something that sounded and looked a lot like the circa-1980 Sears hedge clipper we had growing up.  Off the body, the head looked almost rubber, almost like a cartoon.  Except for the eyes.  The eyes were tiny and wet.

“Ya’ll are sick, taking pictures of pig torture,” somebody next to me said, snapping a picture of his own.  Two guys stuck the end of the hedge clipper into the hog’s neck and started going to town on the ribs.  A man walking by trotted up and licked the head’s cheek.  Thursday night at the Food Truck Oasis.

This was not pig torture.  It was Alabama-based Jim and Nick’s Bar-B-Q taking the lead in the Fatback’s Collective Bonnaroo debut.   The Collective is a community of politically progressive chefs, restaurateurs, and gourmands who really dig their pork.  They share with Bonnaroo, according to Melany Mullens, one of a multiple publicists pushing Bonnaroo’s world of food, “a dedication to sustainability and pork.”

I like this coupling.  It sounds silly, but typed out it reads as simultaneously down-home and high-minded, which I figure is pretty much the point.  Bonnaroo is carbon neutral; it gets 20% of its electricity from solar panels; I could go on.  Bonnaroo is also a champion of the Southern culture of food and hospitality.  Welcome to Bonnaroo’s Tennessee, a land of new kinds of partnerships. Continue reading →

Bonnaroo 2013: Anticipation for Fat Factories and Roadkill Balls

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Bonnaroo!

We’re ramping up our Bonnaroo output this year.  Shannon’s won some behind-the-counter time at Eat Box, one of our favorite food trucks from last year, and we’re really hoping the wilderness survival guru who grew starry eyed when discussing the consumption of roadkill testicles returns.  I have been thinking about my favorite summer fat factory—the Amish doughnuts and butter-dipped pretzels—at least a few times a week for the past two months, and we’re going to spend more time in Tent City this year seeking out far-flung late night delicacies and being propositioned by young men selling pot banana bread.

And, keeping in step with the growing national fetishizing (Spellcheck suggestion: “fetish zing”) of all things pig, the incomparable Rusty Odum of Knoxville’s Blank News is going to be chowing on one of the hogs being roasted in its entirety each day of the festival and give us the low down.  Because we don’t eat them mammals.  We’re also looking forward to drinking Yazoo the only Volunteer State brewer represented, and learning just what is to be learned from the Living Cuisine workshop at the Roo Academy.

Oh, and seeing if every living Wu-Tang member shows up.

We’ll check back in with ya’ll next week.

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

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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.

What Will Oscar Eat?: Arugula vs. Cannellini Edition

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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 →

My Summer To-Read Picks from the Food Book Festival

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food books

I know the audacity of saying something like this since I edit a food blog, but here’s the truth of it–food books often leave me a little cold. There are just so many pitfalls that a volume of food writing can fall into, including:

  • The tortured chef memoir. Boy, chefs do a lot of coke, or at least it seems that way from the explosion of depressing tell-all autobiographies. And, man, I really do not care to read about it.
  • The restaurant cookbook. This can be nice, I guess, if you really love the restaurant. But then again, if you could really cook that stuff at home, why would you ever bother to go out to eat?
  • The ultra-specific sourcebook. Truly, I sort of admire the geeked-out nature of this sub-genre, but I also find it hard to imagine staying interested in foraging or home brewing or pickling things for upwards of three hundred pages

But enough of the negatives. When I stopped by the Food Book Festival in Williamsburg last weekend, there were plenty of books to intrigue those who love both good food and good writing. Here are a few that I intend to read cover-to-cover:

Cooked by Michael Pollan
If ever there were a food writing superstar, it is Michael Pollan. He can research, he can write, and his books use lovely patterns that release some kind of pressure in my brain. In this new book, he goes back to the structure that he popularized in The Botany of Desire, with each of the four sections of the book devoted to one of the four classical elements (fire, water, air, earth) and how it has changed cooking. Continue reading →

The Adirondacks and a Carola Bury My Grocery Store Russet

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Other than the recipe for my Indian sweet potato fries, I haven’t written about potatoes yet this season.  I know it’s suppose to be Spring now, but it’s not, at least not in New York, so I’m going to jump on this oversight now before the tulips, already sprouted, get over their confusion at the climate-change weather and pop their pretty heads.

We know that potatoes “saved Europe” in that they kept the lower classes alive just well enough to keep them from rising up, in their starvation and despair, and taking out their monarchs.  We know them, thus, as a staple.  Or at least I do.  Their manipulation by the Queen drove my people to America, and for many a year they, in their fry form, were the highlight of the cafeteria.

But I ate some potatoes last week that made the standard, American Grocery Store-variety potato seem as bland as spray starch.

Healthway Farmsis a small farm in the Hudson Valley north of the city, and over the winter

Note: An old toothbrush is an excellent tool for scrubbing the dirt from your potatoes.

I’ve come to know that they grow superb spuds.  I bought three varieties from them: Adirondack Red, Adirondack Blue, and Carola.  I baked all of them with only olive oil, salt, and pepper so we could compare the taste.

Adirondack Blue:  You may have had purple fingerling potatoes.  I love them.  Shannon is “coming to like them.”  She claims they have a trace of a metallic taste to them.  The Adirondack Blue has a deeper taste than its purple fingerling cousins and none of that sharp minerality.  It’s starchier – more potato-y in its way – and holds together in your mouth.  Though it is quite different in taste from your standard Russet, its heft and density made it seem the most traditional of our lot, despite the color.  Continue reading →